"An entirely different experience." a Herculaneum Travel Page by leics

I'd lost a day of my trip due to the first officer being taken ill over the Alps (aaaaargh!). I'd been to Pompeii for 5 hours, and thought I could just manage Herculaneum too, at the end of the afternoon.

So I hopped onto the Circumvesuviana train, walked down the hill from the station........and really rather wished I'd allowed myself time for a longer visit, and that I wasn't already tired. Next time, Herculaneum will get the time it deserves from me.

It's a much smaller site than Pompeii, of course, much of it still lying underneath modern Ercolano (not a pretty place) and thus unexcavatable. But what I had not fully realised, despite many years of reading and programme-watching, was the huge difference in preservation between the two sites. Herculaneum was covered by a slow-moving flow of rock and mud (its inhabitants killed by super-heated gases from the eruption) which created an anaerobic environment, allowing organic materials to survive as well as the upper floors of buildings.

So here are iron window frames, and wooden steps (charred black, but still in situ), and in the museums lie preserved fabrics and furniture. The streets are narrower, the buildings taller, mow wall-paintings and better-preserved ones: the whole site seems more 'alive' than Pompeii in some strange way.

Knowing that the deep excavation one crosses to enter the site was originally the beach is strange. Knowing that more than 300 skeletons were escavated there in 1980, people whose last moments had been spent desperately trying to escape, brings home the terror they must have experienced in those last moments.

There are still ongoing excavations on the site, as well as renovations and restorations, so not all of it is accessible (at least, not when I visited). Two or three hours would allow a thorough investigation, but my hour and a half felt a bit rushed (I had to leave at closing time, and did not want to).