Bargain Hunting at the Antiques Centre

One day last week we had a trip to one of the large antiques warehouses in the area and I bought a few items to bring home with me.

These came from more than one stall, but there's a 78 rpm record - regular readers will know I'm partial to them - four 45 rpm E.P.s, 28 postcards and one other item that we'll have a look at later.

The 78 rpm record is one that I've coveted for quite a while. Anyone who remembers children's TV from the days of Black & White TV would recognise this straight away. And I wouldn't mind betting that the song and exact words are going through your heads at the moment!

Robin Hood, Robin Hood riding through the glen
Robin Hood, Robin Hood, with his band of men
Feared by the bad, loved by the good
Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Robin Hood!

The 78 records made of shellac were very brittle. They broke if dropped or sat on and in the 1950s they came to be replaced by smaller records made of vinyl. Smaller because the spiral of the groove was tighter and required a smaller stylus that even now many people call a needle.

They were very hard to break, but sadly for the collector were very easy to scratch. And it's not always apparent that they might be damaged in a small area enough to make the needle bounce out of the groove into a different part of the spiral. Unfortunate for me because despite a close look at them in the shop, they all "jump" at some point.

But just because they jump now, doesn't necessarily mean they are designated for the bin. I'll have a go at washing them first, taking care not to wet the labels. Years of dust and finger grease, not to mention lumps of sticky toffee being dropped on them, sometimes means that the damage is not a scratch but a build up of material causing a blockage inside the groove. Fingers crossed!

The postcards are a real mix. There are comic cards and picture postcards ranging from the 1910s to the 1970s. Some are from our own country and some, like this 1954 card of an erupting Mount Vesuvius in Italy, are from abroad. Some have been posted and some have been bought as a collector's item.

The other item was a late 1920s photographic album containing 117 family snaps ranging from 1930-1932. The majority are labelled across a corner in fountain pen with the year and the location.

Sadly, none of the people depicted is named and there is nothing inside the album to say whose it was. However, I imagine many of the photos will scan well and clean up and we'll take a look at them on this blog in due course! Come back for a look at some point!

Return to Sorrento

We spent a week in Sorrento in 2005, but this morning, Wednesday 3 September, 2014, we awake aboard the Thomson Majesty, look out of our cabin window and breathe a sigh of contentment at one of the most majestic panoramas of the world.

I took the photo from the Promenade Deck once we were up, showered and dressed. We had an early morning coffee on the top deck before breakfast. Whilst the coffee cooled, I trotted up to the very top deck and took several photos of the ship - the next but one article will be all about Thomson Majesty itself. Tomorrow will be, in fact, our last day before returning to Corfu for our flight home.

The evening before had been a trifle rough as we went through a storm force 7, combined with rough seas. Even Miss Franny succumbed and we spent much of the evening sliding down the bunk or up onto the pillows and reading. The captain had expressed some doubt about Sorrento, which has no harbour large enough for a cruise ship and therefore requires a tender boat operation. The alternative would have been to moor up (sorry! "park") at Naples across the bay. But here we are with a magnificent view of...

"It looks a bit like a volcano, doesn't it...?" a fellow passenger remarked to me as we gazed across the water.
"It's Vesuvius!" I spluttered, a little incredulous that someone could come to Sorrento and not know what the huge mountain with a crater just across the bay could be.

The view from the other side of the ship. Sorrento sits on a cliff face that enters the sea in a vertical drop with no beaches. The locals have made up for this lack of sunbathing opportunity with wooden jetties on top of piles of rocks that they call "beaches" and these come complete with sunbeds for hire. One of the ship's tender boats is returning to the ship from the harbour at the foot of the cliff.

All ships tend to prioritise their excursion customers in any tender operation and solo or independent travellers are asked to wait until the waiting coaches have been filled with their passengers. Knowing this we left it a couple of hours before joining the queue, which still climbed the stairwells for a couple or three decks. People were going down to the gangway deck via a lift only to have to climb back up to join the end of the queue.

Eventually though we step off the tender boat and arrive at Sorrento.

