The Last Day of a City: August 23, Pompeii

This post is part of my Travels with Cadfael series, travelogues of the amazing trips I took with a Benedictine monk whom I had met at Solesmes while studying Gregorian chant.


It’s the mouth of a volcano. Yes, mouth, and lava tongue. A body, a monstrous living body, both male and female. It emits, ejects. It is also an interior, an abyss. Something alive, that can die.

Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover

Cadfael and I pick up the walking sticks and start the ascent to the ancient gaping hole that is the top of Mount Vesuvius. The sun is blistering hot, even for late

August. Our column of polyglot pilgrims— dense, and nearly single file—winds its way through the long switchbacks, slowly rising in altitude. The ground is hard, fine dust, silky ash, and so very oooooold.

Having left his horse with a groom, grasping his walking stick, pouch slung over one shoulder, the Cavaliere marched firmly up the slope. . . . He never approached the crater without apprehension—partly the fear of danger, partly the fear of disappointment.

We feel no disappointment and only fear’s counterpart: awe. We are like ants crawling on the side of overwhelming past power and the threat of potentially more destruction to come. It’s sleeping, somnolent, now, but there is no denying the seismic power beneath the dust, real power, like when the gods and ancient Rome ruled the known world.

The souvenir stand doesn’t even bother me—it harkens back to the cartes postales tradition from the centuries of visitors, the Grand Tour to Victorian times to now.

After taking in as much as we could of this natural death machine it was time to make our way down, and move on to the victim.

It is, purely by happenstance, August 23 in 2004. I find it chilling to be walking in the actual streets that would be buried under twenty feet of ash the next day in Anno Domini 79, obliterating Pompeii and Herculaneum.

In a world of overhype, Pompeii stands out as a stunning, genuinely stirring destination that also does not disappoint. The city is huge—we wander from street to street, entering a villa here, a brothel there, with more and more blocks as far as the eye can see.

I imagine the shadows of the townspeople everywhere, going about their daily life with no idea that they would soon be buried under a pyroclastic flow: fast-moving currents of hot gas, ash and rock collectively known tephra that fell at a rate of 700 km/hour at a temperature now thought to have been 350 degrees celscius, for nearly twenty hours. Wiki tells us that the thermal energy released was 100,000 times that of the A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

We wander out to the amphitheatre, where I hit my head walking through a low doorway and am stunned for a moment. Feels like a little blood on the scalp, I'm feeling a little woozy . . . .

In the TV version of this blog, this will trigger a dream sequence:

Scene up: Handsome Roman couple in a lavishly frescoed living chamber with an open-aired sky light and indoor fountain

Gaius Cadfaelius: Must we go to Lucius' tonight? We’ve already sat through two of his daughter’s Dionysian initiations. Isn’t that enough?

M.A Pellia: Yes, keep dressing or we’ll be late. You will need his support when you run for magistrate next year.

Cadfaelius: But their place is near the temple of the Sybilline Sisterhood. Those chicks give me the willies.

M.A.Pellia: Is that what you’re wearing? I wouldn’t be caught dead with you like that. Go put on your formal toga . . . .

Dream sequence ends--

In real life it just meant that Cad kept asking me, "Are you all right?" worried that a trip to an Italian emergency room was SO not on our agenda. We'd already had a flat tire.

We make our way to the Garden of the Fugitives, where there is a grouping of plaster cast victims, frozen in time. It was like looking at an eerie George Segal sculpture, except that these had been real people and there was no whimsy.

The sun continued strong on that August day, and there is almost no shade in Pompeii. We popped in to a few more of the specific doma, where I was particularly satisfied to see one of the original Cave Canem: "Beware of the Dog" floor tiles. Such a long way, in every sense, from the black/white/de-glo orange vinyl plastic “Beware of the dog” sign on the neighbor’s cyclone fence of my suburban childhood.

Of course the next day, August 24, did not see a repeat of history, and I woke up safe and sound in my hotel, where I spent the morning with Sontag’s The Volcano Lover which so richly combines legend, history, and Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton..

Vesuvius was once a young man, who saw a nymph lovely as a diamond. She scratched his heart, and his soul, he could think of nothing else. Breathing more and more heatedly, he lunged at her. The nymph, scorched by his attentions, jumped into the sea and became the island today called Capri. Seeing this, Vesuvius went mad, He loomed, his sighs of fire spread, little by little he became a mountain. And now, as immobilized as his beloved, forever beyond his reach, he continues to throw fire and makes the city of Naples tremble. How the helpless city regrets that the youth did not get what he desired!

Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover

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 Mapeel     8/23/2013     Amalfi, Italy, literature, Travels with Cadfael   

Travels with Cadfael: Finding the Infinite

There are some images that you see as a child and wonder what it would be like to be there. For me, the Terrace of the Infinite was one of those images. It was so exotic, those ancient Romans perched against the infinite blue of the water and the sky. I had no idea where it actually was. Then one day Cad and I took a road up into the heavens, to the exquisite town of Ravello, and, in the always consulted Lonely Planet guide, I found, to my surprise, where to find the childhood vista.

