Europe 24 - From Agerola to Ruoti

Getting out of Agerola turned out to be more complicated than we thought it would be.

When we arrived we’d parked the Jeep in the little widening at the foot of our apartment, vowing not to move it until we left town, and suddenly here we were. It was time to get it back out to the road through a system of driveways which were, at times, barely wider than the car itself so long as the side mirrors were folded in. We’d figured out how to do that by then. We packed up our stuff and made it out of the first driveway to where we usually turned left down the second one get to the main street – a one-way street headed away from where we wanted to go – and then we made the mistake of consulting GoogleMaps.

It would not be the first such mistake that day, nor the last on our trip.

Later we figured out that it had, for reasons best known to Google, reset itself from “Driving Directions” to “Walking Directions,” which is why it told us to go right instead of left. That was not an easy turn and it took a couple of tries to make that happen without changing the shape of either the car or the buildings. Flush with success, we then got about fifty meters further on before it became clear that a) someone had parked a motorcycle in the middle of the exit out onto the street, and b) it didn’t really matter that they had done so because that exit was approximately half the width of the car. It was barely wide enough for the motorcycle.

Conversation ensued.

This was followed by some backward driving and then a reverse three-point turn into someone else’s property for a brief moment and then some delicate threading of the automotive needle back through the driveways, all the while hoping that nobody had parked along the way out or was heading toward us on the way in because again, technically, this was a two-way thoroughfare. Eventually we made it back to the main road where we turned in the opposite direction of where we wanted to go because that was the only option available to us.

Fortunately at this point GoogleMaps figured out how to do what we wanted it to do and led us back to the main piazza and then around the other side of town until we finally got to the road we wanted to get to in the first place, and from there it was a simple matter of the long steep drive down the mountain switchbacks and through the narrow little villages until we hit sea level and could exhale again.

Driving in Italy is its own adventure.

Our goal that morning was Herculaneum (“Ercolano” in Italian). When Mt. Vesuvius blew up in 79 CE it took a number of cities and towns with it, the most well-known of which was Pompeii. Herculaneum was another, and when we were planning this trip we went back and forth about which one we wanted to see because trying to see both just wasn’t going to happen. Pompeii is bigger and more well known, but Herculaneum is just as well preserved and you could actually see all of it in the time we had. It’s also much less crowded. On top of that we’d read that it was “subterranean,” which we took to mean that it was underground – a not insignificant draw on a hot southern Italian summer day – but which turned out to mean that it was below the current surface level of the ground and had simply been excavated and yes indeed it was extremely open to the sun. You can’t win them all. But we had a good time anyway.

Herculaneum is just south of Naples and we were glad to be making this trip on a Sunday morning given the traffic that Naples is known for. It turned out to be a pretty easy drive and we paid our €2.30 highway toll without incident or story before wending our way through the city streets to the archeological site, which isn’t itself underground but which does have underground parking – a huge bonus on a cloudless 95F/35C day. You go in, park your car, climb the stairs back up to the surface, and the site is Right There In Front Of You. Seriously – you couldn’t ask for better parking.

On top of that it turned out that we were visiting on the first Sunday of the month which in Italy is the day that the museums and historical sites are free so we could just walk right in. This was a pleasant surprise.

Of course we did spend some time in the gift shop, which they funnel you through as any good historical site will, and as with most places in Italy there was a cat. We could not ignore the cat, and the cat seemed happy not to be ignored. It is a well-attended cat, continually passed from one group of tourists to the next.

There were some tour groups when we were there as well as a few rather insistent entrepreneurs trying to rope us into paying for personalized guided tours of the place, but we got past them and walked along the path to get into the site itself. The gift shop level is higher than the site – they’ve been excavating Herculaneum for a while and the surface level was a lot lower in 79 CE than it is now – so you can kind of get an overview as you walk from the corner where the gift shop is located to the other corner where the walkway to get in starts. You can see the walkway in the first photo.

In the last picture above you can see some alcoves. That was the shoreline when Vesuvius erupted and people hid there waiting for the boats to come rescue them. Some people were rescued that way but not everyone, and the bones of those who were left behind are still there. We saw them up close at the end of our time there – the place kind of channels you past them on the way out – and they are unutterably sad.

You can’t see them very well from the upper level, though, so we continued on our way and then turned onto the walkway and into the site.

It’s an astonishing place.

