What the hell! I can't resist posting this photo of Fiorella, her owners (whose names I never found out) and their dog Germina, even though it's a terrible photo. For city folk like me, it's the equivalent of seeing Aborigines walking down the street in those red underpants... er, loincloths... that they wear for official public dance performances. Not that red underpants are about to become a fashion statement in the way that this woman's smock has become the de rigueur outfit for any would-be artist or professor in London or Paris.

I can't believe that I only spent 10 days in Italy. On the Friday afternoon I.'s father drove me to the railway station in Salerno. We did a very short detour via Paestum to have a quick look at the Greek ruins, but mainly to buy a souvenir for my mother. Salerno seems very different from Naples. Even if it is a major port city it seems much more orderly, more properly European - but that may be because I didn't see much. We only had time for a quick coffee at the seafront (which, unlike Naples has trees) and then an information-free wait for my train to Rome. On the train I sat next to a guy who was reading academic papers about cultural evolution and genetics, and opposite a man who used his index finger to punch numbers on his mobile phone! I slept at the Hotel Aphrodite next to the railway station in Rome and caught my flight the next morning.

I think I forgot to mention earlier that we had wild boar for dinner one night in Fornia. The father of a friend had shot one, and according to the rules of the village, meat was available for those who wanted it. We were actually invited for dinner the night before, but I's mother had planned chicken and porcini so we couldn't go. Instead she produced it the next night. I have to say it was quite delicious.

I'm already formulating plans to get back to Cilento. It would be a fabulous place to go hiking. In the meantime, not sure how I'll keep on filling up this blog.

After our walk in the woods we had a beer in the lovely, shady piazza in the lower part of town and then walked further up to look at the village sights. There's a second, more bustling (if that's an appropriate word) piazza with the Commune building, housed in an old palazzo. It has lovely frescoes on some of the outer walls.


At the very top is the ducal palace, right next to the old castle ruins. The entrance is through a tunnel under one side of the building.


From the terrace there are wonderful views down to the chapel we'd just visited and across to the mountains where we'd had our picnic by the other chapel (which is not really discernible in the picture, by the trees near the top of the ridge running down in front of the bald rock face).


The ducal palace was owned for many centuries by the Duke of Longobardo (is that Lombardy?), but was purchased in the 19th century by the Spinelli family of Naples. Now it belongs to the Commune which has recently restored it but hasn't decided what to do with it. It has a very impressive kitchen...

... and beautiful, huge rooms with wood-panelled ceilings.

I also loved the doorknockers.




In the evening we all went for another walk, from Fogna around the spur of the mountain that it sits on to a block of land that L and I. are thinking of buying. On the road we met an ancient couple with their mule or donkey, named Fiorella, and their dog Germina. Neither of them was taller than the mule and they were both dressed in what my modern companions described as "peasant costume". I took three photos, but due to the fading light they are all horribly blurred.

By the time we reached the block of land it was almost dark, though still with just enough light to see the olive trees, the patch of natural woodland, a few grape vines and the big oak by the house. From the upper storey I'm sure you can see the sea, but we couldn't because the house was locked.




I hope they can buy it. It is quite stunning and incredibly cheap for 2.5 hectares. But there are something like 50 titles on it and so far they've only been able to verify that the seller really owns about 2/3 of them.

While I. was working (on a chapter he is submitting for publication) L and I drove over to Laurino to have a look around (and feed the cats). This is the view from near their old house and we decided to walk up to the small chapel in the centre of the picture. Actually we drove down to the bottom of the valley first since the day was hot and then followed the track up to where it forks. The road is the old salt route across Italy from Brindisi to Salerno, which probably explains why Laurino had a castle from the 12th century.


At the fork we followed the right-hand track down to the stream.


On the other side of the stream is a picnic ground, covered in pretty pink flowers.


We followed a rough track upstream until we came to a beautiful clear (and cold!) pool. It's deep enough to be a good swimming hole and the green colour in the photo is really true. We recrossed the stream and sat on a low wall dabbling our feet for a bit...