We spent a full week here, laboriously trekking up and down the cliff in zig-zags. Now they tell us there's a lift... It's signposted "Acensore" and to reach it you have to follow a very narrow trail of wooden gangways at the foot of the cliff. No wonder we hadn't found it on our own...

At the top we have a great view of Thomson Majesty sitting at anchor in the bay. Vesuvius is on the extreme left. The ruins of Roman Pompeii are on its right hand side as we look towards it.

Near the top of the cliff, just where we come out of the lift are several small narrow streets, lined with cafe bars and tourist shops as well as food and clothing shops by the score. It is picturesque, busy, exciting and tempting all at the same time. We made our way up and down, stopped for a while for a morning coffee, watching as two teenagers on a scooter were given a lecture by a patrolling policeman.

We called in at one of many shops selling the delicious lemon-flavoured liqueur, limoncello. Smiling, the old lady who was shopkeeper poured us a sample and pointed out some bottles aimed at the tourist industry, small and medium novelty-shaped bottles. She smiled even more when I picked up a larger more traditionally shaped bottle that I could be more certain of how much it held. We paid and said our goodbyes and came out into the main street running along the coast.

This is the Piazza Tasso where the coast road, the Corso Italia, is joined by what seems like three streets from inland. In reality the Viale Enrico Caruso is split into two lanes, each a one-way street for traffic. The confusion comes because the Via Fuorimura runs between the two lanes of Viale Enrico Caruso, taking bus traffic... Incidentally Caruso, the famed opera singer, came from Naples rather than Sorrento, but was obviously well thought of!

Walking up Via Fuorimura, you come to a great cleft in the land. There's a huge ravine here, where two rivers meet. It is around 150 feet deep and contains its own micro-climate. There are a couple of factories at the bottom, a sawmill and a flour mill, the latter of which remained in use into the last century. The ravine itself was created by massive volcanic action between 35,000 and 37,000 years ago, give or take a week. The ravine is known as The Valley of the Mills. Romantic, picturesque and so deep that taking photos is extremely difficult because of the huge difference in light levels between street level and the gorge interior.

You just come on this out of the blue. The depth takes you by surprise the first time you see it. It needs treating with respect. A young British tourist lost his life after falling down it at 3:00am one morning in 2011.

Back at Piazza Tasso we are now looking down on the zig-zagging road down to the harbour. We climbed this several times during our week here in 2005. It's easier to go down but the don't underestimate the effect on your knees! There's also a shorter route...

Yes... we really were that stupid... Mind you we did come down, not up, the staircases. Even going down you end up out of breath...

We did a bit of admiring the view (an activity also known as getting your breath back) before getting onto the tender boat. This waited until its space was needed by another tender boat coming in and then the boat captain (driver) pressed the starter and chug---chug---chug-----------chug.... nothing...

Several crew members opened a hatch and looked at the battery, but they weren't looking hard enough because even after all that staring, it refused to start the engine. We swapped to the incoming boat once its passengers had got off...

Just down the coast a little is Sant'Agnello, bordering onto Sorrento. It is where we stayed in 2005 and is a quieter place than Sorrento itself. Mind you, the entertainer chap in the next hotel was awful!!!

We had our usual cruising afternoon, snug in a comfortable chair with a drink to hand and our noses in our books. Then a shower and change of clothes before our next meal and we went up onto the Promenade Deck once again for a last look at Sorrento, Vesuvius et al. The last tender boats were still ferrying passengers from Sorrento. We watched as they were winched aboard. Er... that's the boats, not the passengers...

One of the things I best remember about the week we spent here was the beauty and tranquillity of the Bay of Naples in the late afternoon, right through to some spectacular late evening sunsets. We wouldn't see the sunset here tonight, but this view across the mouth of the bay towards the islands of Capri and Ischia gives some idea of what I mean. This is a view for the souls of poets...

We waited until we had started to move and then went back inside the ship and down to our favourite eatery, the Four Seasons restaurant. The day had one more view to show us. As we tucked into our starters, I looked up and saw the unmistakeable silhouettes of Capri's Faglieri Rocks through the window. If you look carefully you can just make out a small opening at the bottom of the middle rock just to the left of the darker fold of the net curtain. In 2005 we sailed through that hole on a launch!

