Herculaneum and Romans

ITALY:2002

HERCULANEUM

To explore it all would take a day or two, even though its a fraction of the size of Pompeii, so our advice is to take a tour, and just see what you can. The tour was excellent and in no way spoilt the independence of being able to poke around on our own.

It's just as if the town is still alive, the difference being the streets of today throng with modern tourists, rather than toga wearing Romans.

Anyone with a child at school doing Romans would find a visit to Herculaneum of great help to their child.

In a child's mind history would come alive and the streets would once more fill with the bustle of Roman life.

You can freely take photographs anywhere, both inside and outside, and use flash. From a conservation point of view, the use of flash may need to be restricted one day in the future.

Herculaneum was residential, as opposed to Pompeii which was commercial.

Herculaneum is far more intimate than Pompeii and has examples of preserved wooden features. Where Pompeii was buried under volcanic ash and stone debris, Herculaneum was buried by a tide of scalding volcanic mud, so things are preserved differently than in Pompeii.

When walking in Herculaneum or Pompeii I was mesmerized by the play of sunlight on the cobbles - it must have been just the same all those years ago, perhaps some Roman in an idle interlude may have admired the shine on the cobbles, maybe the exact cobble I was looking at.folks living there today object to having

Heraculaneum sits in an excavated hole, much of it remains hidden under the modern town that is adjacent to it....as folks living there today object to having their homes demolished to dig up old Romans, much modern archeology is done by underground tunneling.

To me it`s all so mind-blowing, real time travel.