Bryce & Damon in Europe
by Pertinax Carrus
Chapter 22: More of the Naples Area
Mount Vesuvius and Pompeii
The next morning, after an excellent breakfast served at the B&B, Bryce and Damon again climbed into their vehicle and took off to the south. They were headed for one of the most visited sites in Italy, the ancient city of Pompeii. As he drove, Bryce shared his historical perspectives, supplemented by what Damon remembered from his history survey last fall.
“You know,” Damon mused, “History 101 would have been a lot easier if we had taken this trip last summer, before I had the class.”
“Only one problem with that, Boyfriend,” Bryce replied.
“What’s that?”
“Last summer we didn’t even know each other,” Bryce chuckled.
“Oh, yeah,” Damon wondered. “You know, sometimes it seems like I’ve known you all my life.”
“I hope that does not mean you’re getting tired of me,” Bryce joked.
“No way!” his partner assured him.
For miles as they drove around the Bay of Naples they could see Mount Vesuvius in the distance.
“Even if he is inactive, he looks kind of menacing even today,” Damon commented.
“He may be peaceful just now, but he’s not dead. If I remember correctly, Vesuvius erupted as recently as 1944, during the last phase of World War II,” Bryce noted. “A year or two ago, they found some undetonated World War II bombs while continuing to excavate in Pompeii, and had to close the site down for a while. The past and the present are right next to each other in places like this.”
Passing Mount Vesuvius, Bryce pulled into a parking facility in the center of modern Pompeii. They walked to the historic area, and purchased tickets, but had to wait a short time for the departure of the next English language tour. In only a few minutes, a young man appeared, who introduced himself as Marco.
“I will be your guide through Pompeii,” he told the twelve tourists, including Bryce and Damon, gathered at the entrance. “I have been guiding tours here since I was eighteen, and am now an old man of twenty-four, with a wife and little baby to support. That,” he grinned, “is a hint that tips are welcome when we conclude our tour, but only if you think I have given you a good time.”
Marco led them around the outskirts of ancient Pompeii, pointing out the small cubicles which served as apartments for the poor along the way, and the cells in the hillside for prisoners. The first major site to which he introduced them was the arena. Not as large as the Flavian Amphitheater in Rome, it was nonetheless a good sized place for public entertainment, including the inevitable “games,” the contests of gladiators. Their next stop was actually in the practice grounds and work-out area of the gladiators. It was reminiscent of locker rooms at home, but with just a little more dangerous aura, as they knew that many of those gladiators lost their lives in their contests. They made their way along a cobbled street towards the center of town. Marco pointed out a Roman fast food establishment, a shop facing the street, with a stone counter with large holes in it for pots of warm comestibles. In the rear was an oven. Damon said it reminded him of the McDonald’s near the projects where he grew up.
Marco adopted a conspiratorial guise, and asked whether the group wanted to visit an ancient brothel. Of course, they all said yes. Marco pointed out a carving on the paving stones in the street. It was a phallus, quite definitely. That, he said, was something visitors to Pompeii could recognize whether they spoke Latin or not. Follow the direction to which the phallus pointed, and you arrive at the bordello. Following similar signs on the street and on the sides of buildings, they arrived at an entrance off a narrow street. He led them inside, and pointed out the different booths, where the services offered by the whores there were advertised by frescoes on the wall over each small chamber. Take your pick. There even was a booth for a male prostitute. The frescoes were weathered, but the antics being advertised were clearly enough delineated. Damon commented that it was like a pornographic site on the internet today. They exited through a back door, which Marco said was there so that wealthy clients could escape should someone they did not want to meet enter through the front door. Not much has changed in two millennia.
