Jazz Among the Ruins

A couple of weeks ago, there was a jazz festival here, held in a few different tourist sites around Pozzuoli. Concerts were held every night, most in the Solfatara (which is that stinky place I wrote about back in September 2010). Since I vowed never to return to the Solfatara, those concerts were out for me. But one was allegedly held in the Baia Terme Archaeological Park, my favorite ruins in our immediate neighborhood. This is the place that is an old Roman spa complex and villa, and so lacking in visitors that most visits, I've had the complete complex to myself. There is an old swimming pool, a fabulous, domed spa, tunnels heading down into the ground, and a wonderful view of Baia and the Bay of Pozzuoli beyond. Naturally, I was very excited to attend a jazz concert there. I'd made arrangements to go with new friends, who know the festival organizers. They said the concerts always start late, so we didn't rush and eventually arrived to the venue about 30 minutes after the start time...and the venue was completely dark with a chained gate locking it up tight. Okay, this is Italy - maybe they're starting really late. We headed down the street to a popular bar for drinks and snacks. An hour went by and other friends showed up. As it turned out, the venue was printed wrong on the flyer. Possibly the concert was now over, but with good drinks and good company, the evening carried on anyway.

Saturday night was the final concert of the festival - my last chance. Nathan was out of town, but a co-worker couple of his had expressed an interest in going - this concert was at the Temple of Neptune, a ruin that is usually closed to visit, but does have a soccer field attached to it where the local kids play. I'd never even heard of this ruin, so I was quite excited to see something new. Once again, we arrived a little late in hopes we'd get there as the concert was starting. It seems that when my friend told me the concerts don't ever start on time, he was not exaggerating. The 8:00 concert started about 9:25. But what was even funnier is that the venue didn't even fill up until about 9:15 or so. I was wondering if this was a chicken and egg riddle - Did the concert start late, so no one showed up on time...or did no one show up on time, so the concert started late? Which came first? But, as my friend said, "It's Italy." And remember...now I sort of smile at that instead of doing internet searches for cheap flights back to the U.S. Regardless of the start time, the evening was absolutely lovely. A cool breeze had blown away the humidity, our "early" arrival landed us seats in the back where there were cushioned chairs around tables, the better to rest our glasses of a local wine, and when the concert eventually started, we were able to chat quietly with a background of live jazz filling our ears. The night ended perfectly with a visit to a neighborhood pizzeria, where I ordered some of the best pasta I've eaten in Naples. Unfortunately for my friends, they and the rest of the neighborhood had ordered pizza, which took about an hour to come out - highly unusual, here, but the pizzeria was hopping. At midnight, families were still pouring in - families, as in Mama, Papa, Nonna (grandmother), and at least two young children. At midnight. It really is different here.

Perfect Summer Day in Italy

Yesterday was as near a perfect day as I've had this summer. I headed back to the beach with a friend who lives down the street. We set up our chairs and umbrella, pulled out water, snacks, and books, then promptly set to the hard job of relaxing on the beach. Our view took in the Baia Castle up on the nearest cliff, then on to Capo Miseno, that famed home of the Roman fleet at the time of Pompeii's eruption, and off in the distance, Capri was visible in the clear air. When time for a cool down swim arrived, I donned snorkel gear, and we set off for a nearby buoy. Where the buoy floats was once dry land, and with this particular stretch of the coastline being a former hotbed of vacation villas for wealthy Romans, under the waters lie the ruins. There are more watery ruins down the road in Baia, but those are for divers. The Arco Felice bits lie just off the beach where we were set up and the water is so shallow that in a couple of places, had I put down my legs, I would have been standing on an old, villa wall. The only villa we found during this swim was not one that had a mosaic floor, although those are out there, too. This one did have several columns, creepy with the algae covering up their former glory. One toppled column was not covered with marine life, so it's brick facing was clear. In other places, the columns just rose up out of the sand bed, with the walls of the villa surrounding them.

I'm always a little wary when I put on a snorkel. I'm not completely comfortable in the water, and for me, the unknown can sometimes be a good thing. I'm not sure I actually want to know what creatures are swimming around me. As with everything else in my new life, things are different here! There is no marine life. Nada. Just around the villa, I was thankful to finally see a few small, colorful fish - I suppose due to the marine growth on the ruins providing food. That made me feel a little better, but I've never snorkeled a place that just had nothing going on. Is it water pollution? Just a fact of no food = no creatures? Come to think of it, I now recall a headline from a couple of weeks ago in Italian, meaning I paid little attention to it. It was a news banner flashing across my email home page with the words "bianca" (white) and "Naples" in it and a picture of a shark. Perhaps I should have paid closer attention. This seems like it could have been important now that I'm actually swimming in these waters...okay, I've just done a Google search on the matter and found nothing. Although apparently some company named Evinrude is now distributing something called the White Shark line in Italy - see, that headline I read could have said anything. That's why I just count on ignorance and prayer to stay safe here.

