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Updated: June 18, 2025
We kept, however, close beside him, and watched him narrowly, without betraying any symptom of apprehension; and at length, to our great relief, we gained the open road. The royal villa of Portici lies about four "miglia" from Naples, and we made an excursion thither by railway. Both the palace and the gardens are handsome, and of considerable size. Thence we proceeded to Resina.
You may have at any restaurant a smaller morsel than an ox or even an ox's shoulder; and as to ladies' finery, there is no article de Paris, no indispensable inutility, no crinoline, hoop, or cage, of impossible materials, shape, and dimensions, which you may not find under the Portici, or in Vianuova, a facility of which the Turinese beauties give themselves the benefit rather freely.
The peasants, inhabitants of the village, who had probably never heard of Herculaneum, were somewhat surprised at their discovery. About the same time, in a pit in the town of Portici, a similar passage underground was discovered, and, by orders of the King of Naples, workmen were employed to dig away the earth, and clear the passage.
For Europe wants an opera which for our new revolutionary epoch will be what "La Muette de Portici" was for the July revolution, and "Rienzi" is conceived and written for those conditions. If you succeed in introducing into it a slight element of relief, were it only by means of stage machinery or of the ballet, success is certain.
Villa and gardens still remain, but monarchs have ceased to visit Portici since the days of Bomba, and the old royal demesne has been turned into an agricultural college. Adjoining and practically forming part of Portici is the town of Resina, which preserves almost intact the old classical name of Retina that it bore in the distant days when it served as the port of Herculaneum.
To visit Herculaneum it is necessary for us to descend some seventy to a hundred feet into the depths of the earth, passing more than one layer of ancient lava, for Resina and Portici themselves are but modern editions of former towns that have been engulfed in the course of ages.
This is not an uncommon circumstance: Most of the stones used in the palaces of Portici had been employed more than two thousand years before in structures raised by the ancient Romans or Greek colonists; and it is not a little remarkable that the buildings of Herculaneum, a town covered with ashes, tufa, and lava, from the first recorded eruption of Vesuvius more than seventeen hundred years ago, should have been constructed of volcanic materials produced by some antecedent igneous action of the mountain in times beyond the reach of history; and it is still more remarkable that men should have gone on for so many ages making erections in spots where their works have been so often destroyed, inattentive to the voice of time or the warnings of nature.
The king was then at Portici with his Court, and our curiosity attracting us we were witnesses of a most singular spectacle. The king was only nineteen and loved all kinds of frolics. He conceived a desire to be tossed in a blanket! Probably few crowned heads have wished to imitate Sancho Panza in this manner.
Though Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabiae lie buried beneath the mud and ashes belched out of the mouth of Vesuvius, the villages of Portici and Revina, Torre del Greco and Torre del Annunziata have taken their place, and a large population, cheerful and prosperous, flourishes around the disturbed mountain and over the district of which it is the somewhat untrustworthy safety-valve.
Suppose we had discovered two buried cities at the foot of Vesuvius, immediately superimposed upon each other, with a great mass of tuff and lava intervening, just as Portici and Resina, if now covered with ashes, would overlie Herculaneum.
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