Leaving that part of town, Marco led them to the House of the Brothers Vetii. This was the residence of A. Vettius Conviva and A. Vettius Restitutus, freedmen who had made good. The house contained a generously proportioned atrium, open to the sky, with a pool, or impluvium, in the center to catch the rainwater. Around this central courtyard were many rooms, including an elaborate dining room. In several of the rooms the walls were decorated with exquisite frescoes depicting mythological and pastoral scenes. Then they were taken by Marco to a special room, where a local guide specific to the house leered at them as he opened a cabinet erected over a portion of the wall. Inside were other frescoes, this time depicting the sexual activities of the elite of the day in great detail. These frescoes, he explained, could not be shown to school groups and some others who came through, even though some of the boys obviously knew about them and asked. In earlier ages, similar frescoes had been cut out of the walls of houses in Pompeii, and made up the collections of the rich. Now, of course, such vandalism was not permitted.
Leaving this site, Marco led his group to the forum of Pompeii, where the ruins of the public square of the city were to be seen. He indicated a triumphal arch, a temple of Jupiter, and the baths. Here, Marco paused to give the history of the destruction of Pompeii. From the forum one could easily see Mount Vesuvius in the distance, so he pointed as he described the eruption of 79 A.D. It was described in some detail by the Roman writer Pliny the Younger, who witnessed it, and whose uncle, Pliny the Elder, lost his life in the disaster. When the volcano erupted, the elder Pliny was commander of the Roman fleet stationed at Puteoli across the bay, and led the ships to Pompeii in an effort to rescue the victims. Although volcanic ash covered the town to a depth of twenty feet in places, it was not this, but the intense heat which modern research holds accountable for most of the deaths. Marco pointed then to the storage houses on the side of the forum. There, and in the nearby museum, one could see the casts made from the hollows left by the encased bodies of men and women as well as even a dog who had been trapped in the disaster. There were other artifacts, including vases, furniture, and tools, but the casts in plaster were clearly the most dramatic memorials of the destruction of Pompeii, a town which had been a resort area for the wealthy from Rome, a summer retreat from the heat and smells of the city.
Bryce asked Marco about the evidence for Christianity in Pompeii. Marco answered that there were some inscriptions found in the nineteenth century which could be interpreted in a Christian manner, but there were also those who challenged those interpretations. The evidence was inconclusive. Another case of the doubtful.
The tour of ancient Pompeii took most of the morning. After they exited the archaeological site, rewarding Marco appropriately, Bryce and Damon spent some time browsing the stalls nearby, each picking up a memento or two of this visit. Damon chose a tile reproducing the mosaic with a barking dog and the inscription Cave Cane (Beware the Dog). Bryce picked up two books, one on the ruins, and one on the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which contained the letters of Pliny describing the event in the original Latin with an English translation. Then they repaired to a nearby restaurant, where they enjoyed their midday meal.
Leaving Pompeii itself, the two headed back in the direction of Naples, but turned off along the way. They entered the area around Mount Vesuvius itself. Bryce mentioned that the present cone of the volcano was not the one from which the ashes spewed, covering Pompeii. There had been several eruptions since 79 A.D., and the present cone developed somewhat later. Still, it was part of the same complex. They drove to the base of the cone, then, after paying a small fee, hiked up to the top. Smoke or vapor still issued from the cone, and in places the ground was noticeably warmer than natural. On their hike they were accompanied by a gentleman from France, who attempted to describe the geology involved, but most of it in his broken English was too complicated, and he refused to speak French after hearing Damon attempt the language. Bryce’s more polished efforts were brushed aside.
At the top, they could look down into a landscape littered with boulders, and with the same vapors issuing from crevices in the rock. It did not look very dangerous, but neither of the guys wanted to attempt a descent inside the caldera. After witnessing this natural phenomenon, they drove back in the direction of Naples, but decided to take in the other major evidence of that disaster of 79 A.D., the ruins of Herculaneum.