... watched by a tiny frog.


Then we climbed up to the chapel of Sant' Elena, Santa Lena (local dialect name) or Saint Helena. The story is that the locals built the chapel because Santa Lena saved Laurino from attack, either by the briganti or the government authorities, I'm not sure. There's a painting on the back wall of the chapel showing troops in blue uniforms gathered below the village. The briganti were endemic in this area during the period before unification and divided the loyalties of the population. They were both political rebels against feudal oppression and plain brigands (not of the Robin Hood type either). At least one village in the region was completely destroyed by the authorities - presumably in order "to save it" - and huge tracts of forest were burned in order to flush them out. In any case their activities were one of the catalysts for the republican movement and the unification of Italy.


View of Laurino from the chapel.

Roscigno Vecchia is a village that was abandoned at some stage after an earthquake during the 20th century due to fear that it was going to slide down the hillside. One woman, Dorina, refused to move, but she died last year and, on the day we visited, it was full of Americans. We met a guy from Philadelphia who said his parents had been married in the church...

... and who has created a Foundation for the restoration of the village, in which task they are joined by his cousin the mayor of the Commune (just to show what a small world it is, I also spoke to his son who had lived just up the road from me in North Sydney for 10 years). The Americans were having a party to celebrate Dorina's first death anniversary. They invited us for a drink which, for reasons that shall be explained, we politely declined, and showed us which buildings they had so far "restored".
Dorina. I bet she never imagined her career as a PR tool. But she wasn't totally averse to modernity - note the shoes.


Then we met Giuseppe Spagnola, a local volunteer dressed in a red shirt and a black shepherd's hat (you can see him on the far right of the church photo) who runs the little museum. Spagnola said that for years there had been a group of local volunteers working on the restoration of the village, but they have now been pushed out of the way by the Commune and the Foundation - i.e., pushed out by the money. The restoration work is now being done by a construction firm from Naples (read 'Camorra connections') and they don't know the old building technique. The houses are being rebuilt as modern stone houses. He showed us one that his group had restored "exactly as it was when the people left". Even down to the caciocavallo cheese and chillies hanging on the kitchen wall (Spagnola often camps there, sleeping on the big table in the next room).


This house is the first one in this lovely row lining one side of the piazza. The last one in the row has been "restored" by the Foundation and really ruins the whole effect.


In front of this terrace row there is a fountain fed by a spring. It runs constantly without a tap and, as I discovered in other parts of this area, there is a long-established system whereby the springwater from one fountain or cattle trough is fed by gravity into one somewhere below, the water eventually joining the river in the valley.


( More details of Roscigno Vecchia )
Finally, so you can make up your own mind, the two houses that have been restored so far by the Foundation. The main complaint seems to be about the mortar. Most of the old houses don't have any at all. And the new roof guttering seems to overwhelm the cornice. I suppose that they might mellow to the original colour with age.

On the Tuesday we had a slow-food lunch at a tiny bar that specializes in traditional recipes with two of L's friends who are musicians. Afterwards they took us to their studio and played some music they're working on for a movie. They previously did the score for a movie by Nina di Maio and now she has commissioned more music from them. I thought their music was good and I've brought home a couple of CDs.

After lunch we packed up all our gear and headed for the railway station. We got stuck in the traffic and missed two trains, so we didn't get to Battipaglia until about 7.30. There we were picked up by I's parents who drove us the remaining 60 km to their home in Fogna (officially known as Villa Littoria) in the middle of the Cilento National Park. The park was created in 1991 and is a world heritage site, listed not only for its tracts of wild country, but also for its representation of the "traditional" way of life. The latter aspect is really interesting because since the park was declared many of the locals are switching back to traditional crops and livestock and away from the new commercial varieties. In Fogna, although many people have quite ordinary jobs, there's also a system of village barter whereby somebody who has just made a new batch of ricotta will give most of it away to friends, while somebody else who has shot a wild boar will similarly distribute the meat. As far as I could see, there were only 2 shops and one of these only sells tobacco and newspapers. I's mother has a basement absolutely crammed with salamis, preserves, sauces and god-knows-what-else that she has either manufactured herself or received from friends. On our arrival we ate a dinner of ricotta (just delivered by a neighbour), fresh buffalo mozzarella, two types of salami, a basil and tomato salad and crusty brown bread, washed down with I's father's home-made wine! Just antipasto, said I's mother, are you sure it's enough? We also had fresh hand-made pasta for lunch every day - the first of a daily three-course meal. Luckily she was willing to skimp on future dinners - even though they don't start eating until 9.30 or 10 at night, I still couldn't manage more than a nibble.