Italian Flavours Cruise Index

Herculaneum

Sunday, 15 May 2011. The Thomson Destiny docks at Naples and we are booked on an excursion to see the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum. Like its near neighbour, Pompeii, Herculaneum was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in August AD79.

Unlike Pompeii, Herculaneum was not subject to the intense rain of heavy ash that brought down the roofs of Pompeii's buildings. Herculaneum was buried by molten rock from successive pyroclastic flows to a depth of 50-60 feet and Naples was built over it, the builders having forgotten its existence. It was buried deep. I was standing between Herculaneum and the coast on top of today's ground level. Those buildings at the bottom of the photo are boat houses...

This point was close enough to the coast then to sail right out. Unfortunately for around 300 people, whose skeletons were found in the boat houses, there were not enough boats for them all to escape.

Whilst sheltered from the direct impact of the surging ash and molten material, the intense heat (around 500 degrees) caused instant death and sucking all moisture from the structures which were then buried and preserved for us to see.

The remains were discovered by builders digging a well over one and a half millennia later, in 1709. Much of the site still lies beneath modern Naples.

A mosaic floor showing Neptune. I couldn't get to the bottom of the artwork and so had to turn the photo upside down to view the image properly. That's why it looks more like a ceiling... The flooring in this building showed sagging and breaks caused by earthquake motion during the eruption. At one point the floor elsewhere in this room had broken, falling into the hypocaust.

The College of the Augustales. In this building with its fresco of Hercules, after whom the town is named, it looked as though the roof had lurched sideways. The top of the fresco leans out and in the adjoining room the top of the wall correspondingly curves inwards.

A stack of amphorae in the remains of a shop.

Some of the buildings have remarkable treasures. Wooden staircases, partitions and doors, albeit somewhat carbonised by the heat of the pyroclastic surge. One room still contains a bed frame.

This would have been a beautiful place to live, with views of the Bay of Naples and the mountain behind. Vesuvius had been inactive for 800 years prior to the AD79 eruption. No one even dreamed of it being a volcano. Few people had any idea that such things existed. It has erupted around 40 times since that fateful day. They say a large eruption is overdue...

Our excursion comes to an end and our coach takes us back to the ship at modern-day Naples.

We are up on deck, shivering a little to watch us sail out. The top of the volcano has disappeared under cloud.

We pull out from the side of the Maritime Station and glide past the ferries in the harbour. Our next stop will be Corsica.

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Pompeii

Tuesday, 23 August 2005. We have booked another excursion this to take us to the ancient devastated city of Pompeii.

By gum, there's not much space on this coach... Oh, wait no, it's just a cheap way of advertising someone's restaurant! We've seen a few of these tiny three-wheelers about. Some of them have pick-up backs for deliveries or park workers etc.

Roman Pompeii. There is much more of it than you would think - indeed the ticket office is still in fine shape...

This is our first sight of Pompeii, immediately after passing through the entrance. We are given a set of earphones each and the guide talks into a radio that we can all hear. This is good in that we can all hear clearly - but if he's out of sight we have no idea which direction to go to find him!

We set off all the same and first stop is a look at the amphitheatre. The band Pink Floyd filmed a short concert (6 songs) here in 1971, though the audience was limited to the film crew and some local children.

We hit the streets and now it starts to hit you about what happened here. Although these streets are 2000 years old, they look very familiar. A central roadway. Pavements to either side. Kerbstones. Recognisable ruins of buildings to either side...

Inside the buildings are still traces of wall plaster and painted designs. Although the exposed stonework may look random and primitive, the brickwork is laid in courses exactly the same as it would be today. As regards the stonework, I have a sneaky feeling that the more random parts of the structure have been added at a later date, perhaps to keep the building from falling following exposure from the layers of ash and mud that covered it.

There is a mixture of wide streets and narrow alleys.