Herculaneum
When Mount Vesuvius blew his top in 79, he did not limit his destruction to Pompeii, even though that is the most famous of his victims. Several other towns were destroyed, including Herculaneum. The difficulty here is that, unlike Pompeii, which until recent times had no real inhabitants, there is a well established settlement on the site, called Ercolano in Italian, so excavation is limited in space and scope, and only about 25% of the estimated extent has been excavated. But the site was much deeper buried than Pompeii, to a depth of 60 feet in places, and so preserved much of the original materials better, even wooden items and food, as well as marvelous marble floors and other amenities. It was at first thought that everyone had been evacuated after the first phase of the disaster, which was mild at Herculaneum, but later discoveries found about 300 bodies at what are believed to be boat houses on the beach, where these unfortunates gathered awaiting evacuation, and were caught in the second, more severe phase of the disaster. As at Pompeii, it was the great heat, reaching about 932 degrees Fahrenheit (or about 500 degrees Celsius), which was the cause of death.
As they approached the site, they were on a road high above the excavations, which were approached along a slanting walkway down to the ancient street level. The excavated area makes up only about six or eight city blocks, quite small when compared to the much more extensive excavations at Pompeii. In one corner of the excavated area was the site of the cult of the Emperor, which contains some marvelous, well preserved frescoes.
“The Roman emperors were worshiped as gods, right?” Damon asked.
“Technically it was their guiding spirits rather than the persons of the emperors which were worshiped during their lifetimes, at least in Rome itself, and they only officially became gods after their deaths by proclamation of the Senate, but I suspect it did not make much difference to the average person,” Bryce replied.
“And the ancient Romans had lots of gods, right?” Damon continued.
“Right,” Bryce concurred.
“I guess if you’ve got dozens of gods, adding a few more, like the Divine Julius we saw in the Roman forum, wouldn’t make much difference. Seems like just about everything was a god or goddess. I recall Professor Dickinson explaining that at their core the pagans worshiped natural forces which they could not control, like Zeus for the sky and Poseidon for the sea and Hera for the earth. By the way, why haven’t we run across those guys. Seems like they would be especially important gods,” Damon continued.
“We did,” Bryce chuckled, “just in a different language. The names you remembered are the Greek names, but you have the same thing in Latin. Zeus is Jupiter, or Jove, like Tiberius’ place on Capri or in the forum at Pompeii. Poseidon is Neptune, and Hera is Juno, for whom the month of June is named.”
“Well, languages are more your thing than mine,” Damon conceded.
About half of the city block on which the College of the Augustali, or priests of the imperial cult, was located was taken up with the baths. Baths were quite popular in Roman times, being something like a combination of gym, social club, and civic center. Another major structure is the villa called that of L. Calpurnius Piso, Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, although the attribution is challenged by some. Still, it was that of a wealthy man, and contained the only ancient library to come down to the present intact. Unfortunately, the scrolls are carbonized, making reading them a major undertaking, still going on at the National Library in Naples.
In the central block of the excavated area, as they entered a house Damon let out an exclamation. “Wow, that’s some fresco!”
“Yes, here you are. Here’s Neptune, the Roman equivalent of the Posidon you were asking about earlier. See the trident, an emblem common to both the Greek and the Roman versions of this god,” Bryce said.
“This is mosaic,” their guide informed them, “not fresco. Made of little pieces of colored stone and glass. More permanent than fresco.”
“Who’s the female?” Damon asked.
“Amphitrite,” the guide responded. “Wife of Neptune. Sea goddess. Here much Greek influence. She not so important to Romans.”
“That’s a shame. She looks like a pretty good looking babe, and taller than her hubby. She’d make a great forward on the women’s basketball team back home,” Damon teased. He thought the guide was entirely too solemn, not like Marco at Pompeii.
In the same room was a huge fireplace, indicating that even southern Italy got cool on occasion. Surely, in a room as richly decorated as this, this was not merely the kitchen stove.
After completing their tour under the suspicious eye of their guide, who was certain Damon was up to no good, the guys climbed back to the modern level and their vehicle, and made their way back to Naples. Ercolano was practically a suburb, with the area between the two completely built up.