The area is stunningly beautiful.




In this photo you can see Fogna across the valley.


On the bridge over a gorge on the way to Roscigno.


One afternoon we drove up a one-track road to a 16th century chapel on a mountainside for a picnic (at 1500 metres). The chapel was commissioned by a traveller who had nearly lost his life in a snowstorm. It was closed, but the views are spectacular.




Later the same day we drove up another one-track road towards Pruno, a village that is still completely cut off from the outside world in winter. Unlike the mountain of the chapel, this one is covered in forest. We saw deer - a doe and a stag - close to the road, and further up in the beech forest, horses. They belong to someone, as the lead horse has a bell, but they're not used to humans and did a circle around us through the trees. Here, we also tramped through dead leaves a foot deep to visit La Grava, a cave that drops vertically for hundreds of metres into the next valley. The cave makes faint noises (presumably wind in the depths) which add to its spooky quality. I much preferred being back on the track with the horses.

One day L's brother took us out of the city to visit the Campi Flegrei. First stop was at a huge Roman amphitheatre at Pozzuoli. Apparently it was the third largest in Italy and they used to have really spectacular events in it - like flooding the arena to conduct naval battles! The basement was really impressive.




A nice row of water jars.


We stopped in the next town to get some local takeaway - different types of frittata - and went to have a picnic at Lake Averno. The name, "without birds", was given by the Romans who thought it was the entrance to Hades on account of the sulphurous gases it gave off. It's actually an old volcanic crater. These days the birds are back.


There are also the remains of a temple. There is a strong relation between this lake and Sybil, the oracle that had to be asked whether, if you entered Hades to visit a relative, you'd be able to come back again. The Romans cut a tunnel from here to Cuma, where the oracle was located, but now it's on private land.


At Cuma, however, we were able to visit Sybil's grotto itself. You enter by a long underground passage leading to a large room with nothing in it.


On top of the hill above the grotto is a Greek acropolis with temples for Apollo and Jupiter. This is what's left of Apollo's (Jupiter's has rather more Roman modifications, but isn't much better preserved).


But the best thing about this hill was the view. We met a few people on the path, but mostly it was very peaceful, surrounded by woods. Further to the west you can see the island of Ischia. The coastal strip is all native vegetation - possibly the land there is quite new - all along the coast there are old Greeek ports that are now inland and old Greek towns that are now underwater. At one place there is a submarine tour that takes you through the ruins - unfortunately it doesn't run in September.


It was a Monday, so at the one other place we tried to visit the park was closed. It had an early version of the type of dome on the Pantheon in Rome which can be seen from the road. Pozzuoli, apart from being Sophia Loren's hometown, is the place where pozzolana cement comes from. The Romans discovered that volcanic ash could make a light cement that made the construction of such domes possible. The pozzolana would also set in water, which made it useful for bridge building. Pozzuoli itself used to be an important port, but in 1984 the earth rose by 2 metres and now the port is too shallow! The town is right in the centre of the caldera that makes up the Campi Flegrei.