Following a few hours under the summer sun and sporting a lovely stretch of skin that my sunblock spray missed, we packed it in and headed to our respective homes. Since sitting in the sun all day is hard work, I had no desire to cook dinner. As it turns out, a J-O-B. is actually hard work, so Nathan, too, was missing a desire to cook. He made the most lovely suggestion for dinner. You might think it was the words, "Let's eat out." That, however, is not the relaxing, easy way out - dinner out can be complicated, and very long, unless it's pizza. Since we're just off our diets, we're trying to spend weeknights with more healthy options. Off we went to Gennaro's, where we picked up prosciutto, salami, mozzarella di bufala, fontina cheese, and a large loaf of bread. Back home, adding in some olives and tomatoes and fresh basil to our spread along with glasses of wine, and we enjoyed my favorite, Italian dinner of all. And best of all, while we were at Gennaro's, we also stopped in to the gelateria for dessert first - a cone of biscotti gelato, and the day was perfect!

Mom's Visit

While I have taken my mom to some of the same places we've taken our other guests, like downtown Naples, Herculaneum, and Positano, we've also done some things new to me as well. Such as finally getting Ischia right (see previous post) and finally visiting the Baia Castle, home to an Archaeological Museum. The Baia Castle was a biggie to visit because we can see it from our house. And yet, nine months in this country with no visit to the museum that's almost literally in my backyard.

Baia was a big deal among the Roman emperor crowd. They had parties that would have put 1980s Hollywood bashes to shame. And they partied in villas that once lined the shore, but now provide some supposedly fascinating diving since they're all underwater after years of the earth shifting in this volcanic region. The museum holds some of the things brought up from those villas, but most of the exhibits we saw were treasures found at the Cuma settlement and other artifacts from the Campi Flegrei region. And yet again, I've seen how underutilized these amazing archaeological areas are. While there was a large crowd of schoolkids on a field trip, other than that group, Mom and I were it for visitors. We headed to a different floor than the kids and had the entire museum to ourselves. The exhibits have well done, English translations, they show a variety of ancient life (from a bit of jewelry to statues to funerary urns and beyond), and they even have a cast of an Egyptian wadi (like a grotto in the desert near water) that is home to about 80 pieces of early graffiti (dating to about 4th century BC). Why would that be in a somewhat obscure museum on a small peninsula in Italy? Because the oldest graffiti was done by the freed slave of one of Pozzuoli's wealthy residents, and he apparently discovered, by happenstance, a really awesome trade route between Ceylon and Aden. This was a big deal, and so, his graffiti lives on. So next time you see, carved into a wall, "John + Lara were here, 2gether 4ever" with a big heart around it, don't be so quick to turn up your nose. One day, that might be important.

Roman road sign that means "River ahead"

In other news, we visited Herculaneum (Ercolano), and I took loads more pics of the frescoes so I can begin creating my "Frescoes of Ercolano" album. While I enjoyed seeing Pompeii's frescoes in the Naples Archaeological Museum, there is really nothing like seeing frescoes and mosaics where they belong. Being able to walk on the same mosaic floor or sit in a house and stare at the fresco it's owner commissioned two millenia ago allows us to get a unique window into their lives and stories. We also took a daytrip to Positano, down on the Amalfi Coast. I love Positano in the off season, but it's even better now. We've had limited and expensive food options on our prior trips, but now, charming cafes are open all over the place, and all the shops are going full speed. We'd not left enough time to lounge about on the beach - maybe next week.

Mom on the Amalfi Coast

Quiet Days

After our two days of pounding the Venetian cobblestones, we decided to spend the last two days of Mike and Katrina's vacation resting and staying near home. We spent much of our time reading, writing, and sleeping in the warm, lemon-scented Glass House, which is always a nice way to pass the time.

In the interest of one last site visit, we drove the quick, 5-minute drive to the Baia Archaeological Park. I visited this place a few months ago, on a quiet day while Nathan was out of town. It's a little known, lovely place to see ruins of old villas and thermal complexes completely alone. There are no other tourists. Both times I visited, there was a sum total of about four other people walking around this huge area - much different from our visit to the Roman Forum the following day (coming in a future post).

