Wanderlust Women Travel™

If you have been reading here long enough, you know of my fondness for archaeological discoveries while on holiday.  Flying solo makes it a lot easier to navigate the ancient byways of Italy, Greece and beyond without extra baggage, if you catch my drift.

For years, and I do mean since I was a little girl, I had always wanted to visit ancient Herculaneum, now known as modern day Ercolano.  It intrigued me for a variety of reasons but mainly because it was the buried city that got very little press in the shadow of its larger neighbor, Pompei.  Both cities, along Italy’s Amalfi Coast, were buried in that legendary eruption of Mount Vesuvius on August 24, 79 A.D.

For Herculaneum, however, it was long thought that most people were able to escape because the winds blew the pyroclastic cloud southeast, away from Vesuvius, burying Pompei in ash.  It wasn’t until 1982 when archaeologists discovered victims huddled together in a futile effort to escape.  They had not been buried in ash but literally vaporized from the inside out by the intense heat.  It was a brutal way to die but it was instantaneous.

Today, modern day Ercolano sits at the bottom of a busy city in the shadow of Vesuvio.  Once you depart the train on the Circumvesuviana Linea, you walk “sempre dritto,” straight downhill, until the scavi (excavation) site comes into view.

Step back 2,000 years.  There was no phone and no Twitter.  The only way the vacationing bourgeois at Herculaneum knew that something was wrong was because Vesuvius was spewing on the horizon, darkening the sky for miles around.  They thought they could escape by boat.  What they did not realize was that doom waited for them at the shore.

Visit the ancient seaside resort of Herculaneum.  You can see the villas and daily life of those on holiday.  It was August.  It was hot and they went to the shore.  It was to this shore that they tried to escape when the ash started falling.  When the excavation began, archaeologists discovered  dozens of skeletons huddle in caves along the shoreline, children buried in their mother’s arms, couples holding hands, men frozen in agony – all killed in an epic moment of horror.

Ercolano, like Pompei, is still a working site.  It makes history come alive as you watch archaeologists carefully, slowly, gently brush away the past to reveal a piece of pottery here or a mosaic there.

It is a small, manageable site in relation to the grander scale of Pompei.  Walk the cobbled streets. Stroll past cafes where lunch was eaten buffet style from tavola calda (hot tables).  Journey back in time to the life of ancient Romans.

In spring my thoughts always return to the Amalfi Coast and Ercolano is worthy of a visit time and time again.

When you’re ready to visit the ancient world, let our Amalfi Coast specialist help plan the journey of your dreams.