# Introduction | How one travel theme led to another…
If you asked me about my travels 25 years ago, I would have answered that most of my destinations were related to water or volcanoes. Water, because of my hobby: whitewater kayaking and love for waterfalls. And volcanoes had become a passion after visiting Mount St Helens in State Washington (USA) in 1993. That trip to the desolate moon landscape was as if I was on another planet; still one of the most impressive experiences in my life.
Since then, I have watched many, many TV programs on National Geographic and Discovery Channel about volcanoes. Many of these documentaries would feature a story about the famous eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. the catastrophic eruption that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum under volcanic pumice and ash. The remains were perfectly preserved and almost 2,000 years later are some of the most amazing and most famous Roman archeological sites to visit.
It was a Roman lawyer and magistrate, known as Pliny the Younger, who sent two letters to a historian in which he wrote a detailed eye-witness account of the 79 AD eruption. His observations were so detailed and accurate that he can be seen as the first volcanologist. Modern scientists have named the type of eruption that Pliny the Younger observed and described as a Plinian eruption.
A recent Plinian eruption that occurred that you may have heard about or experienced is the large eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991.
His uncle, who helped educate and raise Pliny the Younger, was the famous Roman admiral, naturalist and author, Pliny the Elder. His main claim to fame was his book Natural History. It is the largest single written work from the Roman Empire that still exists today and is the earliest surviving encyclopedia. His editorial structure of referencing other authors and his creation of an index in the document are still used in modern encyclopedias.
Pliny the Elder died whilst executing a rescue operation during the eruption of Vesuvius. It was the historian, Tacitus, asking about his death, that made Pliny the Younger write those two important letters. So, it was my interest in volcanoes and volcanology that brought me to visit the Bay of Naples in 1998.
The Bay of Naples
On my way to Naples and Vesuvius, I spent a few days in Rome. Of course, I visited famous sites, like the Colosseum and the Pantheon. As any other tourist, I was amazed how the Pantheon is still intact and in use after so many years. The most striking feature of the building is the world’s largest and oldest unreinforced concrete dome.
I soon learned during this trip that Roman concrete is stronger and more resistant than many modern concretes, and that for many years scientists were unable to reconstruct its recipe and fully understand its properties. It was the Roman’s mastering of concrete that created what is called the concrete revolution in architecture. The most important ingredient of Roman concrete is Pozzolana, also known as Pozzolanic ash. Yes, a volcanic material.
This mixture of ash and pumice comes from another very, very dangerous volcano in the bay of Naples: the Campi Flegrei. Here I visited the famous archeological site of a Roman market in Pozzuoli. The ruins show signs that the buildings had spent considerable amounts of time both in the open air and submerged under the sea during its history. This was not the result of changing sea levels but the actual up and down movement of the land on which the Roman structures were built: a volcanic phenomenon called bradyseism. This is when the ground is lifted or lowered in height as a result of the magma chamber filling or emptying underneath! So you see, my interest in volcanology was totally interspersed with Roman archeology.
Visiting Pompeii itself was a thrilling experience. Just to be walking the same streets and roaming the ruins of what was a vibrant, wealthy city full of treasures and 2,000-year-old graffiti.
Pompeii was a fairly large city and two-thirds have been excavated, so it takes many steps to explore it.
On a different level, I remember the eerie feeling of disaster and the weight of the tragedy that occurred there. This was best expressed by the “mummies’’ of the victims that have been found.
Archeologists discovered hollow places in the ash during the excavations. When filling these voids with plaster they revealed the casts (outlines) of people in dramatic positions: time capsules created as the inhabitants got burned by a 250+ degrees Celsius avalanche of hot volcanic gases and rock (a pyroclastic flow) and were buried under 4 to 6 meters of volcanic material.
Museums versus Archeological Sites
Before my first trip to Pompeii and Herculaneum, I had visited many museums with Roman artifacts, statues, and tombstones. I was always amazed by how much of our “modern civilization” already existed in Roman times. Think about beautiful colored glass objects, medical instruments, running water taps with plumbing, sewage systems, central floor and wall heating, etc. etc. Yet, out of context in a sterile environment, it never got me really excited. That changed after I visited Pompeii and Herculaneum. It placed everything in situ and in context where it triggered my imagination and helped me picture those ancient times. Add to that the high-quality BBC drama series of “I Claudius”, the movie “Gladiator” in the year 2000, and the impressive HBO series called “Rome” in 2005, and all of a sudden these artifacts became much more thrilling and interesting to me. As a result, I started to look for Roman sites to visit, and it became a theme during my travels.