You come in on a long straight street with the ruins of buildings on either side and you can wander pretty much wherever you want from there. Everywhere you look there are buildings, pathways, columns and the like and we didn’t even try to stick together though we ran into each other often enough. The streets can be as much as an arm’s length lower than the sidewalks in some places so periodically you have little bridges you can cross or simply cutouts that let you go down and back up, and we slowly made our way clockwise through the place.

You can peer into the open buildings and all of them are intact enough that you can go inside. There are very few clear sightlines once you do that, though, so you end up twisting and turning and coming out in different places from where you went in and I suppose that’s part of the fun of it.

There are hints that tell you what some of the buildings were so you can get a handle on them. This one was a bath house.

This one, from what I could tell, was a public toilet. Ancient notions of privacy were rather different from modern ones, after all. Each of those rings leads down to its own vast jug and I suppose someone would have been tasked to empty them on a regular basis.

This room had both artwork and some of the marble fixtures, but the most interesting thing about it was that the door is the original wood from 79 CE, which is why it is encased in glass like that.

You can still see the window bars and some of the artwork in this room, which is pretty amazing considering the gulf of time and events between now and then.

There was a lot of artwork that you could see, actually. It’s really quite something how much of it survived. I spent a lot of time just kind of staring at this room, for example.

 

Everywhere you went, you could see rooms like that.

Though sometimes it was interesting to look a bit closer and see some of the smaller artworks. You wonder who painted them on their walls, what their lives had been like, and whether they made it out on that day and what they thought of it all if they did. The town was buried. Even if they made it out, they never went back.

There were also mosaics, some of which are brightly colored even now. This one is listed on the little guide that they give you as something you should try to find and it lived up to the billing.

As did this one.

Some of it was the more common black and white but still made to look like artwork.

Most of the black and white mosaics were more geometrical shapes and abstract designs though. The Ancient Romans just loved their mosaics.

Also, as a historian I can confirm that people have been people since as far back as we have records of people and the jokes never change.

There were a lot of statues as well. Romans also loved their statues and you didn’t have to walk very far to get from one to the next.

There were a couple of these things too. I’m assuming they were watering troughs for horses or something along those lines. The thing that I noticed most about them is that they are decorative. There are few starkly utilitarian objects or spaces anywhere in Herculaneum – everything has something carved or painted or arranged in a way that is more than just useful. Even the bare walls are decorated, if only with patterns of repeating stone. In an age of utilitarianism such as we live in now, it’s nice to be reminded that there is room for creative expression even in mundane things.

We spent three or four hours walking around Herculaneum and saw pretty much all of it. If there is any drawback to the place at all it is that there were no fountains anywhere to be found so once you finished your water bottle you were done. We found our way down to the lowest level where the alcoves were and stared at those for a bit before finding the pathway back up to the entry level, which fortunately was an enclosed stone tunnel with fans at intervals and therefore much cooler. The ramp takes you most of the way to the little vending area at the top where you can rest after your time there. We made a beeline for the water bottle machine and were rewarded with a free bottle when the machine spit out two for our euro. We sat in a shady spot overlooking the site for a bit, drinking our water, before moving on to the row of little museums that they have on the path back to the gift shop.

The first museum is a fairly diverse collection of artifacts from the place – statues, mosaics, and the like. It has the signal advantage of being air conditioned, so it was worth exploring in some depth.

This lump of coins is a reminder of what it must have been like on that day, as the pyroclastic flow from the volcano incinerated anything flammable in the city and melted much of the rest.

You can still see Vesuvius from Herculaneum, by the way. It looms in the near distance, a reminder of events. The thing about living in this region, though, is that none of this is all that historical – it’s something you have to live with every day. The Campi Flegrei, a volcanic crater beneath Naples and most of the surrounding area which is part of a larger volcanic system that includes Vesuvius, has been shaking with earthquakes and rising visibly over the last year or two at a rate of 2cm/month. As recently as May it was hit with a swarm of earthquakes, enough to cause evacuations. There is only one way that goes. It can go sooner or it can go later, but that’s how it will go.

The next museum over really only has one artifact in it, an ancient boat that was excavated nearby. It’s impressive enough on its own.

