Campania!! Part one

The Campania trip was awesome.

It was less intense than the Sicily trip in that we didn’t have to move every single night, but only stayed in two different places. The first was called the Villa Vergiliana, but we referred to it as “Centro Due” because it was like the country cousin of our beloved city dwelling in Rome.

Campania is Italian for ‘countryside’ anyway. We were headed south.

Day One: our first stop was not an ancient site. We went to an American military cemetery at Nettuno, where the American soldiers who fought mostly in Sicily were buried.

It was a really beautiful place and put me in mind of the clean new monuments I saw last time I was in Washington DC. There were a lot of elements that all combined and of course plenty of classical references. WWII monuments are always a little hard to take. I liked the gardens best.

From there we moved south along the coast to Terracina. I’d been looking forward to this since my Roman art history teacher showed us plans of the Jupiter sanctuary there, explaining the importance of its cliffs-to-the-sea view. There’s a bar now on top of the hill where there used to be a small temple with a portico. And some fan-freaking-tastic views of the sea.

The whole complex sits on a platform that is reinforced by barrel vaulting and arches underneath.

The town of Terracina/Anxur still has parts of the Appian way, which we walked. This was where I mailed my JET application in a nearby post box. Tragically for the two envelopes, they would be separated in their journey, and one would not see Nashville.

There’s a place further down near the sea where Trajan had part of the cliff-face cut away to give the road some space, so the Appian Way could get between the cliff and the water.

Engineers cleared an estimated 13,600 cubic meters of rock. Pretty intense, if you consider that when we do this, we use a lot more advanced technology, and explosives. They left numbers carved into the rock counting the Roman feet down from where they started.

Our next stop was Sperlonga, where the second emperor Tiberius had a villa. This villa is most notable for the dining grotto that’s built into a natural cave next to the ocean.

This is from inside the grotto where one of the biggest groups of statues would have stood. The people dining would be on the grassy platform visible on the left, while the platform in the middle had another statue. The ocean is behind it all, but the whole grotto is filled with water, for a sweet lighting and sound effect. It’s important because it’s so different from Augustus who lived modestly and in Rome.

Our last stop of the day was Minturnae, but since we were running behind schedule, it was pretty much dark by the time we got there.

noooooo.. come back!

So we couldn’t take as complete a tour of the place. We explored for a little while in the dark, then visited the little museum under the support structure of the theatre, and then moved on to Centro Due, where we had the best dinner ever, and hung about in the salon room before crashing out.

Day two:

First stop, Piscina Mirabilis! Which means roughly ‘amazing pool,’ and it was. Though it looked and felt unsettlingly like the Lord of the Rings ‘Mines of Moria’ setting, this was once a huge cistern that could hold 12,600 cubic meters of water.

Heck yeah

Then we went to Misenum, where the navy used to be, and then to a museum which had some pretty fun stuff (see: statue of Nerva/Domitian on horse), like some statues of Vespasian and Titus in which they have kind of realistic heads but heroically-nude Greek style bodies that just don’t match.

Next we went to Baiae, which was famous in Roman times both for being a place to regain health, and for its crazy debauchery. We explored a large bath complex with various ruins of swimming pools and rooms. Everyone kept saying the Mercury temple was the coolest thing ever, so I was on my way there when I came upon what was in fact the coolest thing ever:

That is not an optical illusion. That is my roommate and myself in a barrel vault where a fig tree is growing upside-down.

I’m not really sure how this happened. I thought this was what everyone had been raving about, but then I found my way into the Mercury dome which was in fact the coolest place ever, acoustically speaking. The dome was filled at the bottom with water, which meant the place had the greatest echo effect. We had a great time snapping, clapping, whistling, stomping, and otherwise creating a disturbance while the whole place reverberated.

We returned to Centro Due for lunch, an amazing lunch of pizza rustica (pizza rolls?), pizza, fruit (much of it from the trees outside, like the eggs we had at breakfast being from the chickens outside), and all kinds of wonderful homemade bread (from the big bread oven outside). I had no idea how close the Villa Vergiliana was to Cumae, but after lunch we were only on the bus for like six minutes before arriving.

