D'un vell color de plata
jo voldria que fossin
els meus versos: d’un noble,
antic color de plata.
Davant la mort, que porta
secrets senyals del rostre
que jo veig en mirar-me,
cerco amb ells extingides
veus del mar, pas de núvol,
les distants primaveres.
Trist i lliure, camino,
davant la mort que em mira,
a la llum, per la plata
antiga dels meus versos...
Mrs. Death, Salvador Espriu
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There are cities that can be understood through their monuments. Napoli is not one of them. To understand Napoli, you have to listen. You have to listen to the bells ringing above the streets, to the voices echoing through the vicoli, to the fishermen returning from the sea, to the vendors shouting their wares, to the music coming from a window that you cannot quite locate. And, sooner or later, you have to listen to the tambourine.
Because Napoli does not merely have a history written in stone. It has a history written in rhythm. And few rhythms are more immediately associated with southern Italy than the tarantella.
After walking through the history of Napoli -from the Greek foundations of Neapolis to Roman Pompeii and Herculaneum, from the medieval world of Castel dell'Ovo to the splendour of Castel Nuovo and the kingdoms that ruled from this extraordinary Mediterranean city- I wanted to take a different path. This time, I wanted to leave the castles behind. I wanted to follow the music. Because castles preserve the memory of kings. Songs and dances preserve the memory of people.
The first thing to say about the tarantella is that there is not, strictly speaking, a single tarantella. It is a family of traditional dances that developed in different forms throughout southern Italy. Its rhythms, gestures, instruments and meanings vary considerably from one region to another.
The traditional tarantella is generally characterised by a fast, energetic rhythm, often in 3/8 or 6/8, accompanied by instruments such as the tambourine, guitar and, later, mandolin and accordion.
The dance became particularly associated with Napoli and the culture of southern Italy, but its history cannot be reduced to a single place or a single explanation. Even the name is surrounded by uncertainty. For centuries, tarantella was connected to taranta and tarantola, and popular tradition associated the dance with the bite of a spider. The traditional explanation was wonderfully dramatic: the bite of the tarantula produced a mysterious condition that could be cured by music and dance.
The victim -traditionally, and very often, a woman- would enter a state of agitation or apparent trance. Musicians would play different melodies until they found the particular rhythm that made the tarantata respond. And then she would dance. Faster. And faster. Until, according to the traditional belief, the illness had been expelled from the body.
The historical phenomenon known as tarantism is particularly associated with Apulia and the Salento, where it survived in attenuated forms well into the twentieth century. The oldest known documentary connection between the bite of the taranta and the therapeutic power of music dates back to the fourteenth century.
Today, of course, we do not understand tarantism as a medical treatment for spider venom. But perhaps that is not the most interesting part of the story. What fascinates me is something much more human. For centuries, people believed that music could heal. They believed that rhythm could speak to the body when words were no longer enough. And that idea feels profoundly Mediterranean to me.
The story of the tarantula has become so deeply embedded in the popular imagination that it is tempting to tell the tarantella as a simple story: Spider. Poison. Madness. Music. Dance. Cure. But history is rarely so simple. Modern scholarship has shown that tarantism was a complex cultural phenomenon involving ritual, belief, community, music, the body and psychological distress. Ernesto de Martino's famous twentieth-century study of the phenomenon helped establish tarantism as a major subject of anthropological and religious-historical research.
And there is another important distinction. Tarantism and tarantella are related in the cultural imagination, but they are not interchangeable terms. The tarantella became a dance in its own right, and its history continued far beyond the ritual world of the tarantate. This is where Napoli enters the story.
The tarantella became increasingly associated with Napoli and the Neapolitan imagination. By the eighteenth century, travellers were already describing the dance in Napoli. Goethe himself encountered the tarantella during his Italian journey in 1786-1787. Later, during the nineteenth century, the dance increasingly acquired the form that would become familiar throughout Europe: a lively, theatrical and often flirtatious dance between two people. And something fascinating happened. The dance travelled. It moved from the countryside to the city. From popular culture to the theatre. From local celebrations to fashionable society. And eventually from Napoli to the rest of Europe. The tarantella became an image of southern Italy itself. Suddenly, the whole of Napoli seemed to dance. From the kingdom to the street This transformation is particularly interesting when we remember the history of Napoli. For centuries, this was not merely a city. It was a capital. A city of kings, dynasties and competing powers. The Angevins, the Aragonese, the Spanish and the Bourbons all left their mark on its architecture and political history.