The terrace is on the grounds of the Villa Cimbrone, that exotic hideaway for Stokowski and Garbo. Friends of Cadfael’s from his language school were camping on the Campania, and so we met up for lunch and to ramble through the gardens and hang out with those ancient Romans. It was infinitely enjoyable.

The next day was our trip to Caserta--to the palace of Naples under the Bourbon Kings Charles, Duke of Parma, and then his son. Ferdinand IV, who ruled the Two Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily in the eighteenth century.

Modeled on Versailles, the palace has 1,200 rooms, two-dozen state apartments, and a royal theater, as we toured through a never-ending series of room upon room.

But it’s the promenade out to the formal English gardens that put us back into the infinite, with miles of its parallel lines that connect the palace with the gardens. We walked under the hot August sun for what felt an eternity, and still were only in the middle of these parallel lanes.

And so we decided to abandon this endlessness for a very specific kind of Italian infinite—-hospitality. A young Roman friend of Cad’s was visiting his family who lives in Caserta, and he invited us over for lunch. We went from the cold, empty grandeur of the Naplese past to the warmth of a modest middle-class home.

Mother, father, 2 brothers and a sister all came in and out to say hello to the American monk and his New Yorker friend. We ate a perfect meal of spaghetti Bolognese with a Limoncello chaser accompanied by hilarious conversation between Italian and English. We took our leave and went into the city of Naples for the afternoon.

I first heard of the Bay of Naples, in Ireland. In college my backpacker friend Karen and I stopped in the town of Dalkey enroute to Dublin, and there saw a view of the Irish sea that was widely claimed to rival the beauty of the Bay of Naples. And lo so many years later now, I was looking at the original itself. It is stunning, from many angles.

It was time to get back to Amalfi, and that meant driving on some of that extraordinary coast road in the pitch dark. Taking all those hairpin turns in the dark caused a disorienting sensation. The motion of the turns, punctuated by intermittent oncoming headlights, made me feel like we were in a giant pinball machine.

Switchback after switchback upon dizzying turns started to have a hypnotic effect on us both, more problematic for Cad than me. And there was a slightly sickening sensation that a mistake on Cad’s part would put us over the edge and into the final infinite.

But Cadfael’s skill triumphed as usual, and we lived to travel another day.

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 Mapeel     11/13/2007     Amalfi, Italy, Travels with Cadfael   

Travels with Cadfael: The Amalfi Coast

“I’m near Salerno—do you want to visit?”

It was a variation on a theme from the last several years. Usually Cadfael said, ”I’ll meet you anywhere in the world.” But this time the destination was predetermined, as though we were Calvinists: the Amalfi Coast.

Cad picked me up at the Naples airport, and we drove the highway to Salerno, then down to the extraordinary coast road back to the actual town of Amalfi. It’s an alpha driver’s highway, where you must hug the ancient hewn, towering granite on the hairpins, as the buses come barreling straight on, all against the startling blue sky and sea.

It felt like we drove forever, looking for the Hotel Luna Convento. Finally we came to its distinct tower that sits on the rock that juts out into the water, seen in many photographs of the area. Built around a convent founded by St. Francis of Assisi in 1222, it was a perfect hotel—-white stucco, gorgeous tiled floors, stunning views of the water.

Cad was staying near Salerno, where he was subbing for a priest in a small town. I don’t do well with jet lag, so I took the first day to relax by the pool. In the morning I walked to the dock in town and took the ferry over to Salerno. It’s one of the all-time most beautiful ferry rides there is, as you pull away from the town and can see life miraculously built into the sides of those sheer rocks.

It was charming to see Cad on the other dock, waiting for me. Usually it’s him coming to get me in our travels, and this was a twist in the ritual. Some of the joy of travel with a partner is ritual—his driving, my navigating, reading from literature at times, just being quiet at times. “No, no, they can’t take that away from me . . . “

We visited La Trinite della Cava, a Benedictine monastery founded in 1025. As usual, our private tour took us behind the scenes, and in this case, into the ground. The monastery is enormous, and they were excavating centuries of levels and rooms below it as part of a joint government archaeological project. It was part creepy, part astonishing to descend into the ancient past—-all that physical work to build and create, seeing traces of all those people gone and forgotten, but for the witness of the current people populating the planet, like us,

That night we went to a dream-like restaurant, high in the mountain above the monastery. It was part of a winery, and the tables were outside, under an arbor covered with grape vines. As is often the case in our travels, we were the only nonItalians in the place. The food was light, simple and deeply savory, the wines full and rich, and while this was vacation mode for me, I marveled again, as centuries of people have before me, at the distinct beauty of Italian life. Our senses, so fully engaged, was a powerful contrast to the dust of the day's visit.

I don't know if our lives will leave any discernible mark to be witnessed by the current people 1,000 years from now, but the idea of witness to lives led took on more meaning when we went to Pompeii the next day.

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 Mapeel     10/08/2007     Amalfi, Italy, Travels with Cadfael