Exploding Mountains, the Emperor Caligula, and Plane Trees

Wednesday, 7/14/10

A plane tree

   

Today the group spent the whole day at the Vesuvian Institute. The change of pace was most welcome. Until 1:00 we had presentations and study sessions. Leigh gave a great presentation on the details of the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. I hope I remember the terms subduction, pyroclastic flow, and pyroclastic surge.

 

 From another presentation I learned that Caligula once gave a dinner-party in a Plane Tree. I took some pictures of a local plane tree. It is too small for a dinner-party, but the shape gives you the idea. It might be a shady spot for a party. A platform could be built where the tree widens beneath the crown.

A nice, cool spot for a dinner-party?

 This afternoon I did my PT exercises and took a walk to the Terme di Stabia to see if I could get more aqua s. ferrata. I could get in for free, but the particular spigot I wanted apparently only flows in the morning. Maybe on Saturday I can get some more. The other ladies who have problems with rashes want me to bring some back for them, since they see it is clearing up my rash. I only have a  little it left and will be sad when I run out.

 We met at 7 tonight to go over tomorrow's plans. The group will be going to Ischia, site of the first Greek colony in Italy. The Greeks called it Pithecusae. Some of the ruins are beneath the church of Sancta Restituta, a Roman Catholic saint from North Africa. From Pithecusae another Greek colony, Cumae, was established, where Matthew and I will be staying for my last two weeks in Italy. Our group must get going early tomorrow, meaning out of the hotel by 7:30 am, to catch our boat ride to the island on time. We are warned to be at the correct harbor on Ischia (there are two) at 5 pm or we will miss the last ferry home and have to find a way to spend the night there. After our morning educational tour, we will have some free time to enjoy the beaches, dining, thermal spas, or gardens of Ischia. It sounds like a nice place to get stranded, although I have no intention of doing so.

I would like to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for funding this portion of our trip, whether I get stranded or no.

Stabia and Boscoreale

Thursday, July 8, 2010

A fresco from the Villa San Marco

   Today we went to the Villa Adriana and the Villa San Marco at Stabiae, then we went to Boscoreale to visit a typical Roman villa rustica, or working country farmhouse, and its nearby museum. The Villa San Marco would have been one of the types of seaside villas in the area where Pliny the Elder died trying to rescue victims of the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D. He was also trying to study the eruption for observation purposes. He reminds me in that respect of an ancient Jacques Cousteau. The restoration work and reproductions there help set the frescoes we saw at the Naples Museum in the context of a house. The garden was large and breathtaking, with a huge piscina (pool or fishpond) and a nymphaeum (decorative fountain) at the back. The plantings in the garden are historically accurate, based on root castings and DNA research done by archaeologists, accurate even down to the size and placement of the plane trees. They really helped give a sense of what the garden looked like as well as provided welcome shade. Plane trees dot the Vesuvian Institute and the surrounding streets as well. Even today they seem to be a popular tree here.

The large piscina or fishpond

 

The state of the garden interested me, because the specialty of studying the plantings in the Roman gardens was still young during my last visit to these kinds of sites in 1988. At the Villa Adriana we actually observed archaeologists at work on the garden there, working on the bare soil to make root castings of both large and small plants. Much of the work is done by undergraduates at the University of Maryland, many of whom come back in their summers year after year to continue this work. The views of the coastline from this villa must have been magnificent. The ocean would have come right up to about where the apartment buildings line the base of the slope where the villa stands, today. After the eruption, the ocean receded so that it is about a kilometer away from where it used to be.

Plaster casts of the garden at the Villa Adriana

A bronze bust at Boscoreale

 

Boscoreale is a fine example of a villa rustica, and very different from the luxury and urban villas we have been visiting up to this point. The term rustica now has a more concrete meaning in my mind. I used to think of it as just villa out in the country, but the minute I stepped into this building I felt I was on a working farm. Its layout upon entry almost reminds me of stepping into a friend's stables. The building has been restored well, too, so that you can see even what the roofs would have looked like. The nearby museum is full of the tools and materials related to the kind of work and recreation what would have gone on here, from fishhooks to a small mill for flour to information on textiles and dyes, etc. There was also a special exhibit with some of the castings of victims of the eruption.

A mill to grind grain into flour at Boscoreale

Helle, a mosaic at the Villa San Marco

 

The highlight of the evening was a plenary session by Roger Macfarlane, a visiting scholar who works on using computer technology to rescue and share the content of ancient scrolls, particularly at the Villa of the Papyri. He showed us a documentary about these efforts called Out of the Ashes. I very much want to see if I can somehow find a copy of this for my students. I took a little video of him of my own, too.

 

Tomorrow our group plans to go through Hell.

(My thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities for making this portion of my trip possible).