Our guide was quite good. Let's face it, here there is really only one date that matters, so he spoke more about the people, their way of living and the discoveries that have increased our knowledge about them, rather than any list of dates that would have sent me to sleep in no time.

Most Roman towns, perhaps all of them, had several fast food outlets that sold such delights as dormice on sticks, locusts in aspic etc. This is one such, the salad bar of huge earthenware jars, surviving so that happy children could dip their locusts!

As I've said, walking along streets 2000 years old is humbling. Working on a generation every 25 years that's 80 generations away. If my ancestor had lived there it would have been my great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great... you're right - it doesn't bear thinking about! The huge chunks of stone in the middle of the road by the way allowed people to cross the street without wading through the filth of sewerage and rotting food. Well, perhaps there has been a bit of progress since then...

I'm very much afraid I can't remember what this building was, but it had a wealth of art, both painted and carved in relief on the walls.

No matter how many times you have seen photos of the bodies, the actual sight of one makes you pause. The volcano's pyroclastic flows were so hot (around 250 degrees centigrade) that they would have killed people instantly even as they left the volcano and before the flow reached Pompeii. The hot ash then settled hardening into rock. As the bodies decayed into nothing, their impression was left inside. This is a plaster cast - not an actual petrified corpse. Even so, the first time you see one, your heart goes whumpf in shock and it makes you think what it may have been like for these poor people.

Via dell'Abbondanza, the main street in Pompeii.

Avert your eyes children! Here and there a carving of a phallus can be found in the roadway - perhaps pointing to a house of ill-repute... or perhaps pointing out a house with a very good repute...!

The site of the Forum, looking over to the Temple of Jupiter.

As Lucretzia said to Bilius at No. XXIII Arena Street, "It'll never last..." And it didn't. This is all that's left of why. At the time Vesuvius had a single coned peak. So follow the sides of the volcano up until the lines would meet. That's how high it was until it blew itself apart.

24 August AD 79. "What on earth was that?!?" (Centurian Kevin)

The Temple of Apollo. There are lots of wonderful things to see in Pompeii. It was a large city - you certainly cannot hope to see it all in one visit

Another figure huddled against falling ash and pumice stone. This was in one of a number of shops with amphorae and lots of earthenware goods.

Many of the old shops have been used as storerooms to hold the thousands of finds uncovered over the years. Pompeii had not been entirely covered. The highest buildings would have had their tops poking out of the ash which settled to a depth of around 82 feet (25 metres). However it was 1592 when the ruins were first found, when work was ongoing to divert the River Sarno. At that time the remains were simply covered up again.

Herculaneum was discovered in 1738 and led to an expedition to uncover Pompeii ten years later, although it was only discovered that the city was Pompeii in 1763 when an inscription was found that identified the city.

The remains of a latrine. A continuous shelf of marble would have run on top of the supports from the wall with keyhole shapes for men to sit companiably together - no partitions - in peaceful convenience... Waste fell into a flowing stream whilst a second stream with clean flowing water before the men's feet allowed them to dip their sponges-on-sticks that were used in place of toilet paper.

The House of The Tragic Poet (also called The Homeric House or The Iliadic House).

However tragic his poems may have been, he had another branch of MacDonaldus mouseburgers handily just next door.

Round the corner was a bakery shop. The oven was still standing, though the fire had gone out.

Towards the end of the tour we were taken through the city's cemetery. Bodies were interred in crypts above ground, rather than being buried. Passing through the cemetery, we queue for the final impressive sight as we enter the House of Mystery.

The House of Mystery has the most wonderful Roman paintings left in existence. The colours are amazingly vivid. These paintings are at least 2000 years old.

Vesuvius killed somewhere between 10,000-25,000 people in AD79. In 2009 over 3 million people live around it. It last erupted in 1944 and will erupt again, although the eruption of 79 was by far greater than any eruption since (at least 40 eruptions have occurred since AD 79). But that's not to say the next won't be worse

Our trip included lunch in a nearby restaurant. This fine fellow gives a quick serenade of O Sole Mio and that tune from the Godfather - ah splendid! Horse's head and spaghetti! (That's a joke, please do not sue...)

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