#2: Being a series of reports, observations, reflections, that supplement the journals kept on-the-spot during a 3-week sojourn on the Amalfi coast southeast of Naples, Italy.
VESUVIO
WHY CAMPAGNIA FEELS LIKE HOME: Neapolitan-Amalfitan geography is notable, and is reminiscent of my Sonoma County home north of San Francisco, California. The Bay of Naples in many ways resembles San Francisco Bay, thought the former is a collapsed caldera while the latter is a graben, a sunken crustal block. Mt. Vesuvius could be the east bay's Mt. Diablo with its classic stratovolcano silhouette, or the north bay's Mt. Konocti with its associated volcanic and thermal fields. The Amalfitan coast's outlines evoke images of the Sonoma coast, though the former's geological underpinning is limestone while the latter's is serpentine.
Imagine sufficient Global Warming to give the S.F. Bay Area the climate of San Diego, more tropical than the sub-tropical weather we now enjoy, and the physical parallels with the Naples-Amalfi area are complete.
GEOLOGIC DOOM: And both regions are subject to tectonic hazards. Here in Ecotopia we eagerly await The Big One, a massive quake along the San Andreas or some subsidiary fault zone that will level our major metropolitan region. And vulcanologists say that Vesuvio will likely undergo a major eruption in ten years or so. This is definitely not a good time to invest in Neapolitan real estate; much better to do a short-term lease or rental, and have at hand an open ticket to elsewhere. She's a'gonna blow, pardner!
Hopefully the Amalfi coast will be as immune to the upcoming event as it has been to most Vesuvian activity in the past. A major 1980 quake north of Naples in Avellina caused great damage in Campagnia (south-central Italy) that was ignored by much of the world's press, whose repercussions are still evident in all the sprawling apartment blocks built since then to house those left homeless by that shake.
But that event didn't much affect Amalfi; neither did most past eruptions and tremblors. One quake some 800 years ago, and mudslides caused by medieval and modern rainstorms, have done sufficient damage to the Coast.
STORMS VS. QUAKES: And that's what most people overlook: storms are more deadly and expensive than earthquakes and eruptions, and happen much more often. The atmosphere is more active than the geosphere. One good Florida hurricane will cause much more death and destruction than a California quake, and there will be several such storms per year, against one Left Coast doozie every 5 or 10 or 20 or 50 years. Vesuvius and the San Andreas belt are a LOT safer (and more attractive) than Tornado Alley, Hurricane Alley, Bangladesh and other monsoon targets. Gotta keep things in perspective, eh?
Letter on land usage, Italy vs. California
----- Original Message ----- From: "Hilary A. Thomas"
> WHAT FUTURE FOR FAMILY FARMS?
> A pair of aerial photographs tells the story,
> or an important piece of it anyway.
> http://www.capitolhillblue.com/Article.asp?ID=1612
The story deals with a small farm in a California coastal community enveloped by suburban sprawl, and describes its situation thusly:
Yet it is much more than just a farm. It also is a refutation of three "truisms" frequently trotted out to justify or at least excuse development of agricultural land on the edge of California's rapidly growing urban areas: 1. Noisy, smelly farms and residential neighborhoods cannot coexist; 2. Agriculture cannot be conducted profitably on real estate made expensive by its proximity to development; 3. Small-scale family farms can no longer compete economically in a world of corporate megafarms.
I've just returned from a 3-week sojourn in south-central Italy, a nation the size of California with twice as many people and less arable land. They can't afford to let ANY land go to waste, so they don't pave everything, don't have massive parking lots & wide roads, terrace every hillside, and plant and graze every unbuilt acre. As I write in my trip journal:
Civilization, settlement are continuous across the terrain. Country, town, city seem to differ only in their density, only in the height and extent of cultivation and residence.
Livestock grazes along freeway margins and roadside watercourses. Walltops and rooftops are produce gardens, backyards and hillsides are orchards, poultry and rabbits and greenhouses are tucked into odd corners, and open-field agribiz occupies flat alluvial plains between clumped suburban blocks. The smallest plots and orchards may produce food only for the family, or they may sell to jobbers, or they may be part of an extensive commercial network. But town and farm are NOT separate, that's just too wasteful of an extremely limited resource.
Neapolitan highways are narrow; I didn't see huge tractor-trailer rigs; so the food here is likely not to have been hauled long distances, but to be locally grown (without pesticides), fresh, tasty, inexpensive. At least, that was my experience. And this Mediterranean diet is low in red-meat protein and fats, high in seafood and olive oil (and wine!)
As more and more people move into California, pressure to reclaim and reutilize the rich but nonproducing acres surrendered to (sub)urban- sprawl developers and highway departments will increase. Italy has had a few millennia to develop its land-use patterns; an ever-denser California landscape (and other growth-belt regions) will likely be transformed in rather less time. Or else we'll implode, maybe. Yow.
But yes, some millions of people live in the shadow of Vesuvio, the urban sprawl of Napoli crawling relentlessly around its base — only nationl park status prevents apartment blocks from spreading up the volcano's flanks also. And there will soon be more buried towns for future archaeologists to unearth, more architecture and art and artifice for them to marvel at, more target audiences for souvenir vendors.
