The New Treasures of Pompeii
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The New Treasures of Pompeii
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Re: The New Treasures of Pompeii
#2Pompeii is amazing, but Herculaneum[1] is just mind-blowing. They're maybe 30 minutes from each other, so it's possible to visit them on the same day if you start early.
While Pompeii was covered in lava, Herculaneum was a bit further away from the volcano, so it got covered in ash - and therefore it's much better preserved.
Herculaneum was kind of a beach resort for the Pompeii rich. It has luxurious villas, the shops you'd expect, and a thermal bath that you could use today and not notice is 2000 years old.
Same with the houses, and the city in general. There's something incredibly familiar in them; I always get the feeling that we haven't invented much stuff since the Romans.
Re: The New Treasures of Pompeii
#3Pompeii is amazing, but Herculaneum[1] is just mind-blowing. They're maybe 30 minutes from each other, so it's possible to visit them on the same day if you start early. While Pompeii was covered in lava, Herculaneum was a bit further away from the volcano, so it got covered in ash - and therefore it's much better preserved. Herculaneum was kind of a beach resort for the Pompeii rich. It has luxurious villas, the sho…
I listened to some podcast about these places. Apparently the sewers were well preserved and we could get an idea of their diet from it. They ate giraffes!
Re: The New Treasures of Pompeii
#4Pompeii is amazing, but Herculaneum[1] is just mind-blowing. They're maybe 30 minutes from each other, so it's possible to visit them on the same day if you start early. While Pompeii was covered in lava, Herculaneum was a bit further away from the volcano, so it got covered in ash - and therefore it's much better preserved. Herculaneum was kind of a beach resort for the Pompeii rich. It has luxurious villas, the sho…
Some travel sites recommends not visiting them both at the same day, since Pompeii is very large, and walking on cobble stone is exhausting.
This piqued my interest, have you been to both? Do you have any general advice or travel tips? Did you go up to the volcano peak, if so, do you think that would be doable also for a small-ish child (~6-8 yo)?
Thanks!
Re: The New Treasures of Pompeii
#5Pompeii is amazing, but Herculaneum[1] is just mind-blowing. They're maybe 30 minutes from each other, so it's possible to visit them on the same day if you start early. While Pompeii was covered in lava, Herculaneum was a bit further away from the volcano, so it got covered in ash - and therefore it's much better preserved. Herculaneum was kind of a beach resort for the Pompeii rich. It has luxurious villas, the sho…
Some travel sites recommends not visiting them both at the same day, since Pompeii is very large, and walking on cobble stone is exhausting. This piqued my interest, have you been to both? Do you have any general advice or travel tips? Did you go up to the volcano peak, if so, do you think that would be doable also for a small-ish child (~6-8 yo)? Thanks!
So I was there about 5 months ago. I'll be honest, I'm in pretty good shape and even still, Pompeii is way too much to do in a day. Herculaneum is wonderful and very well preserved, but if you only had an afternoon you could see it with some ease.
Were I to do it again I'd likely spend one day in Pompeii, one day in Herculaneum and on the slopes of Vesuvius, and at least a day in Napoli proper. That would get everything in any respect, but would let have a real sense of those couple sites.
Re: The New Treasures of Pompeii
#6Pompeii is amazing, but Herculaneum[1] is just mind-blowing. They're maybe 30 minutes from each other, so it's possible to visit them on the same day if you start early. While Pompeii was covered in lava, Herculaneum was a bit further away from the volcano, so it got covered in ash - and therefore it's much better preserved. Herculaneum was kind of a beach resort for the Pompeii rich. It has luxurious villas, the sho…
Mind boggling to me is that what we see of Herculaneum is less than a third of what is buried. The rest is under the city and they're afraid excavating it may cause problems (drainage related I believe).
Re: The New Treasures of Pompeii
#7Pompeii is amazing, but Herculaneum[1] is just mind-blowing. They're maybe 30 minutes from each other, so it's possible to visit them on the same day if you start early. While Pompeii was covered in lava, Herculaneum was a bit further away from the volcano, so it got covered in ash - and therefore it's much better preserved. Herculaneum was kind of a beach resort for the Pompeii rich. It has luxurious villas, the sho…
I can second the recommendation of Herculaneum, it is an incredible site and I really enjoyed my visit.
There was a collection of papyrus scrolls in the Villa dei Papiri there, which were carbonized by the ash. They were damaged and preserved at the same time by the eruption, so we still have many of them today but the intact scrolls fall apart if you try to open them by hand (similar to trying to unroll a piece of charcoal).