By this point we were hungry and we decided we’d seen our fill of Herculaneum and needed to get our fill of some lunch. Fortunately the site is located in an urban area and it’s not a long walk to get to a place where there are establishments who will happily cater to that need. Unfortunately there is no shade between where you are and where they are so the walk feels longer than it is. But we soon found our way into the city and, half a block later, we arrived at a takeout place where you could get pizza by the slice and sit at a shaded sidewalk table in front of a roaring fan and watch the world go by for a while.

And on the way back we got some nice views of the site again.

Getting back out of the underground parking lot was more complicated than it seemed – a running theme for the day, in some ways. We got to the car and then remembered that one of us (i.e. me) had to go back up to the office and pay our parking fees, which wasn’t all that hard except that they didn’t give me back my little ticket so the only way we could get out was to slowly approach the gate and hope that the people in the office were watching the little closed circuit monitor so they could flip the switch manually to get the gate to go up. Surprisingly enough, this worked.

Our next scheduled stop was the town of Avigliano, across the valley from Ruoti in Basilicata, but Kim wanted to dip her toes in the Mediterranean Sea so we ended up making a short detour to Vietri sul Mari. It is a beautiful seaside town with approximately seven parking spaces and we circled around trying to secure one before lining up at a small lot where we waited for people to leave so we could enter and take their spot. This turned out to be a shorter wait than we thought and not long after that we found the sea.

The beach there is divided into a plebian side where any member of the public can go and an aristocratic side where you have to pay to get in. This applies to the water, too. But we were only there for a short visit and nobody bothered Kim as she went for a quick stroll from one side to the other. It was a gorgeous beach, it has to be said.

Someone waiting in line at that parking lot was very happy when we left.

The drive from there to Ruoti looked surprisingly familiar in some ways. We’d gone much of this route last year and we recognized some of the scenery as well as a couple of the construction projects.

Our route took us through Ruoti, which was actually the main focus of this part of the trip and why the title of this post is what it is. We’d been invited back for a festival (which will be pretty much all of the next post) but didn’t actually decide to attend until there were no rooms left in Ruoti so we ended up at the next town over in an agriturismo place just outside of Avigliano.

While the two towns are maybe 5km apart as the crow flies it’s about a 20km drive down into the valley and back up the other side and it takes the better part of half an hour to do it. GoogleMaps decided to take us through someone’s field at one point, but eventually it did get us into Avigliano.

Our room was at an old farm just outside of Avigliano where there was a small row of buildings by the front entrance. It was rather more rustic than we were expecting, though if you enjoy that sort of thing it was a nice place. There was no air conditioning, but there were goats. The three of us shared a large room, and the scorpion that we saw when we first arrived fled right away and didn’t bother us after that. There was wifi and a television but no refrigerator so we had to stash our Agerola cheese in the breakfast room next door, which also had yogurts, wrapped pastries, and a coffee machine. If you walked past the parking area they had a little canvas-lined pool which was pleasant on a hot day.

We hung out for a bit and then decided that it was dinner time and this raised the question of what to do about that at 8pm on a Sunday evening in an Italian hilltop town, but it turned out that there was a pizza place (we ate a lot of pizza on this trip and regret none of it) called Rosarum on the other side of Avigliano so we set out in our Jeep through the steep, narrow maze of one-way streets to find it. There was a point on this journey where we found ourselves driving up what was legitimately a staircase, but apparently that was what we were expected to do since nobody questioned it and eventually we found our destination. We had the place to ourselves when we got there – just us and the staff, who were watching the Olympics and who graciously turned the monitor toward us so we could watch as well. They were a little surprised to see tourists – it’s not really a touristy area, up in the mountains of Basilicata – so we told them about our connections with Ruoti and the festival that was happening the next day, and they thought that was interesting if somewhat odd. If Italian towns are anything like American towns, I suspect the next town over is always going to be a rival somehow.

Eventually the tables began to fill up, beginning with a party of about a dozen teenage boys celebrating the birthday of one of them. That’s them in the photo. They were clearly having a very good time, and it was fun to listen to them. And by 9:30 when we left, the place was packed.

As with every restaurant we went to in Italy, the people at Rosarum were just wonderful about the food allergy situation and were happy to point out what was safe and what wasn’t. In the end we went with the pizza and it was very good, but the fries were excellent.

We made it back to our room without mishap and spent the rest of the evening hanging out and watching the Olympics. By this point the fencing was going on and Italy was one of the favorites so it was prominently featured on Italian television. It’s hard to follow if you don’t know the sport, but the announcers were clearly enjoying themselves and sometimes that’s all you need.