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Updated: June 2, 2025
Clarence, my friend, nunc est bibendum; but take care of the pede libero, which won't do for walking on lava!" The bottle was finished, the bill paid, the gentlemen mounted, the landlord bowed, and they bent their way in the cool of the delightful evening towards Resina.
Portici and Resina are so closely connected together by villas and houses, that a stranger would take them for one place. Beneath Resina lies Herculaneum, a city destroyed seventy-nine years after the birth of our Saviour. In the year 1689 a marquis caused a well to be dug in his garden, when, at a depth of sixty-five feet, the labourers came upon fragments of marble with divers inscriptions.
We had seen where Herculaneum lies under the lava and under the town of Resina; we had walked those clean and narrow streets of Pompeii, and seen the workmen picking away at the imbedded gravel, sand, and ashes which still cover nearly two thirds of the nice little, tight little Roman city; we had looked at the black gashes on the mountain-sides, where the lava streams had gushed and rolled and twisted over vineyards and villas and villages; and we decided to take a nearer look at the immediate cause of all this abnormal state of things.
The inhabitants of the coast were thus warned of the approaching danger, and had several days to arrange for their safety; but in the end, a great part of Torre del Greco was destroyed, and a like fate overtook Resina and Granatello, with a loss of life reported at 18,000 persons.
In front of the houses are the markets in the open air, fish, vegetables, carts of oranges; in the sun sit women spinning from distaffs or weaving fishing-nets; and rows of children who were never washed and never clothed but once, and whose garments have nearly wasted away; beggars, fishermen in red caps, sailors, priests, donkeys, fruit-venders, street-musicians, carriages, carts, two-wheeled break-down vehicles, the whole tangled in one wild roar and rush and babel, a shifting, varied panorama of color, rags, a pandemonium such as the world cannot show elsewhere, that is what one sees on the road to Resina.
We took carriages at nine o'clock to Resina, a drive of four miles, and one of exceeding interest, if you wish to see Naples life. The way is round the curving bay by the sea; but so continuously built up is it, and so inclosed with high walls of villas, through the open gates of which the golden oranges gleam, that you seem never to leave the city.
Everybody who comes to Naples, that is, everybody except the lady who fell from her horse the other day at Resina and injured her shoulder, as she was mounting for the ascent, everybody, I say, goes up Vesuvius, and nearly every one writes impressions and descriptions of the performance.
But much of the city itself has yet hardly been touched since the days when it was destroyed in the reign of Titus, so that far below the squalid lanes of Portici and Resina there must still exist acres upon acres of undisturbed buildings, public and private, many of them perhaps filled with priceless works of Greek and Roman art, for Herculaneum, unlike Pompeii, was never tampered with by the ancients themselves, for the coating of volcanic mud, which filled the whole area of the city, made impracticable a systematic searching of its ruins by the despoiled citizens.
Let us take advantage of the fine weather; make the best of our way to Resina, the little village at the foot of the mountain; prepare ourselves, as well as we can, on so short a notice, at the guide's house; ascend at once, and have sunset half-way up, moonlight at the top, and midnight to come down in!
Here then in the mean streets of Resina we find ourselves standing above, though certainly not upon, historic ground, for the temples and villas, the theatres and private houses of the famous buried city lie far below the surface trodden by our feet.
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