Cumae is the location of Vergil’s Cumaen Sibyl. She’s the prophetess who goes into a frenzy and tells Aeneas what to do (Aeneas, eventual founder of Rome, sort of). It’s one of my favorite Vergil passages, where Deiphobea “raves in the cave.” Well, this was her cave, lengendarily speaking.

Dark.

We moved up to the summit, as Aeneas does in the story, to the temple of Apollo (which was not always a temple to Apollo, necessarily. The Greeks were in Cumae from the 8^th century BC, so it was theirs first, rededicated in the time of Augustus to Apollo). I thought we were on top of the hill there, but we were not. We climbed further to the site of the temple to Jupiter, mostly gone. But, from this vantage point we saw such wonderful things as a horse pulling a chariot along the beach, and this:

I mean.. whoa.

We went back to Centro Due from there, and there was an optional field trip to go and see an amphitheatre that was still being excavated. Of course I went to see it. It was basically on Villa Vergiliana property, and they believe that the associated temple to perhaps Mercury (idk how they figure this stuff out, still) is underneath the Centro Due.

You can just see the top of the amphitheatre outer wall in this picture of Centro Due

Day Three:
Day Three was Naples Day. The art history class professor “Tags” joined us to give us a sort of tour of part of the city. He was proud that we weren’t driving to the museum, and then driving directly out of the city. Naples has a bad reputation, but it’s still an important place to see, he said. It was pretty cool. There was a lot to see, and we only saw some of it (churches and some areas underground that were Roman shopping areas). Our Centro-Due bag lunches were so stocked that we were all able to give something non-monetary to the beggars that came by.

We also got to explore some shops that sold really cool and unique Nativity sets, and separate pieces, but I didn’t buy anything because I had no idea how to get something like that home in my already overstuffed suitcase.

We did go to the museum as well. There is a ton of stuff there, and sections are closed arbitrarily on certain days, so I didn’t get to see the Stabiae Flora painting, but we did see some really cool sculpture (including Isis statue from Pompeii sanctuary) and mosaic, and also the ‘secret room’ which has all the erotica material from Pompeii. Since so much of the material is from Pompeii, I felt lucky to have already been there before going to the Naples Museum (we were to go to Pompeii in a couple days).

Ever see that show, Rome?

That night, Emily C and I ate at the professors’ table, and dessert was tiramisu. We had been thoroughly enjoying our stay, between the amazing food downstairs, and the good times to be had in the salon room above. I tried to do my homework, but it was a pretty useless attempt during out stay at Centro Due. I had not managed to write my paper before leaving on the trip, so I had brought my computer with me. Which I used, of course, to other ends as well. And, we watched Scrubs and were all very hyper.

Day Four dawned bright and clear, and we left the Villa Vergiliana (farewell, oh best food ever and fierce shower competition) to head toward Pompeii. We stopped first in Beneventum along the way, where (among other Roman things like an Isis temple, a bridge, and a theatre, Trajan has an arch depicting him as just, capable, and divinely sanctioned:

This is a strategic place on the Appian Way

And we had lunch in a little courtyard before going into the museum, full of the materials that had been collected all over the Beneventum area (once called Maleventum, but changed so it would sound more pleasant). I’m not sure it could have been more pleasant.

This is where we ate lunch. Beneventum is super quaint and super clean.

Thence to Saepinum, a Roman colony. It was still an absolutely goregous day, and we explored Saepinum trying to figure out what was where.

Professor Wally: What’s that at the head of the forum?
Me: (sigh) Basilica…

It was a fun task, hindered somewhat by the hordes of ragazzi who seemed to have a similar assignment. And, a shepherd who happened to be driving his sheep through town (Saepinum is originally from Saepio which means enclosure, or sheepfold, so this has been going on since Roman times).. The town is cool because it’s a Roman colony but a mountain town, or it was until Rome settled the lower area, but still has a different style to it.

That’s my class; I’m always last.

Our hotel was right next to the Circumvesuviana Pompeii train station, called Villa Dei Misteri; we were ready for the Pompeii visit the next day; we were to be there from the opening of the archaeopark at 8:30 until it closed at 5.