Salerno, Vietri, and Solopaca

Homesickness has begun setting in these past few weeks. In an attempt to ward off la nostalgia degli Stati Uniti, we’ve been doing our best to get out and travel as much as possible. And even though we’ve kept mainly to day trips, it’s been helpful in reminding us of how beautiful this country is and how rich the culture is that we have the opportunity to experience every single day.

Our rooftop view

Last weekend, David and I headed out for our first Neapolitan adventure, sans guidance from the experts (a.k.a. people who have been stationed here more than 6 months). We were headed to the town of Salerno, about an hour east of Naples off the Amalfi Coast.

Proof of parallel parking! 

I should mention that when you live in a foreign country, everything is an ordeal. From the language barrier to the different styles of driving to the crazy (and I mean crazy!) roads, even the smallest, most mundane tasks you take for granted in the States are exhausting. Going to the grocery store, filling your car with gas, parking (that one might be more of a Neapolitan joy), eating at a restaurant… the list goes on.

So that gives you some perspective on how we felt getting into our car and heading to Salerno. Our goal was to make it there and back in one piece. We were absolutely fine with whatever happened in between (but really hoped that would not include our car getting broken into).

Our efforts were greatly rewarded when we pulled into town and saw the beautiful waterfront path and quaint cobblestone streets, complete with your quintessential Italian cafes and street vendors.

An ancient aqueduct runs through the town—how cool is that?!

We wandered the town with nothing more in hand than Google Maps, poking into stores and shops here and there. We happened along an open-air market where small business owners were selling meats, cheese, produce, honey, and a plethora of other tasty goods local to the Campania area.

I also had a lovely conversation with an Italian man, who first thought I was a student, and then thought I was a teacher, and then just gave up on trying to figure out what I was doing here. I can’t be sure exactly what was said because it was a mixture of broken Italian and French (he didn’t speak any English but we both knew a little French), but he was very kind.

You can see the street slopes downward into the ocean.

We also had a handful of Italians ogle over the Twin Terrors. We heard lots of “piccolini” and “molto tranquille, brava!” and had to explain with our broken Italian that Max was in fact blind and not just sleeping.

Outside of the Duomo of Salerno

I’d also like to take a moment to say just how incredibly dog friendly we’ve found this country to be. Sure strays are everywhere, but the doggies lucky enough to be doted on by Italians get the royal treatment. We’ve been in cafes and shops with them, seated in restaurants with them (they did tack on an extra cover charge for the dogs, but luckily they only counted them as one person’s worth of coperto), we even took them into a 1000 year old cathedral and no one batted an eye!

Roscoe offered to help finish our pizzas

Roscoe also wanted to remind us that “God” is just “dog” spelled backwards…

After lunch, we headed to the neighboring town of Vietri, famous for its ceramic creations and of course, its breathtaking views.

The following day, we invited some friends who are currently car-less to join us on an outing to Cantina di Solopaca. The Cantina is a giant farmer’s co-op that collects grapes and turns them into the most delicious wine you’ve ever tasted.

When you drive in, you see huge “silos” of wine in the parking lot. And you can buy your wine from gas pumps. Yes, you read that right. Gas pumps. It’s spectacular.

They were kind enough to offer us wine tastings of some of their bottled wine (and later their gas pump wine).

Quick lesson on wine drinking—there are four types of wine consumed here in Italy. The lowest tier and quality is called “vino da Tavola,” or table wine. The next one up is vino a indicazione geografica tipica, or IGT, which is wine produced in a specific region. After that is vino a denominazione di origine controllata (DOC), which are also produced in specific regions, but they must fit specific rules designed to preserve the traditional winemaking methods of those regions. Finally, there’s vino a denominazione di origine controllata e garantita (DOCG), which is like DOC wine but made under even more regulations.

After over 30 liters of wine purchased (between three 5 gallon jugs and a dozen or so bottles, some for us and some for friends who couldn’t come), we patted ourselves on the back for a successful outing. We then almost got into a car accident because the navigator told the driver to go the wrong way on a one way road. The navigator might have been a little tipsy from all that wine tasting. But I’ll let you all figure out who was who.

All in all, it was a very rewarding weekend even if it was a little stressful. The more we let go of the way we “think” things should be and just accepted that “this is Italy,” the more we realize how wonderful and amazing this country is that the Navy tossed us into.

Sunset view from our rooftop

I look forward to many, many more travels in our time here. But for now, I have wine to drink!

Pompeii

Last Friday, we went out with some friends to see the ruins at Pompeii. We drove out first thing in the morning and met up with Giancarlo, a local archaeologist who gives tours of a few different sites in the area.