And yes, some millions of people live along the San Andreas zone and its splayed radiating faults, in the Los Angeles and San Francisco conurbations, and much of the architecture and infrastructure is NOT earthquake-hardened. Flat alluvium is the cheapest place to build, so much housing is on land most likely to shimmy and sway. Someday soon it'll all fall down, and it'll all be built back up again, with maybe the usual annual celebrations of remembrance.
These places are just too nice (generally) to abandon. It'll take more than mere tectonic forces to scrape the humans off.
POMPEII, Etc.
DISCLAIMER: This isn't a guide book, I'm not a tour guide nor historian nor archaeologist. I won't pretend to provide any substantial details here, just my general impressions and recommendations.
Italy's Campagnia region, south and east of it's Neapolitan core, hosts some superlatively impressive ancient sites, not all of which were inundated by Vesuvio. The excavated cities of Pompeii (Scavi Pompei) and Herculaneum (Scavi Ercolano) are the best-known Vesuvian victims, outshining the Stabian Baths in Castellammare di Stabia and the remarkable Villa Oplontis in Torre Annunziata. Further southeast is the old Graeco-Roman city of Paestum, swallowed by forests (and mosquitoes) rather than volcanic debris. Those three cities are the "must-see" sites for most history-drenched visitors.
PREPARATION: Before visiting any of these sites, read some guidebooks (see recommendations at the end of this piece), examine pictures, familiarize yourself with the history, and see the museums containing good stuff removed from the sites. The best Vesuvian art and artifacts are in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples; the museum at Paestum holds that site's superb relics. The city sites seem perpetually overrun with tour groups and school classes; any guide you hire must have a loud, clear, penetrating voice. Bring your own water and garments for sun or rain, and note the locations of rest rooms. If you're into recording your experiences, bring plenty of film, tapes & batteries, paper & crayons, supplies for whatever media you prefer. Leave your alien implant at home.
We took canned tours of Pompeii, Paestum, and the Naples museum, and guided ourselves thru Herculaneum, Oplontis, Minori's Villa Romana, and the Paestum museum. How do they rate? All are splendid for various reasons, all require return visits, and the museums are mandatory.
POMPEII is of breathtaking extent, an entire working city cast in volcanic ash, its upper levels collapsed by the weight of that ash. A half day was just enough to get a taste of maybe a quarter of the site (and we didn't even get near the Villa dei Misteri) and not nearly sufficient ot absorb its feel, its energy, its dimensions. I feel a great hunger to return, maybe in winter when it's not so jammed, to explore further and record impressions.
PAESTUM is also large but more fragmentary, more schematic, more of it lost to vegetation and weather over the millennia. But the three huge Greek temples are overwhelming, classic Hellenic architecture at its finest. A half day there was about half enough, museum extra.
HERCULANEUM is a much richer and more compact and better-preserved site; its details were safely encased in mud, and it's more vertically-dimensional than Pompeii, much more opulent than Paestum. A half day was almost enough to scan most of the surface, but there are many corners to poke into. I could spend some time with the gardern, and with the classic sculpture and Escher arches and Lovecraft spaces of the sub-urban baths.
Yes, I'm suggesting at least two days each for the city sites — they're well worth it. If you've taken time and effort to get there, take time and effort to explore them.The VILLA OPLANTIS is smaller than a city but larger than small villages, an incredibly gorgeous look at The Lives Of The Rich And Famous of long ago. Wonderful art and architecture; an hour there was barely enough, a slow half-day or more would be fulfilling.
Minori's VILLA ROMANA was home to someone rich but not hyper-rich, like Oplantis' tenancy by an Emperor's wife, but it's impressive enough. Next time, I'll ask the keepers to open the locked areas so we can explore the whole place, which might take a half day.
WHAT WE MISSED: There were so many other archaeological sites and museums in the Naples area that we wanted to explore but just didn't make adequate opportunity for: the Campi Flegrei and Pozzuoli and Cumae, west of Naples; Stabia, other Vesuvian burial sites and the climb up Vesuvio itself, east of Naples; the multilayered-over-time architecture of Naples' San Lorenzo Maggiore basilica; the old Greek city of Velia, south of Paestum on the Cilento coast. Gotta go back, stay closer to the Neapolitan sites, eh? Next time, a room around Sorrento, and then moped south...
Guidebooks, Guidebooks, ya can't tell the sites without some guidebooks. A good pictorial overview of the region is NAPLES AND POMPEII from Knopf Guides, available at major booksellers worldwide. Official and unofficial guides and albums of splendid pictures are available in many languages at shops everywhere in the region — again, you should acquire and study the guidebooks BEFORE you visit a site. "Overlay books" (GUIDES WITH RECONSTRUCTIONS) in various sizes feature as-they-are photos and as-they-were paintings on plastic overlay pages, useful in visualizing the bygone scenes — we used the small POMPEII-HERCULANEUM Past And Present from VISION S.R.L., Roma, who also publish similar (and larger) books for Rome, Hadrian's Villa, Ostia, and Paestum (I wish we'd had THAT one!)
CD-ROMs and videotapes and slideshows that recreate tours of the sites are also widely available — watch out for VHS incompatability, make sure any tape you buy will play on your own equipment. And be sure to read and see the various cinema versions of Bulwer-Lytton's THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEII. Literature and film are SO much better than reality, eh?
