Entire History of Roman Britain (55 BC - 410 AD)

I thought this was a very good summary of Roman Britain, with all you need to know if you haven't got a few years to read up on the subject:

Naples

On our trip to Italy we had decided to stay in Naples and make a day trip to Pompeii. A bit of a mistake that as it turns out we should have done things the other way around - stay near Pompeii and take a day trip to Naples.

Why? Naples is a dirty, grubby city, full of crime. It's not a nice place. We took a taxi ride once, from the outside the car looked like a taxi, but inside the cab it was just managing to hang together. The seatbelts didn't work and literally every surface was bashed, dinged, completely worn out. I've never seen any car like it and certainly no taxi. The driver was a happy enough chap, like most Italians he'd learned to accept his fate.

We didn't get to see Herculaneum. A decision had to be made as we ran out of time and I read somewhere that Herculaneum had been stripped of anything interesting. That must be right as our visit to the National Archaeological Museum in Naples seemed to confirm it. What we could read in English often provided the note 'from Herculaneum' or some such. And that English is sporadic at best, at some point all English just evaporated. Everywhere was like that in Italy, they make a half-baked attempt to explain things (and please don't email me saying I should learn Italian, I'm quite happy to learn some, but I'll make a concerted effort when Italy start winning wars <insert sound of crickets chirping>).

The museum in Naples is really the only place worth visiting. We saw the Alexander Mosaic. Kind of Yay, it's not that impressive really. The Numismatics room was closed so we couldn't see the Augustus gold coin or medallion. I believe that these random shut-downs occur all the time and so be warned, the very thing you went to see may be unavailable on that day. Good luck trying to find out if it is (available that is).

Verdict on Naples: it is hard to believe this place is the third largest city in Italy. Its much vaunted pizza is worse than all other pizza in Italy. The world heritage inner city is a dark featureless place and presents an ideal location for muggings. I'm sure you'll be mugged at some point if you stay there too long as criminality appears widespread. And I'm not talking about refugees and migrants. They're mostly well behaved and clean, they're too concentrated on surviving to be worried about committing crime. No, the lowlifes will be locals I'm sure.

Some areas of Naples are complete no-goes after dark. You wade almost ankle deep in blood, vomit, broken teeth, and animal and human faeces (intentional exaggeration to make the point). These places are really bad and they're everywhere. The best thing that could happen to Naples is it gets bulldozed quick smart and then rebuilt modern and fresh.

Naples has a sort-of Chinatown, but they serve up spaghetti as noodle. So that wonton noodle soup is wonton spaghetti soup. Just so you know, you know?

Pompeii

For most of January 2019 I have been in Italy travelling around. Over the next few days and weeks I'll report on my experiences and the impressions I formed of the people and places. Not all of this is going to be positive, be warned.

I was travelling with my wife and youngest daughter. This was going to be a rail trip, travelling between cities on the Italian rail system which I must say functions quite adequately as a fairly fast system, but nothing like that of Japan. Few can match the speed and efficiency of Japan.

For me, the ruins at Pompeii were near the top of my list of places to visit. I ended up disappointed and I can safely say this is a place to avoid unless you are absolutely obsessed with everything Roman and just have to go there.

We stayed in Naples, which is another city worth avoiding, but more about that place later. Getting to Pompeii turned out to be a mission. We wanted to get to Pompeii by rail and set out in the morning, we found out the hard way how to do this: go to Napoli Garribaldi station which is on a lower level of the central railway station, and take the heavily tagged, ugly and uncomfortable trains called the Circumvesuviana Napoli to Sorrento line. Make sure to get on the train indicated on the electronic signboard - (Pompei Scavi), in parentheses after the displayed final destination. This train will take you to the excavations themselves, and right at the entrance gate to the site, and not to Pompei city which is farther away. You can see the city from the hill Pompeii sits on, so it's not that far away but make every effort to be on the right train. Here's what that view looks like:

Our story about this is somewhat convoluted. Leaving our hotel thinking it would be easy to just walk to the train station (okay, it was me who thought this, I'll never live it down), I got us badly lost. Unbeknownst to us at the time we ended up at a station on the correct line, one stop closer to Pompeii (the station was called via Gianturco), but not knowing this we headed on a train back to Napoli Garribaldi. Note, at this stage we hadn't bought a ticket as this via Gianturco place had no ticketing at all. Strange indeed. We were soon joined on the platform by a group of young Spanish people, apparently they'd got off the train they were on as they'd found it wasn't going to Pompeii, so now they were on our platform looking to head back to Naples in order to start their journey again. You'd be right in thinking that a lot of people get lost on their way to Pompeii (as an aside, maybe it's best to stay at modern Pompei city or its surrounds, don't try to stay in Naples and make the day trip to Pompeii Scavi, just saying).