I have been working for a while on a research team that is attempting to read these scrolls noninvasively using micro-CT. The materials of this particular collection are the perfect storm of challenges for this approach, but we are chipping away at the problem. It has been quite a lot of fun to work on. Should anyone find it interesting, here[1] is some of our work from earlier this year, showing a proof of concept on how we can distinguish carbon ink from carbonized papyrus in X-ray even though they appear identical at first.
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Re: The New Treasures of Pompeii
#8Pompeii is amazing, but Herculaneum[1] is just mind-blowing. They're maybe 30 minutes from each other, so it's possible to visit them on the same day if you start early. While Pompeii was covered in lava, Herculaneum was a bit further away from the volcano, so it got covered in ash - and therefore it's much better preserved. Herculaneum was kind of a beach resort for the Pompeii rich. It has luxurious villas, the sho…
Some travel sites recommends not visiting them both at the same day, since Pompeii is very large, and walking on cobble stone is exhausting. This piqued my interest, have you been to both? Do you have any general advice or travel tips? Did you go up to the volcano peak, if so, do you think that would be doable also for a small-ish child (~6-8 yo)? Thanks!
I did both in one day and it was very tiring (and I'm in my 20s). Herculaneum is small enough that anyone without mobility issues can do it, but Pompeii is quite large.
I also went to the volcano and the hike is about 3/4 of a mile and moderately steep. If your children are active they should be able to handle it, but the key is to wear shoes with good traction. Also they sell wine at the top, which is nice :)
Re: The New Treasures of Pompeii
#9Pompeii is amazing, but Herculaneum[1] is just mind-blowing. They're maybe 30 minutes from each other, so it's possible to visit them on the same day if you start early. While Pompeii was covered in lava, Herculaneum was a bit further away from the volcano, so it got covered in ash - and therefore it's much better preserved. Herculaneum was kind of a beach resort for the Pompeii rich. It has luxurious villas, the sho…
Some travel sites recommends not visiting them both at the same day, since Pompeii is very large, and walking on cobble stone is exhausting. This piqued my interest, have you been to both? Do you have any general advice or travel tips? Did you go up to the volcano peak, if so, do you think that would be doable also for a small-ish child (~6-8 yo)? Thanks!
I spent 6-8 hours in Pompeii and 4-5 hours in Herculaneum. If you chop down you can see Pompeii in 2-4 hours as well, but then you would miss out the immersion in ancient culture. So I wouldn't recommend visiting both at the same day.
Re: The New Treasures of Pompeii
#10Pompeii is amazing, but Herculaneum[1] is just mind-blowing. They're maybe 30 minutes from each other, so it's possible to visit them on the same day if you start early. While Pompeii was covered in lava, Herculaneum was a bit further away from the volcano, so it got covered in ash - and therefore it's much better preserved. Herculaneum was kind of a beach resort for the Pompeii rich. It has luxurious villas, the sho…
Some travel sites recommends not visiting them both at the same day, since Pompeii is very large, and walking on cobble stone is exhausting. This piqued my interest, have you been to both? Do you have any general advice or travel tips? Did you go up to the volcano peak, if so, do you think that would be doable also for a small-ish child (~6-8 yo)? Thanks!
I've been there in July, visited them both in the same day: Herculaneum in the morning and Pompeii the afternoon. Is impossible to visit everything in Pompeii only the afternoon, in fact we went only in the most famous places but we completely missed the most northern part. I think that in a full day is possible to visit a lot of it, but it depends how much you want to stop and listen to the audioguide (highly recommended).
Herculaneum is fine visiting it in the morning, you can enter on each and every house, read the textbook that explain a lot about it, etc.
A few advice: prepare yourself for a lot of walking under the sun, those places are really hot (especially in July). In Pompeii there aren't many places to rest in the shade since almost every house have no roof, but there are some fountains where you can fill a water bottle.
On another note you should really spend 2-3 days in Naples, a city which I found (unexpectedly) very interesting and fascinating.
Finally you should really make this card [0], it allows you to take every train, metro, bus, funicular railway, from Naples to Sorrento and allows you to enter for free in the first two cultural sites that you visit. So I recommend you to go first in the two Roman cities and save a few money that you can invest in good pizzas :).
[0]: https://www.campaniartecard.it/campania-3-days/?lang=en