The next stop was Naples. I used to fly in there fifty years earlier but never left the airport. One day I was in the operations office busily filling out a flight plan back to Berlin when one of the several workers started singing an aria. Shortly he was joined by another and pretty soon everyone in the office had stopped working and was singing that aria. Another person came in the door and he immediately joined in. When the aria was finished they all went back to work and that was that. This is Italy.
I had studied a bit about Pompeii in anticipation of this trip so there were sights on my list to see. Pompeii was a sea coast, holiday resort area for Romans. The houses there tended to be large and well decorated. In 62 a.d., there was a very powerful earthquake that did a lot of damage. Repairs were made and then, sixteen years later, in 79 a.d., Vesuvius erupted and covered the place in pyroclastic flow (Google that if interested), sealing it up for 2000 years. The population was evacuated in time except for a few who were trapped. Mosaic floors and fresco-ed walls were protected and preserved.
A nearby town named Herculaneum was also covered and more recently discovered and excavated. Herculaneum was a more affluent area than Pompeii. One house covered 18,000 square feet. There were shops and other town features. Barbara's advanced research advised us to tour Herculaneum instead of Pompeii. Just like Rome we avoided the crowds and saw more than we would have in Pompeii where the walking tour groups were reported to be "bumper to bumper" trying to access the artifacts. As we finished our tour it started to rain. Hard. Calling a cab to take us back to the train station we exited the dig.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/episodes/herculaneum-uncovered/108/
Messina is on the island of Sicily and we stopped there. Not much to report on that one. We then spent two days at sea going to Nafpilon, Greece.
Nafpilon is a picturesque beach town with two small but very nice museums. The first museum specialized in ancient musical instruments. Most were stringed of the lyre type in many phases of development leading to our modern stringed instruments. Others included horns, pipes, and percussion. They also has some clever, specialized devices to investigate the physics and mathematics of musical scales which they understood thoroughly.
The other museum was devoted to ancient mechanical devices especially those of Archimedes. Water clocks, steam devices, models of the means of lifting huge weights using only human power, and surveying instruments that they used for measuring the diameter of the earth (apparently they knew what the earth looked like long before Columbus) and other neat stuff. I could have spent all day in there by myself. It is amazing what the ancient Greeks could do.
Next we dropped in on Katakolon where the Olympic games started. Corfu was on the following day. Corfu is an island on the Albanian border in the extreme north-west of Greece and it is a very popular holiday resort area for Europeans.
I used to fly from Berlin to Titograd (Podgorica in Montenegro since the breakup of Yugoslavia) every fourth Friday and on the way we would pass over the walled town of Dubrovnik at 10,000 feet. That was close enough to see that it was a very interesting place. I always wanted to see it at ground level. Then, in 1991, the neighboring Serbs went crazy and trained their artillery on Dubrovnik to spite the Croats. Dubrovnik had no strategic value but the senseless destruction went on, anyway. Help to restore the "Jewel of the Adriatic" came from all over Europe, successfully repairing almost all damage. Most of the red tile roofs look new. The city has grown beyond its wall but everything inside the wall is maintained as it has been for centuries. A nearby wide estuary contains marinas and a shore lined with modern vacation villas. The area is no longer the shipping and commerce center it once was but tourism keeps it healthy now. The Dalmatian coast from Dubrovnik to Split is a boaters playground with 1000 islands that begs me to return.
I had studied a bit about Pompeii in anticipation of this trip so there were sights on my list to see. Pompeii was a sea coast, holiday resort area for Romans. The houses there tended to be large and well decorated. In 62 a.d., there was a very powerful earthquake that did a lot of damage. Repairs were made and then, sixteen years later, in 79 a.d., Vesuvius erupted and covered the place in pyroclastic flow (Google that if interested), sealing it up for 2000 years. The population was evacuated in time except for a few who were trapped. Mosaic floors and fresco-ed walls were protected and preserved.
A nearby town named Herculaneum was also covered and more recently discovered and excavated. Herculaneum was a more affluent area than Pompeii. One house covered 18,000 square feet. There were shops and other town features. Barbara's advanced research advised us to tour Herculaneum instead of Pompeii. Just like Rome we avoided the crowds and saw more than we would have in Pompeii where the walking tour groups were reported to be "bumper to bumper" trying to access the artifacts. As we finished our tour it started to rain. Hard. Calling a cab to take us back to the train station we exited the dig.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/episodes/herculaneum-uncovered/108/
Messina is on the island of Sicily and we stopped there. Not much to report on that one. We then spent two days at sea going to Nafpilon, Greece.
Nafpilon is a picturesque beach town with two small but very nice museums. The first museum specialized in ancient musical instruments. Most were stringed of the lyre type in many phases of development leading to our modern stringed instruments. Others included horns, pipes, and percussion. They also has some clever, specialized devices to investigate the physics and mathematics of musical scales which they understood thoroughly.
The other museum was devoted to ancient mechanical devices especially those of Archimedes. Water clocks, steam devices, models of the means of lifting huge weights using only human power, and surveying instruments that they used for measuring the diameter of the earth (apparently they knew what the earth looked like long before Columbus) and other neat stuff. I could have spent all day in there by myself. It is amazing what the ancient Greeks could do.
Next we dropped in on Katakolon where the Olympic games started. Corfu was on the following day. Corfu is an island on the Albanian border in the extreme north-west of Greece and it is a very popular holiday resort area for Europeans.
I used to fly from Berlin to Titograd (Podgorica in Montenegro since the breakup of Yugoslavia) every fourth Friday and on the way we would pass over the walled town of Dubrovnik at 10,000 feet. That was close enough to see that it was a very interesting place. I always wanted to see it at ground level. Then, in 1991, the neighboring Serbs went crazy and trained their artillery on Dubrovnik to spite the Croats. Dubrovnik had no strategic value but the senseless destruction went on, anyway. Help to restore the "Jewel of the Adriatic" came from all over Europe, successfully repairing almost all damage. Most of the red tile roofs look new. The city has grown beyond its wall but everything inside the wall is maintained as it has been for centuries. A nearby wide estuary contains marinas and a shore lined with modern vacation villas. The area is no longer the shipping and commerce center it once was but tourism keeps it healthy now. The Dalmatian coast from Dubrovnik to Split is a boaters playground with 1000 islands that begs me to return.