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Monday December 3rd, 2012: Naples redux!
Bob: The Pacific Princess docked in Naples in the morning, so we had a leisurely breakfast and set off with the minimalist Princess map of Naples to walk up to the Napoli Sistema Museo (English: Naples' Archeological Museum). We both wanted to see some of the statues, mosaics, and paintings that had been looted from Pompei and Herculaneum to round out our picture of what those ancient cities had been like back when they were inhabited. But the map Princess provided was crude and omitted the names of all but the most major streets and also omitted many small side streets all together. I tried to use my GPS, but it could not successfully initialize because we were in an "urban canyon" with tall buildings surrounding narrow streets, which effectively block the satellite signals. The final complication to walking around Naples is the exceedingly idosyncratic and sporadic marking of street names in Italy. We would search high and low for any type of engraved stone, sign, or place name that we could use to fix our street position, but most often that was a complete bust. |
Monika: Instead of trying to see Pompeii on our own, we decided to stay in Naples and see the Archelogical Museum, where most of the more interesting mosaics and statues from Pompeii had ended up. From the ship's map, we knew the museum was mostly up along one of the major streets. How to get to that particular street was not too obvious. And since the map had only a few street names, and the streets had only a few signs, Bob tried the GPS. It took a while to initialize, but did help in the end. Just before we came to the museum, we hit upon a beautiful old building with a nice interior corridor. I have no idea what it was originally, but now it was a bank, and had an ATM in a place where there were not many strangers running around. After yesterday's experience we were a lot more cautious. |
Bob: Still, we managed to fumble around and get uphill to the site of the archeological museum, which turned out to be several floors of a large, old, and very fancy building, at least on the inside. The first floor contained mostly statues, ranging from normal, life-sized statues to enormous busts and statues maybe 15 feet high. Almost all were Roman copies of earlier Greek statues, and dated from about 100 B.C. to 200 A.D. Curiously, the Romans, despite being brilliant engineers and military strategists, did not seem to produce any native statuary or artistic themes of their own. |
Monika: A block farther on was the museum, nothing to look at from the outside, but gorgeous from the inside with high ceilings. The first floor was made up of 5 rooms containing statues found in the house and garden of an Italian count, whose forefathers had collected them in the 15th and 16th century. Most statues were from the 1st century AD but were copies from older Greek statues. The whole thing was very confusing, but the statues were interesting. Most of them were beautiful statues of Greek gods or goddesses, but there were also some statues of legendary heros. |
Bob: The next floor up had mosaics, many of which quite beautiful and almost as detailed as a painting. But there I also learned that the guy heading the removal of the mosaics had not only decided which to preserve for the King, but also taken the liberty of destroying all the rest of them so that no other collector could have one of the mosaics. How arrogant and destructive of irreplacable ancient artwork! I do wish someone would copy the mosaics in some reasonably accurate and cost-effective manner and then re-insert the copies in their original position in the ruins of Pompei. Even a high-quality copy-photograph enlarged to original size and inserted under some matte glass to protect it, would give you some idea what things looked like back in the day. |
Monika: Upstairs was what we were looking for, mosaics that had been taken from the homes of the rich people in Pompeii. Cutting them out of the original walls or floors had of course damaged them, but they were still breathtaking. It is a shame that they are no longer in there original place, but here they have at least a safe environment. |
Bob: Going up to the third floor, we entered a very large and ornately decorated room with celings at least 3 stories high. Since this huge and elaborately adorned upstairs room had previously been a university library, I deduced that the entire building had at one point been a university with classrooms out on the wings. |
Monika: In the middle of the second floor was an enormous room with a high painted ceiling and paintings along the wall. It was truly breath taking and we just sat down to take it all in. I walked over to the far end to take a picture and you can see how small Bob is at the other end. |
Bob: We were both tired and hungry by that point, but we hustled through the third floor section of ancient paintings. Mostly the paintings were frescoes that had been painted on wet plaster, but some paintings had been executed directly on marble slabs or even on wood panels. Canvas or other less durable materials were not apparently used at all. The most curious section was the "erotic materials" or X-rated section of ancient art. All the odd, sexually-graphic material looted from the ruins was consolidated in this room off to one side of the museum. Some of it was the usual ho-hum stuff that persists to this day, but other things were truly odd and unique, such as phallic-shaped oil lamps, which were apparently greatly prized. Huh? Given the vast cultural shifts between ancient Roman culture and modern American culture I would hesitate, however, to call those works "pornographic" because I am not sure how they were really regarded by the people way back when. That said, there are obviously some aspects of ancient Roman culture I really do not understand! |
Monika: Having rested a while, we were ready for the next part, paintings that had been taken from Pompeii. Some paintings had been on plaster, some on wood, and some on tile. It was interesting to see the different media and what had been created on them. At the far end was a last section that was X-rated and not meant for children. This was pornographic art from Pompeii. Yes, we did take some pictures, and no I will not put them in this journal. Suffice it to say, that it was rather interesting. |
Bob: We hoped the museum would have an attached cafe where we could have rested and then continued examining the exhibition halls, but no such luck. Reluctantly we started heading back downhill toward the ship. By this time my left knee was shooting pain up my leg with each step, so I did not enjoy the walk as much as I otherwise would have. I also was getting a bit fed up with jostling with cars and motor scooters on the narrow streets. Sidewalks were half-hazardly marked off on the sides of some sections of the side streets, but so many people parked on those sidewalk areas that they were impossible to use. As a result, we all ended up jostling with each other in the middle of the street. Aggravating. Once back at the ship we had a belated lunch and I rested my throbbing knee until it was time to dress for dinner. We had lost Vickie and Owen from our table for 8, but David, Pat, Chris, and Tina and we had a nice time chatting together. Loathe to do any more walking, I elected to just return to our cabin after dinner and turn in for the night. But before doing so I re-oriented our double bed so that it ran athwartships rather than pointing from bow to stern. The Pacific Princess rolled a lot but didn't pitch noticeably at all, so having our bed pointing across the width of the ship changed the roll into a gentle lift up or let down on the bed rather than a force trying to turn me over. I could now completely relax instead of bracing myself to stay on one side or the other and float gently off to sleep. Much better! |
Monika: But we both were getting hungry and tired. I had hoped there was a small restaurant attached to the museum, as often is the case. But no such luck. So we just picked up some museum replicas of Pompei frescoes printed on hand-made paper at the giftshop and headed back to the ship, luckily it was all downhill from here. On board we had a late lunch and then rested our weary bones. |
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