Naples part VII: Herculaneum

Right, time for another couple of installments in my travelogue, this time: Herculaneum. The town was obliterated together with Pompeii, and was actually found a couple of years before but it's much smaller, and in my view better kept. A lot of stuff was taken away from the sites, but the various royals who ran Naples at the time of the early excavations concentrated on Pompeii for their plunder, which probably saved Herculaneum somewhat.

The site is a lot more quiet than Pompeii. It opens at 8.30 and I was there shortly after 10, and I never felt that the place got crowded. So iffin yer fixin to see just one site and don't have much time, or hate crowds (like I do), Herculaneum is a very good replacement for Pompeii. It's also closer to Naples.

I recommend you splurge on the audioguide, as it will make the trip a lot more informative for you, and you will come away from the visit with a lot more than just your own, personal guesswork. All pics from Herculaneum here.


Herculaneum used to lie by the sea. The eruption of 79AD covered it in several meters of ashes and moved the coastline 400 meters south/west. This is what they had to dig through...


The ancient ruin city of Herculaneum. The modern city of Ercolano in the back.


An authentic, wooden door from Roman times.


One of the local senators. He'd put up lots of buildings and owned one of the biggest villas in town. Enshrined in marble he used to look out at the sea, now he's facing a wall of volcanic stone. Sic transit gloria mundi.


Some pretty frescoes that were still incredibly vivid and intact, 2,000 years later.






They found at least 300 skeletons in Herculaneum. The average height for men was 160cm (5'3") and for women 150cm (4'11"). This skeleton belonged to someone whose age was given as appx 20 years old, but my Italian wasn't good enough to find out if it was a boy or a girl.


The painted ceiling of a bedroom in one of the villas. Maybe this was the last sight the skeleton person saw each night before tucking in. Ars long, vita brevis.