Herculaneum

In 79 AD, after Caecilius erat in horto and Grumio erat iratus, Mount Vesuvius, a volcano that had lain dormant for so long that the locals had forgotten it was anything other than a big mountain, violently erupted. The subsequent pyroclastic flow obliterated Pompeii, destroying the city and encasing the Roman citizens in a blizzard of fiery ash. This left the unfortunate victims literally petrified - their bodies encased in rock, left entombed for millennia until archaeologists excavated the site of the travesty millennia later. This much is common knowledge, but what's less well known is that this fate not only befell Pompeii but also the seaside town of Herculaneum.

As a tourist attraction, in my opinion Herculaneum is leaps and bounds ahead of Pompeii. While the archaeological site of Pompeii is many times larger, its fame results in a daily inundation of tourists. It's also highly curated, with huge swathes of the site cut off to visitors. Herculaneum on the other hand is smaller, packing everything into 3 blocks of streets rather than Pompeii's city-scale layout, with historical relics and frescos that are much better preserved than at Pompeii. Unlike Pompeii, there isn't a set route through the site - you can more or less explore as you please - and it even has more roofs (some of them still intact after nearly 2,000 years!) and so more shade (my most overwhelming memory of Pompeii from 10 years ago was the unbearable 35ºC Italian heat with no shade to be found anywhere!)

Overall I really enjoyed exploring Herculaneum, it was a window into Roman life nearly 2,000 years ago that has been unbelievably well preserved. I would recommend it to anyone with even a vague interest in how the Romans used to live.Read more