Pompeii is up on a hill, which makes sense given that ancient people tended to build towns on high ground for security. It has some of its outer wall still intact, but the city had been enjoying Pax Romana for so long by A.D. 79 that people used the walls not for defense but for building multiple levels of houses on the outer wall to take advantage of the great views.

You seldom see pictures of Pompeii from the outside, so it’s pretty impressive to see just walking up to it.

The outside of one entrance to the ruins.

Most of the pictures I (David) had seen of the place ahead of time either of the forum (the open village square) or looking directly down a street. Those pictures gave me the impression that Pompeii is largely open feeling thanks to Mount Vesuvius having knocked over most of the structures.

An ancient archway framing a view of Mount Vesuvius.

The first place the tour guide took us was the field where gladiators trained, so the prior impression I had was initially correct.

In fact, the city doesn’t feel open at all except for that training field, the forum, and the intersection of the two largest roads.

The field where gladiators trained. It used to have a covered walkway around all of it, but the field was always open to the sky.

While no roofs still stand and nearly all walls have crumbled to some extent, it does feel closed in like a city. Buildings come right up to the sidewalks, and there isn’t really space between them.

It doesn’t take too much imagination to feel what life might have been like as there’s more of the city left standing than you might think.

Rather than looking down a street, this is the view from the street. You can see an arch in the back where an oven was. The regular holes in the back wall were for wooden support beams for the second floor, which housed slaves.

It was a great choice to hire a tour guide because so much of the nuance would have been lost. You can notice some things a guide would point out, but our guide was able to explain why all those things existed.

For example, the walls have obviously different construction methods interspersed because the Pompeiians rebuilt old walls damaged by earthquakes with the current era’s methods and materials.

There are two differently sized theaters because one was used for theater (large space to accommodate sets, multiple actors, costume changes, etc) and another was used for musical performance (a smaller space helps the sound to project better; it also had what modern day musicians would refer to as a ‘pit’).

This was the larger theater, used for drama. Only the white seats, which are marble, are original. The rest are modern reconstructions. You’ll notice the entryways get smaller as each level gets higher- the rich would enter the biggest door and sit on the lower seats while the lowest class would enter at the highest point through the smallest doors.

Not all of the buildings on the sidewalk would have been businesses. The building fronts with grooves in the ground for sliding doors were the businesses, while the buildings without grooves were homes. Each home had a main entrance with a large door for the family, but the house’s slaves would have to enter a smaller entrance.

This was a Pompeiian fast food joint. The pots would’ve contained food, and the shelves on the left would’ve had wine.

The place is fascinating, but it’s not without its downer aspects. The plaster casts of the bodies of people who died in the eruption are a reminder of the horrific event that allow us to tour the city in the first place.

Slavery was also fully integrated into Roman society. I can barely think of a thing that Giancarlo pointed out that didn’t involve mentioning slaves to some degree, and he told us that slaves were truly thought of as property (sometimes disposable property) and not as people. Some slaves were forced into being prostitutes, purchased by the richer families and made to perform in certain ways depending on what the local clientele desired. Some ‘merchants’ purchased their prostitutes from lands a far distance from Italy so they could advertise their goods as ‘exotic’ and therefore more appealing. For as advanced as the Romans were, they were unbearably brutal on a large number of people.

One of the 40+ brothels found (so far) in Pompeii. The marble sign is from a mapping system created by archaeologists in the 1800s to better keep track of the ruins. Richer clients would use the larger rooms on the second floor while the budget shopper would simply occupy a stall on the first floor.

The stone streets sloped downwards and were used (along with a steady stream of water) to carry waste away from the city. Large cobblestones were used as “crosswalks” so one could cross the road without stepping in the filthy water. You can also see large grooves in the stone carved out by the wheels of the chariots that traversed the city.

We plan on going back to just wander and look at the details, as well as see a few things like the amphitheater we didn’t get to this time. We also want to go to Herculaneum, a city that Vesuvius destroyed with mudslides rather than ash and pumice. It’s smaller, but it’s also better preserved. The mud kept out oxygen, which means that unlike at Pompeii, organic material didn’t decompose. Plus, the mud is tougher to dig through than the ash. That fact kept the area-ruling Spanish in the 1700s and the museum-building Neapolitans in the 1800s from pillaging many of the artifacts.

A house in Pompeii once had the famous mosaic of Alexander the Great, but this is a copy installed in 2005. The original is in a museum in Naples.

We’re fortunate to live so close to the ruins to be able to explore them multiple times over our years here in Naples. There aren’t many places you can go to see city-sized areas that old outside of places like Egypt and some remote locales in Central America and Asia.