Our wonderful program director, Elizabeth, planned another "educational field trip" for our group, this time to Pompeii, Herculaneum, Ischia, and Naples. We were all very excited to have another weekend planned and paid for us. Once again, it really made me appreciate doing all of these studies in Italy. While school may be extremely stressful and crazy, it's such a blessing to be able to hop on a train or walk down the street to a museum and see the art I just studied in person.
We all woke up really early and were already on our way to the train station at 6:10 AM. We all made it on time and quickly settled in. Most people went back to sleep, since we had a three hour train ride until Naples. But since I had two midterms the next week, I decided to type out all of the Italian tenses we had learned for the exam to get some studying in, knowing that I would not want to the rest of the weekend. After we arrived, we hopped onto a bus and headed for Pompeii. When we arrived and could kind of see some of the ruins, it really hit me. After all that I had learned in my Latin I class at Turpin and Humanities 111 class at Pepperdine, I was finally at Pompeii. As terrible of a tragedy as the eruption was, it is amazing how well preserved everything is. It was so sad to see the plaster molds of the people in the positions they were in when they died.
We walked on towards the amphitheater, which had a section of the original seating that was separated for the different classes of people. After a "fight" in the amphitheater, we went over to the main streets of town. One thing that I had always heard about and seen pictures of was the stepping stones that the people had used to cross the streets. The streets were for sewage and carriages to ride through; the people would not have wanted to walk in the streets, but on the sidewalks. So in order to cross the streets, there were large stepping stones every so often. It was very interesting to see the homes, as the large ones of the wealthy were intermixed among the small ones of the poor. The streets were very narrow, and even though the buildings are not as tall as they used to be, it was a little claustrophobic. But we came to the town center, where there was a big open forum. Different governmental buildings surrounded this area. Pompeii seemed to be a very community-oriented town. Everything was very close together, and it was very self-sufficient. In religion class, we talked about what their world view might have been. Most of us thought that they were only concerned with their town, and that they did not travel, or have the need to travel. Another part of their world view that we discussed was seen through their artwork. They had art, in some form, everywhere. There streets had symbols to ward off evil spirits, their homes were not decorated for style and color but their walls were covered with pagan and mystical stories that represented their beliefs, and they had paintings that represented their daily life. On of the buildings we entered was a brothel. Around the ceiling, there were bits of paintings left that told the story of the building and what occurred there. We entered a large villa, called the House of Mysteries. One of the rooms with the most well conserved wall paintings had the depiction of a cult ceremony.
After lunch and fresh squeezed lemonade (the Amalfi Coast lemons are huge!), we went to Herculaneum. This was much smaller than Pompeii, and we were surprised that 5,000 people had inhabited the town. One interesting place that we saw in Herculaneum were the baths. They had separate ones for the males and females, and had specially designed ceilings to aid in the heating and cooling of the rooms. After our visit here, we went to the port of Naples, and took a ferry to the island of Ischia. That night, we all went out to a pizza dinner, but the restaurant was rather rude. For some of us, it took nearly three hours to get our dinner. Exhausted after a long day, we went back to the hotel to rest up for the next day at the thermal gardens.
On our second day, we went to the Poseidon Thermal Gardens, about an hour away from our hotel. We were there on the last day of the season. We arrived early in the morning so that we could have an entire day there. The facilities were beautiful, covered with flowers and trees, right on the beach, and built into the mountainside. Courtney and I started with our first round of the baths, beginning in the 30 degree Celsius one. The water was a little on the cold side, but it was also freezing outside. After twenty-five minutes, we moved over to the 32 degree Celsius bath. This one was a little bit warmer, and it had underwater back massage jets! We were in this bath for 15 minutes. The next bath was 34 degrees Celsius. This is called the Ischia bath, and it is the largest and most popular. It was nice to finally be in a warm and larger pool, so we stayed in that one for longer than the "recommended" time frame. The next
bath was 36 degrees Celsius. It was nice and warm, but it did not have any benches, so we left right after our fifteen minutes were up. The next bath, 38 degrees Celsius, was our favorite. It was the perfect temperature, had nice benches, and looked over the entire Poseidon facilities and the ocean. The view was amazing. After spending time here, we moved over to the 40 - 15 degrees Celsius baths. First, we entered the 40 degree bath for three minutes. We then immediately went to the small fifteen degree Celsius bath to "cool off" for about fifteen seconds. But it was way too cold and I was never able to go any deeper than my waist, and immediately ran out afterwards and hopped back into the hot pool. Next, we did the Japanese foot bath, which is basically walking on rocks, alternating between hot and cold water.
After a nice lunch on the beach, we did the baths again. We tried to do the sauna, but I had to leave immediately because I felt like I could not breathe and was very claustrophobic. We just spent the rest of the day relaxing and laying out and hanging out in the 40 degree baths. We left just after watching a beautiful sunset. Dinner that night was on our own, and the service was much better because it was just a small group of us.
Sunday morning, we headed back to Naples and went to the Archeological Museum. It was very interesting to see after having gone to Pompeii and Herculaneum. Our tour guide kept insisting the nothing in the Renaissance was new and that it had all already but thought of. Overall, it was a very fun weekend. The only problem that was looming in the back of our minds was that we had both a humanities and an Italian exam the next week.
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