Ercolano

I am on the Italian A3 autoroute, navigating some perplexing highway interchanges. Lisa is driving and I am manning Google maps on our way to Ercolano.  We are actually planning on visiting Ercolano's ancient relative which lies buried below the modern town. Herculaneum was obliterated nearly two thousand years ago, during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that also buried nearby Pompeii. We are in a sweet, little white Fiat 500 convertible - it seems that Hertz had run out of bad cars, and we are lucky to have the tiny car when it comes time to work our way through the insane, narrow surface streets of Ercolano.  It takes some adjustments to local traffic conventions, but Lisa soon determines when best to stop, and when it is better to speed up. The challenge comes from cars, delivery trucks, dogs, children leaving school with pastel colored schoolbags, motorbikes, and people stepping off curbs with cell phones to their ears.

Safely to the excavation site, we park in the new underground parking structure and are comforted that other cars are nearby - safety in numbers. It would be bad to loose our luggage, piled in the back seat - too large for the trunk. 

Looking at the site from above, we see layers; from bottom to top, we look closely and see the skeletal remains of the citizens who took refuge in the vaulted storage warehouses at the ancient waterfront. Above them, the buff stone structures of the town extend maybe a quarter mile to the rear of the excavated area. Above all that, on top of the ashfall that buried the landscape, are the modern, more colorful residential areas. In the distance is Vesuvius, which is still active and may someday bury the whole area again. Walking the ruins without a guide, it is easy to make up stories about what we see, but most is easily identified. Public baths are enclosed by vaulted stone ceilings with mosaic floors decorated with nautical gods. Residence walls are richly decorated with frescoes or glass mosaics. Public water fountains grace the streets. Small single rooms facing the street were individual shops, selling goods to the citizens of Rome. Where frescoes or painted surfaces have survived, I am surprised by the bright colors and I imagine how proud the owners might have been to outdo their neighbors.

 When we finally leave this amazing place, we are back on the A3 heading to Ravello. I check my phone and Google Maps and see a road that looks like a bowl of noodles, heading up the hill. Lisa calmly mentions that some advise not taking one of the roads around here because of the terrifying drop off, but we continue. Buses! There are huge buses on this narrow windy road - they take the whole road on the hairpin turns. And trucks! There are trucks the size of small houses on this road. Clearly this is not the road that was warned about because everyone is using it.

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An Unusual Flag

In two days, I am going to a part of the world that flys this strange flag. I look at flags as a way to gain some understanding of a culture, but this is a strange one, and may take some explaining. 

• That remarkable thing on the middle is the triskelion (with the legs), the head of Medusa (with wings), and three ears of wheat (for the fertile land). The symbol has represented the region for thousands of years.
• It is not an independent country, but is a separate autonomous region of a larger country.
• The region has been ruled at various times by the Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Goths, Normans, French, Moors, Byzantines, and Spanish. I’m sure there were others.
• The flag was first adopted upon unification of the island after the Vespers Revolt of 1282, which took the lives of 5,000 French settlers after a French soldier made an unwelcome advance on a woman during the holiday festivities. 
• The flag is bisected diagonally into regions colored red and yellow, representing two primary communities that formed an alliance during the Vespers Revolt. Red - for the current capital of the region, and yellow - representing a what is now a smaller town but was a primary agricultural region at the time.