Back in Naples
Instead of returning directly to their B&B, Bryce drove to the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, first established in 1750 under King Charles V, later King of Spain as Charles III and an American ally during our War for Independence. “That,” Bryce said, “is why the present king, Juan Carlos, qualifies for membership in the Sons of the American Revolution,” an organization to which, thanks to his mother, Bryce also belonged. During the eighteenth century, Naples was a major center of enlightenment and reform, but in the wake of the excesses of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic conquests, a reaction set in, from which it has never quite recovered.
Although the museum contained many interesting collections, the interest of the two today was primarily in the artifacts retrieved from Pompeii and Herculaneum. One of the most interesting and best preserved is the mosaic of Alexander, dating to about 100 B.C., and originally in the House of the Faun in Pompeii. It depicts the conflict between Alexander the Great and the Persian monarch Darius III at Issus in 333 B.C. Alexander is on the left, bareheaded and mounted, charging forward with his lengthy Macedonian pike over the slain bodies of both Macedonian and Persian soldiers. Bryce drew Damon’s attention to the fact that there were no stirrups. Stirrups came in only in the fourth century A.D., and marked the beginning of the transition from ancient warfare, based on infantry, to medieval warfare, based on cavalry. In the mosaic, Darius is in his chariot on the right, looking frightened, with his chariot already turning away in flight. It is a grand piece of classical art, and not incidently a piece of Roman propaganda, as the greatest civilized enemy of the Romans for centuries was the Persians, or, as they were sometimes called, the Parthians. “Technically,” Bryce explained, “they were two distinct peoples in what is now Iran and Afghanistan, but so similar as to be indistinguishable to all except experts.” Damon wanted to know what the significance of the tree stump in the background was, but no one could answer that question, neither Bryce nor the guide nor the brochures they consulted.
From there, they went to the Egyptian collection, always of interest to Damon. Naples has the third largest Egyptian collection in Italy, after the Vatican and Turin. A major part of the collection was based on that of Cardinal Borgia.
“Is that the famous poisoner?” Damon asked.
“No. You’re thinking of Rodrigo Borgia, who became Pope Alexander VI and lived around 1500. This was probably a relative, but the Cardinal Borgia who collected Egyptian artifacts lived in the eighteenth century,” Bryce deduced from the brochure they had picked up.
“Good. Let the poisoners keep their hands off Egyptian stuff,” Damon proclaimed.
Bryce chuckled.
In a room next to that containing the Borgia collection, they found a series of what the brochure called “pseudo-Egyptian artifacts” from Pompeii. These seemed to be items in the Egyptian fashion, but not originally from Egypt itself. One thing made clear from the collection was the popularity of the cult of Isis in southern Italy, and perhaps elsewhere as well.
Leaving the museum, they made a few stops for pictures and brief visits before settling in for their evening meal. One site was the so-called Castel Nuovo, which means “new castle” but dates from the later thirteenth century. The French usurper, Charles of Anjou, brother of St. Louis IX, conquered what was then called the Kingdom of Sicily in 1266, and moved the capitol from Palermo on the island of Sicily, residence of the Norman founders of the kingdom, to the mainland and Naples, where he had the castle constructed between 1279 and 1282. The old castle which the Castel Nuovo replaced is located right on the shore, actually originally on an island in the bay, but now connected to the coast. This small island was inhabited from ancient times, and was the site to which the last Roman Emperor in the West, appropriately named Romulus, was exiled in 476 by his rebellious Germanic bodyguard. He was fortunate. Normally deposed emperors were killed. The Normans made the site the location of their major fortification in the twelfth century, the origin of the present castle. It was called the castle of the egg (Castel dell’ Ovo) because of a medieval legend linking it to Virgil and a magical egg. In the Middle Ages, for some reason, Virgil was regarded as a magician.