At Naples we approached an attendant and were promptly given some kind of fine for not having a ticket but being within the system. After much gesticulation he found out we were trying to get to Pompeii, and weren't coming from Pompeii. He refunded our money and waved us away. After some wandering around we found ourselves on the platform for Pompeii Scavi.

This didn't go as planned as an Englishman who thought he knew everything informed us the very next train was going to Pompeii Scavi. It turned out he only had half the information he needed, at best. We got on this train, and just past via Gianturco (that one again, we'd just come from there with the young Spanish speakers) a very nice Italian gentleman started telling us where we needed to be. We didn't understand a word of what he said but someone else on the train knew English and interpreted, telling us we needed to get off at the next station and take the train coming after this one, that would get us to Pompeii Scavi. On our travels we found Italians to be very helpful like this.

So we got off the train at the next station to see the Englishman there too, I avoided talking to him as I didn't want a Commonwealth incident in Italy, we were meant to be Allies after all.

So at last we were on the train to Pompeii. Yay. Then some hustlers boarded the train and began playing loud music, beating drums and shaking tambourines. I guessed they wanted us to pay to make them go away, but at the next station they were thrown off. Given the patience the locals had toward this din, my guess is they're used to it. The locals seemed amused at my appalled reaction. Do not pay these so-called entertainers anything (the noise-making hustlers that is).

Arriving at the site, there was no ticket check at the station exit and so we had just managed to travel to Pompei Scavi for free (going home at the end of the day we bought tickets at the ticket window and paid about 50% more for the privilege, the price displayed on the actual ticket showed less than we'd just paid). We were then constantly berated by more hustlers and swindlers just outside the main gates. Very low class and not a good first impression.

The cost to get in to Pompeii? 30 Euro, my wife and I had to pay, the child was free. Was this a good deal? No it wasn't, that was way too expensive. We collected our free map, which turned out to be useless as it contained such little information and virtually no English. Once on site, there is very little English and next to no information about what is what. So we wandered around all day, me being guide as it turns out I actually know what I'm talking about.

Were there highlights of this day exploring Pompeii? Yes, I enjoyed the Villa dei Misteri. I've looked around for a good map of the site to indicate where this house sits and found this link:
http://www.tourpompei.com/alex/sites/default/files/Itinerary_3_forkids_0.jpg

The Villa is illustrated at the top left of the above map, outside the city walls. What is good about this place is it is intact and you can see the art still on the inside walls of the house. No-one knew about this place until the twentieth century, so it hasn't been looted.

My suggestion; do not leave it too late to visit the Villa dei Misteri. It's a walk away from the main site, and knowing this I had it first on my list. When approaching the house which is a walk up and then down a small hill adjacent to Pompeii, a nice man called out from the house, were we English? No, I replied, New Zealand. He knew where this was; we found Italians generally knew where New Zealand was and they also knew Italy always lost to the All Blacks. They tell us that, we would never mention it of course.

Here are some pics from inside the Villa:

It turned out this nice gentleman was touting for his neighbouring family restaurant run by his mother. He proudly informed us that Morgan Freeman had eaten there. The place is called Bacco e Arianna. Yes, another hustle, but a good one as he sold us custom made takeaway sandwiches that were too big for us to finish, half the price of sandwiches selling on site that are a third the size.

