Okay finally the south trip.
I believe the last week of February the class took a 3 day trip to the southern part of Italy. We saw Herculaneum, Pompeii, Villa Oplantis, and then Caserta on the way back. The majority of the sites we saw were Roman archeological sites, mostly kept in its original state thanks to Mt. Vesuvius erupting around 80 AD. Caserta on the other hand is an Italian palace that was occupied with southern Italian royalty during the late 18th and mid 19th centuries.
We took a large bus early Wednesday morning and traveled on down to the Naples area. No one seemed to be too excited about Naples as Marco, our Italian professor wasn't keen on the city itself, not to mention that it's known for its poverty, overly forward men, and organized crime in the city, cough cough Mafia. Herculaneum was located on the edge of Naples, so we didn't have to drive through much of it. The size of Herculaneum was fairly large but most likely only a quarter of the city is exposed while the rest is under feet of rock of which many Naples’s neighborhoods are built on top of. Herculaneum was pretty interesting, and was the perfect first stop for the archeological sites. It gave us an idea of what a Roman city would have looked in the 8 century. We could see the road that carts would have been towed thru the town on, we saw many small cantinas, as well as many domuses (or houses). For the most part all that exists now is the stone structure of the buildings, which in those days was the majority of material anyways. However, some items that survived was petrified wood, as well as a few human remains completely preserved by the lava from Vesuvius, as well as some paintings and tile mosaic in the Roman domuses. We had an hour or two to explore and got to really understand how these people lived, and perhaps better understand how they handled animals, and water supply cisterns, and waste removal.
We stayed in Pompeii for the night so that we would have easy access to the ruins there the following day. Maggie and I shared a room and that evening we decided to go and explore the city of Pompeii and find some dinner. Unfortunately, the hotel is much removed from the city and it was a long poorly lit walk to the city center. We quickly found out that Pompeii consists of one main street and a bunch of creepy side streets, through our own exploration. We found ourselves at the little restaurant Don and Carlo recommended. Maggie and I perused the menu for what seemed like an eternity. We weren't sure what to get as we were one of their first customers for the night. We thought seafood of some sort would be a good choice as we were right off the coast. I ordered a simple pasta with cheese filling and Maggie ordered a pasta with mussels. First course was excellent. For the second, Maggie choose calamari with prawns and I last minutes decided to go crazy and tried the fried fish plate. I looked at Maggie and said "as long as it doesn't come with a head on it, I'm good." Well about 15 minutes later my plate shows up with not a fried fish fillet but a huge plate of 6 different whole fish that looked as if they had been mistakenly thrown into the fryer than the fish bowl. I was beside myself, and looked at Maggie and her plate, the calamari looked pretty normal but she had the whole bodies of prawns sitting on her plate staring at her. We looked at each other and about busted out laughing. Maggie looks at me and says" you going to be able to eat that" I of course say that I am at least willing to try. I try a small prawn on my plate and clearly eat it wrong as all I ended up eating was like the head of it, and it was straight up crunch and not very good. So then I moved to one of the 6 fish on my plate. I accidently squashed the eye ball and green stuff is oozing out everywhere. So I just move on the next one. At this point Maggie and I are in stitches as to how we ended up in this situation. Maggie covers her prawn with lettuce so they stop looking at her as I take a big bite of fish. Its full of the tiny bones, and I sit there with a mouth full unable to even swallow. I spit it out politely into my napkin and spend another five minutes trying to get all the small fish bones out of my mouth. I was pretty much done after that and just hit the remainder under leaves of lettuce. We decided to not venture and get desert there for fear of what we would end up with. We ventured to a little cafe where we listened to the lady sing Celine Dion with her radio. At that point Maggie and I had crossed the point of no return for the night. Our walk back involved two guys stopping in their car and trying to pick us up. Finally they drove away. And before we knew it we were back at the hotel for the night. I chose to take a shower that night and it ended up being the finally for the night. I ended up covering the whole bath room in water and there was probably a half an inch of water on the floor. The shower had a hand held shower head and there was no shower curtain. I must have dropped that thing a million times, and I would face it one direction and I would spray all my clothes or the other way and soak my towels. And by the end of it I just gave up and even the toilets got soaked.
Fortunately, that was the craziest time we had on our trip. Maggie said the bath room was still soaked in the morning despite my attempts to dry it the night before with a floor towel the size of a wash cloth. Pompeii was great, we were there the second it opened and were the only people in the complex for about an hour. We all got to appreciate the ruins and take excellent photos without tons of people in the way. Pompeii for the most part had the same things that Herculaneum had just on a much larger scale. I believe all of Pompeii is excavated. We spent at least 5 hours there to see the majority of the building ruins, many domus (houses), some cool shops, a few gardens, and the amphitheater which was pretty impressive, as well as some very well preserved roman baths. Following Pompeii we also visited Villa Oplantis which was a roman ruin as well, however, it was a private villa located outside the roman cities. The villa was huge and was partially reconstructed and really helped provided a sense of feel of the space. But at the same time, after seeing hour’s worth of roman ruins in two days, it wasn't all that exciting.
The following day we visited the Caserta Palace. It was a nice change of scenery, but unfortunately the weather was not real cooperative, as it was down pouring rain. The palace was very interesting, it had paintings and furniture that I absolutely loved from 18th century Italian royalty. We explored all the rooms of the king’s apartment and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The only downer is that we didn't get to explore the gardens there due to the rain, that is unless you were crazy and didn't mind being wet the reminder of the day. I chose to just stay dry for the 6 hour bus ride home. As a whole, it was a great trip. Pompeii would be something I would recommend every one see at some point!
Ciao for now!