A fishing village grew up by the Castel dell’ Ovo called the Borgo dei Marinari, which today boasts wonderful seafood restaurants. There, Bryce and Damon had their evening meal on that Wednesday evening. They sat until quite late, enjoying the sea breezes and Italian wine. It was while they were thus at ease that Bryce related another interesting story. The patron saint of Naples is St. Januarius, or San Gennaro in Italian. Little reliable information is known about him, but he evidently was a bishop martyred by beheading during the last great Roman persecution, which began under Diocletian about the beginning of the fourth century. Now legend comes into the story. Legend says that a woman named Eusebia managed to collect some of the martyr’s blood at the time of his execution. Two small vials housed in a vault in the cathedral contain what purports to be the blood of the martyr. Several times each year, these vials are taken out and carried to the Monastery of St. Clare – not the one in Assisi, of course, but one here in Naples – and it liquefies.
“Liquefies?” Damon asked.
“You know. It’s solid, like a scab, most of the time, but during these ceremonies it becomes liquid,” Bryce said.
“Really?” Damon asked skeptically.
“Well, I never saw it myself,” Bryce admitted. “But it’s like a lot of other things. For the past two centuries or so, people have tried to prove it a fake, but have not succeeded. Each so-called ‘scientific’ explanation is more fantastic than the previous one. Of course, this is another of those things which are doubtful, so belief is not required of those seeking admission to the Church,” Bryce hinted, attempting to draw Damon on the matter he raised with Father Long a few days ago, but again without success.
Instead, Damon looked out over the sea and said, “This is a really nice place. I can see why people chose to live here, like those wealthy Romans who got caught at Pompeii or Herculaneum.”
Giving up on trying to pry information out of Damon, Bryce launched into a discourse on the name of the city. “Naples is our English version of the Italian Napoli. The original was a Greek colony, and was named Neapolis. That sounds nice, but all it means is ‘new town.’ The ‘polis’ part is the Greek word for a town, and ‘nea’ means ‘new.’ It’s a name that gets repeated over and over in history. Across the Mediterranean, near modern Tunis in North Africa was Carthage, which also means ‘new town’ in the Phoenician language. Then, of course, there were lots of new towns which grew up during the middle ages, and have names like Neufbourg or Neufville in French, or Neuburg or Neustadt in German, or, of course, Newton (as in Sir Isaac), or Newcastle (as in carrying coals to), in English. In addition, one of the original settlements in Russia was named Novgorod, which means the same thing.”
Damon swallowed the last of his wine, and rose. “I’m kind of tired. Ready to get back to our room?”
Bryce sighed. No one appreciated his trivia.
A Scenic Drive
The following morning Bryce and Damon said good-bye to Francesca and Donna Adelina, and retrieved their car from the garage near the station. But they did not immediately return to Rome. Instead, Bryce directed them south once more. They once more passed Mount Vesuvius, looming over the landscape, and also passed Pompeii, continuing south until they reached Castellamare di Stabia, about thirty kilometers southeast of Naples, another town destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D. But the guys were not interested in further archaeological studies. Bryce noted that Castellamare was the hometown of the father of Damon’s fellow Chicagoan, Al Capone. Damon responded that he learned from the guy Cristofero at the B&B that the current mayor, a guy called Luigi Bobbio, was a public enemy in his own way, in that he was attempting to ban miniskirts, clogs and flip-flops, sunbathing, bad language, and soccer. They quickly passed through Castellamare, and continued around the southern fringes of the Bay of Naples.
Next they came to Sorrento, one of the most picturesque towns in a land full of picturesque towns. The town is surrounded by orange groves, and serves as a port for cruise lines. But they did not stop there either, except to take a few pictures of the Bay of Naples and the Sorrentine coast. Following the narrow highway, dating back to Roman times, they crossed the peninsula and continued along the southern coast. After a while, they came to Amalfi, more or less where the peninsula rejoins the mainland. Once a major trading center in the ninth to twelfth centuries, Amalfi is set on a series of steep hillsides plunging into the sea. The guys stopped there to take pictures of the picturesque town and have coffee at a (naturally picturesque) outside restaurant before continuing their trip.
From Amalfi, they continued on to Salerno, and then gave up sightseeing, and turned north. They now had more than 200 miles to go to get back to the Hotel Cicerone in Rome, where they would remain for the rest of their time in Europe.