Waiting for discovery

This visit, however, I was armed with the most fantastic guidebook specific to our region - Campi Flegrei, Guide of Discovery to the Lands of Fire by Massimo D'Antonio. Using this, we could see that the big hole in the ground really was once a swimming pool, we could see the changing rooms for the thermal complex, we could know that the domed Temple of Mercury (the swimming pool built a hundred years before the Pantheon in Rome) is actually the oldest known example of a round cupola. We walked around, sometimes following dark tunnels into the terrace below, sometimes pausing to take in a vista that included the Temple of Venus, set right into the nearby neighborhood, the Baia Castle atop it's cliff, the Bays of Pozzuoli and Naples, Capri in the distance, and Mount Vesuvius hovering over the mainland, a view that we could imagine those bathers so long ago enjoying as they walked upon mosaic floors, from sauna to warm pool to cold pool.

Around Our House

I think I used up all of my energy in our first two months here. A friend invited me to her house for dinner last night, and while we were discussing living in Italy, I realized that we've now lived in our house for two weeks. In that time, my excursions to explore our neighborhood have consisted of three dinners out (including the Chinese restaurant!), one short drive to a little beach area called Capo Miseno, and a visit to the Baia Archeological Park, which I did on Sunday. That's it. I have not gone out for gelato (horror of horrors), I have not walked around the nearby lake, I have not gone to the supermercato (grocery store), I have not walked around the shopping area in the next village over, I have not explored any of the great ruins we have within a 5-10 minute drive from our house, other than my Sunday excursion. It's shameful, really. But I wanted to write just a little about our area.

We live in the area of Campi Flegrei (in English, called the Phlegraean Fields). It's home to thousand years old ruins, volcanic craters, a place where myths were born and the Sybils offered up their oracles. Amazing wines grow on it's hills, and those hills abound with Greek and Roman ruins, the oldest of which pre-dates Christ by about five more centuries. We don't really live in a village. I call it a roundabout (a traffic circle) because really, we're located in between two smart looking, seaside villages. Our little roundabout hosts a gelateria, a newspaper stand, a salumeria (fancy 7-11), macelleria (butcher), tabacchi (guess what that is), and several restaurants. Oh, and my favorite, a "beauty farm." The roundabout and these lovely places are on a small lake which was once a hotspot among the wealthy Romans. Many of their villas are either long gone or under the sea...which leads to some disturbing information. We live on the slopes of a place called Monte Nuovo (new mountain), so called because the entire mountain appeared in one week in 1538! This is not a joke. A volcano erupted, and in the ensuing aftermath, this mountain was formed. Nathan finds it "cool" that witnesses actually watched a mountain form 500 years ago; I find it terrifying. Also nearby is what I hope will become a favorite: Terme Stufe di Nerone. Thermal baths. In the 1960s, two brothers re-discovered thermal baths and grottos located among some Roman ruins on land they inherited from their mother. They created a modern complex to "take the waters," have massages, etc. I look forward to trying it out!

The Archeological Park of Baia is a lovely area with lots of ruins to explore. In places, columns and pedastals are just sort of toppled over. One of my favorite things was the most unassuming - as I walked down a dirt path and found about five rows of mosaic tiles poking up from the dirt, the remains of an old floor taking its last gasp before time covers it completely. One of the men working at the site was generous enough to share tidbits of info with me, which increased my enjoyment of the site immensely. Especially because we conversed in Italian. His sentences were long and fluid, while mine were punctuated with lots of pauses and the vocabulary of a two year old, but still, it's progress. He showed me a little area I would have completely missed, which is an itty, bitty room that used to be a sauna. A culvert in the floor allowed the steaming water to pass through, and the ceiling still had the carvings of the Romans decorating it.

There is also a huge, domed structure, called a temple, but what I've learned is that a few hundred years back, when lots of these sorts of things were "found," folks labeled anything they weren't sure about a temple. Nowadays, there are a few more ideas about the varying purposes of structures, but the temple names have stuck. So the Temple of Mercury is built just as the Pantheon in Rome was built (Thomas Jefferson based his design of UVA's Rotunda on the Pantheon), only this one in Baia was built 100 years earlier. It is eerie to visit because you enter through a short, stone tunnel, and step out onto a metal walkway. After you've stepped out, you realize there is water about 2 inches below this metal walkway - I'm a child of the 70s/80s, so I just can't help but say this - it was a "Goonies" moment. As with so many fascinating ruins here, they are edged with modern (sort of) buildings edging them. What sorts of treasures and history lie beneath these apartment buildings and houses?

 

Can you make out the remains of the frescoes?