Amphitheatres & Aqueducts
Initially, my favorite sites to visit were amphitheatres and aqueducts. Amphitheatres simply because so many have survived and are in good enough shape that little imagination is necessary to appreciate them. I have a theatre background and used to work in the public event industry, so it is logical that I was attracted to ancient Greek and Roman theaters and arenas.
Roman aqueducts on the other hand are more rare as they are most often destroyed. They are the dramatic part of a much wider story that is all about water. The Romans were not the first and only civilization to make pipes and systems to transport water, but they are the first to do so on an industrial level, supplying their cities with vast amounts of water from impressive distances.
It enabled their sanitation, such as their public bathhouses, water connections to houses and villas (with taps and sinks and private baths) and many fountains. They also used water to flush their sewage systems.
It is mind-blowing to learn, for example, that they built an aqueduct of 50 km (31 miles) to serve Nimes in France with water for its 50,000 inhabitants. This water flowed by gravity (so no pumps), and to keep the water flowing along a path that would take more than a day to flow from one end to the other it only descended 17 meters over 50 kilometers!!! That is an average gradient of 1 in 3,000. But guess what: the gradient varies along the route and in some sections the gradient is only 1 in 20,000, which means it goes downhill 1 cm over a length of 20,000 cm. Imagine the engineering and surveying skills that were involved. Like I said: mind-blowing.
The Pont du Gard aqueduct is the most-visited monument in France that dates from antiquity. Since the year 2000, it has an underground museum of 4500 m2. I loved it and it is one of the best interpretive museums I have visited.
Another immersive experience that I treasure is my visit to the aqueduct of Albarracin to Cella (Aragon, Spain). No impressive bridges with arches, but a tunnel. Aqueducts were in fact, for most part, subterranean. There was no museum to speak of, but some signs explaining how the aqueduct was built and which sections you are able to visit and explore. So with a lamp in hand, I walked through part of the tunnel in the dark encountering vertical shafts that provided air and that were used to take out the material whilst they dug the tunnel. Super exciting.
Another amazing and mind-blowing site related to tunnels and water that I visited was also in Spain. Las Médulas was the most important gold mine of the whole Roman Empire. Here the Romans used water instead of dynamite to excavate the treasure. By digging a hydraulic system of tunnels, they then used water (again brought from far away using another impressive aqueduct), from large reservoirs above, to “blow up” mountains and to expose the veins of gold using a phenomenon known as a water hammer.
Mosaics
My taste for visiting the remains of Roman villas really took off after a vacation in 2006 to the United Kingdom where I visited many archeological sites, including the famous Hadrian’s Wall. Of course, at the borders of the Roman Empire the focus was mostly on military installations (like watchtowers) and camps and fortresses (castra). Here I learned much about the logistics involved in feeding and housing all the soldiers. One nice piece of trivia I picked up is that our word “salary” dates back from the time that Roman soldiers were paid in salt units. How cool is that!
So the elaborate villas can mostly be found away from the dangerous borderlands. For example the impressive Fishbourne Roman Palace, not too far from London.
As very little of these villas is usually still standing, the treasures to admire are often the beautiful mosaic floors that rich Romans used to show off their wealth and sophistication.
In general, I mostly appreciate the monochrome figurative mosaics of gods, sea creatures or, for example, grape vines. In some cases however, the full colour images are like beautiful paintings. The fish in the picture below, I admired last summer in Italy.
My interest in mosaics went even as far as taking a short course, so I learned how to make mosaics myself.
Other common finds in and around villas are statues of different sizes, lamps and coins.
Google Maps
Often, I have to thank Google Maps, for allowing me to discover sites to visit that were never on my itinerary. Frequently on the road, I will search Maps for Roman sites. Amazing places like the tunnels near Albarracin or the goldmine of Las Medulas, I only came across by accident, using Google.
So what is your travel theme?
As you can deduce from my story, having a travel theme can give focus to select places you wish to visit. Each trip adds new experiences to one’s journey of discovery and life-long learning. Step by step you build up knowledge and your collection of references enrich your insights and understanding at every next visit to a similar site you make. I can highly recommend it.
Let me know what your travel themes are in the comments.
Photo credits: D. Frigo (published with permission)
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