A couple of photo's, what the restaurant looks inside the courtyard, and what those sandwiches looked like:

(This is the street view of the establishment:
 https://www.google.co.nz/maps/@40.7531859,14.4773121,3a,60y,13.6h,86.63t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sL_Ai38goZ0ytz31kVWqBZg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 )

See the white hut at the end there? That's some kind of backdoor entry to Pompeii, and the turnstile was always open. The two guards just waved us through, one saying he'd remember us when coming back from the restaurant, but they didn't notice or check when we returned. Very Italian all this, as was the Mum making those sandwiches. Like some kind of scene from a movie. I must say they had a brilliant crop of Mandarins coming on there, diners can sit outdoors underneath the trees while they eat.

You may have picked up on my thinking here. If you're clever and scout around, you could easily get into Pompeii for free. They deserve to have this happen as the site is so badly managed. One of the major secrets is the museum up the back and next door to the amphitheatre, it appears devoted to Etruscan and Samnite stuff. There was nothing promoting this museum earlier, and by the time we found it we were running out of time. The amphitheatre was a waste of time and polluted with Pink Floyd blaring from below. As the young one pointed out, those vibrations are probably breaking down the structure. Message: leave Pink Floyd out, I don't care if they played there, they're irrelevant, pretentious twits.

While the Villa dei Misteri is very impressive, it's not where I could picture myself living. No, my favourite house was the sunken garden place, which funnily enough is toward the Villa in terms of direction (to the left of the Forum as you look at it upon entering from the main gate). This is the sunken garden house:

Walking back to the main gate my daughter asked if the pavement we were walking on was 2,000 years old. No, I could safely say, it was probably laid last week. A lot of the site was like that, new plaster, recent pavement, new roofs. Give the place to Disney to manage, they'd do the job properly.

Oh and one last thing; the Romans weren't stupid. Stupid people would have rutted roads impossible to use. Those stones in the surface of the city streets, those cracks would have been filled with sand. How do I know this? Very few of the stones were broken at the edges. Wagon wheels get stuck in cracks and break, or they break off the edges of the paver. But more prevalent were wheel ruts in the stone itself., meaning the wheels were running over an even surface.

Fill those cracks with sand and make the site easy to walk around, like it would've been back in the day. The other benefit (which the Romans knew about) is the sand locks up the paving stones, and they're less likely to move around plus the sand soaks up animal waste and also glues everything together. The site management have gone out of their way to make the site difficult to navigate, the streets could put your back out they're that bad.

Here's what I'm talking about:

Look at the road itself, nicely worn stones, those cracks would have been filled with sand to make the road surface flush. If they didn't do this all those stones would be broken away at the edges, and back in the day wagons would be breaking axles and wheels, and they'd possibly hit stepping stones used for crossing the street by failing to make clearance.

This looks better, more like this:

Slavery: Roman Empire

Something I feel is often overlooked about the institution of slavery during the Roman Empire, is that it worked as a social filter. More recent slavery failed as it worked the opposite way, keeping people in slavery generation after generation.

What do I mean by social filter? The institution funnelled people from the outside, into becoming civilised. Now I'm grossly exaggerating of course, see a Wikipedia article below for a more detailed description. However I think my generalisation still holds.

I use an example, the instance is Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars. When a region is conquered he takes a certain number as slaves. Wholesalers followed the army and they would take the slaves and sell them. This would have had two effects, the first being the conquered get to rid themselves of their troublemakers and underclass (that's because they had a say in who got enslaved). It also kept everyone left that wasn't enslaved behaving nicely.

Then the slaves once taken supported the Roman economy by conducting mostly menial tasks (though some were highly skilled and others were treated brutally in the mines, they are the exception not the rule) and they then had the chance to become free and a Roman citizen of low rank. This wasn't just a rare occurrence, laws had to be passed stopping the rapid freeing of slaves, it became so commonplace. And slaves were generally looked after with laws evolving to protect them from mistreatment. Some were expelled from Rome for being too dangerous, but most led productive lives after being freed, including those expelled.

The social filter remained effective for longer than the period of enslavement as freed slaves were connected to their former owners who became the freed slaves patron. They had obligations to one another. And critically, the children of freed slaves became Roman citizens without restriction. 

For a good intro to Roman slavery see the following Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome

And a plug for my novel Dana Point, which has the Herculean society biochemically ranked. Status is determined by blood test at birth but individuals can rise by achievement. If they commit a crime they're busted back to the rank they were born with. It's the way I see a fully advanced Roman society evolving if it was allowed to.