THE BURIED CITY

Hi everybody. All of us except Trish recovered well from last night’s party. She was a bit slow today. She must have had a little too much prosecco.

We were collected at 9:00 o’clock by Allessandro, the driver from Positano Taxi who had brought us from Naples who subjected us to another display of precision driving against almost over whelming odds along the narrow cliffside road between here and Sorrento to get us safely to Herculaneum.

 

It is a city which was buried in volcanic lava and mud in 67 AD when Mt. Vesuvius erupted. Unlike Pompeii which was destroyed by the eruption, Herculeum was preserved intact, frozen in time, but buried under 50 feet of volcanic rock.

It’s existence was only discovered in the 1800’s when a local farmer, drilling a new well, found his drilling impeded by what was subsequently found to be an amphitheatre. Some initial excavation was done but not resumed until the 1920’s. Only a small part of the ancient city has been excavated. Tunnelling has revealed the existence of some additional parts of it but much of it remains inaccessible, buried under the “modern town” built above it over the last two thousand years.

We returned to Positano for an afternoon snooze, a late afternoon walk to explore some additional areas of the town and a swim in a delightful bay just north of the town.

Tomorrow we head to the nearby town of Revello which is apparently another delightful and picturesque spot.