Pompeii is, of course, fantastic. When you're there it boggles the imagination to think that you're walking the streets of a 2600 year old town and that nothing much has changed since it was buried nearly 2000 years ago - well at least since the major rounds of looting stopped. The first looting was straight after the eruption when archaeologists believe that most of the marble and statues were removed. The second looting began in the late 18th century, shortly after the town was rediscovered and the digging began. It is only in more recent times that efforts at conservation have been made. Conservation theory has changed too: in the 19th century the done thing was to remove the best bits and put them in a museum, leaving the rest exposed to the elements. Lately the idea is to concentrate on a few areas - given the shortage of funds, it is impossible to treat the entire town - to restore a few buildings to something like their original form, replant gardens with seeds derived from preserved genetic material and to protect as much as possible of the remaining frescoes. Even so, it is quite dismaying to walk around and see the damage that is still going on - the grey volcanic dust covering almost everything; the fact that half the buildings have had to be gated and locked so that tourists can't get in and add their own graffiti to the Roman ones or, indeed, to the elaborate interior decor; frescoes completely exposed to the brilliant southern Italian sunshine; the grubby plastic sheeting covering some of the frescoes; weeds sprouting amongst the stonework of even the most important buildings.

It still feels like a town though. Partly this is because it's full of people tramping up and down the main street, wandering in an out of what are still recognisably shops (according to my guidebook there were 600 shops and 800 houses for a population of about 12,000 in 79 AD when things came to an end). Never mind that most of these people are in large groups trailing around after a guide holding a flag (ours was sky blue for the Napoli football team) and jabbering away in German, Chinese, Russian, English, etc. According to Maria, our flag bearer, Pompeii is the second most-visited archaeological site in Italy after the Colosseum, so there are clearly huge issues related to maintaining the integrity of the site while keeping it accessible. Also, the new town of Pompei (Italian spelling) that sprouted in the wake of the discovery of the ruins is reportedly Camorra-infested, so it seems natural that half the money allocated to conservation disappears into entirely unrelated projects.

The new Pompei is a whole 'nother story. It is part of a vast, mostly illegally constructed, urban area that spreads all along the coast and halfway up the mountain side of one of the most dangerous volcanoes on earth. Maria was born there and is happy to go on living there. She says that people just don't think about the bomb they're sitting on and anyway there's an evacuation plan. I said to her that I'd heard the vulcanologists can give two weeks' warning. She replied that they've been told 'one month'. But anyway, she added, nobody can escape - there's only one road out of an area populated by a million people and even with the so-called evacuation plan, more people would probably die trying to escape than would die from the explosion. So actually she thinks, grinning cheerfully, that they won't get any warning at all. My thinking is that Neapolitans also have a whole load of religion and other magic to ward off any fear of catastrophe. There are also the laws of probability. First, it doesn't blow up very often, which is why it is so dangerous when it does. Second, contrary to my school lessons, only 10-25% of old Pompeii's population died in the 79 AD eruption (but most people had escaped already after the initial explosion of ash and pumice and the only ones who died had either decided it was over and they wouldn't leave or had gone back to salvage stuff and were caught by the subsequent pyroclastic flow - so under the 'no escape next time' theory, the probability must be higher). Third, which area gets hit depends on which part of the mountain cracks and which way the wind is blowing. New Pompei wasn't affected by any recent eruptions. But there hasn't been one at all since 1944. According to Wikipedia the largest eruption before 79 AD was the "Avellino eruption (Pomici di Avellino), 1660 BC ± 43 years,....The eruption was larger than the ones of 79... and 1631... with pyroclastic surge deposits distributed to the northwest of the vent, the surges travelling as far as 15 km from it, and lie up to 3 m deep in the area now occupied by Naples" (pop. >1,000,000). Further, "It seems that for Vesuvius the amount of magma expelled in an eruption increases very roughly linearly with the interval since the previous one, and at a rate of around 0.001 km³ for each year. This gives an extremely approximate figure of 0.06 km³ for an eruption after 60 years of inactivity." So if it goes up tomorrow it's size should be 60% of the 79 eruption and 6 times larger than that of 1631, which was in turn larger than any of the subsequent ones. Since the prevailing winds are to the southeast, the city of Naples is less likely to be affected than the Pompei area, but none of this really makes me want to go and live there! Even if I thought that cursing San Gennaro could save me.
( About 20 medium-sized photos of downtown Pompeii and yet more text )

End of very long rave about Pompeii.