Castel Nuovo tells us about that Napoli. Its towers, its triumphal arch, its coats of arms and its monumental architecture speak of power. But the tarantella tells us about another Napoli. The Napoli of fishermen. Of craftsmen. Of market sellers. Of women gathering in courtyards. Of religious festivals. Of young people flirting. Of families celebrating. Of people who did not leave behind chronicles, palaces or monumental inscriptions. They left behind music. And this is perhaps why I find the tarantella such a perfect continuation of my journey through Napoli.
Castel Nuovo tells us about the Napoli of kings. The tarantella tells us about the Napoli of its people. And when we speak about Campania, there is another word that deserves to be heard: tammurriata.
The tammurriata is a traditional sung dance from Campania, particularly widespread around the Vesuvian and Salernitan areas. Its name comes from the tammurro, the large frame drum whose powerful rhythm dominates the performance. The tammorra is not simply an accompanying instrument. It is almost another voice. The hands strike the drum in different ways, producing different tones, while castanets, putipù, triccheballacche and other instruments can join the performance. The songs may speak of love, sexuality, everyday life and work. And here the distinction becomes important again.
The tammurriata belongs to the broader world of Campanian traditional music and dance. It is related to the southern Italian tradition that we associate with the tarantella, but it has its own rhythms, instruments, contexts and traditions. There is no single southern Italian dance. There is a whole Mediterranean vocabulary of movement. And perhaps that is more beautiful.
There is another reason why I find the Campanian dances so fascinating. They exist in a world where the boundary between the sacred and the profane is wonderfully blurred. I wrote recently about Napoli and its peculiar relationship with religion: the saints, the processions, the churches, the devotion, the superstition, the celebrations and the extraordinary emotional relationship that Neapolitans have with death.
The tammurriata fits perfectly into that world. A religious celebration can become a celebration of the body. A procession can become music. Music can become dance. Dance can become courtship. And courtship can become celebration. Nothing has to remain in its assigned category.
This is Napoli. A city where contradiction is not necessarily a problem. It is often a way of life. The body remembers There is something else that fascinates me about traditional dance. It survives differently from architecture. A castle can stand for six hundred years. A temple can survive earthquakes, wars, eruptions and changing political regimes. We can photograph it. Measure it. Restore it. Study it. But a dance is much more fragile. If nobody dances it, it disappears. There is no stone to preserve it. No wall to protect it. No archaeological excavation capable of bringing it back exactly as it was. It survives only if one generation teaches another generation how to move. And this makes popular culture extraordinarily powerful. The body becomes an archive. The hands remember what the books forgot. The rhythm remembers what the stones cannot tell us. A grandmother teaches a granddaughter. A musician teaches a child. A community gathers for a festival. The drum begins. And suddenly, something centuries old is alive again.
Perhaps this is why the tarantella feels so profoundly Mediterranean to me. Not because every Mediterranean culture dances the same way. Quite the opposite. The Mediterranean has always been a place of extraordinary diversity. Greek, Roman, Arab, Byzantine, Norman, Occitan, French, Catalan, Jewish and countless local traditions have crossed its waters. Languages changed. Religions changed. Kingdoms rose and disappeared. Borders moved. Cities were destroyed and rebuilt. But people continued to meet around food, music, work, religion, love and the sea. Culture travelled by ship. And sometimes it travelled inside the body. A rhythm could cross a port. A melody could be carried by a sailor. A dance could be transformed by the next village. A word could acquire a new meaning in another dialect. This is what the Mediterranean has always done. It connects things.
Perhaps that is the secret of Napoli. It is an ancient city, but it has never been still. Greek Neapolis became Roman Neapolis. Roman Napoli became a medieval city. The medieval city became the capital of kingdoms. The kingdoms became part of larger states. The old port became a modern metropolis. The fishermen of yesterday became fewer. The streets changed. The buildings changed. The people changed. And yet Napoli remained unmistakably Napoli. Because a city is not only its architecture. It is what its people do with the architecture. They walk through it. They shout across it. They fall in love in it. They mourn in it. They celebrate in it. They eat in it. They sing in it. And sometimes, they dance.
I imagine a Neapolitan evening. The heat of the day is finally disappearing. The stone streets are beginning to cool. Somewhere, someone picks up a tammorra. One person begins to play. Another begins to sing. Someone starts clapping. And then a woman begins to dance. Perhaps she is not thinking about Greek antiquity. Perhaps she is not thinking about the Kingdom of Napoli. Perhaps she has never read about tarantism or the history of the tarantella. She simply knows the rhythm. Her body knows what to do. And that is enough. Because culture does not always survive through knowledge. Sometimes it survives through memory. And memory does not always live in books. Sometimes it lives in the hands. In the feet. In the voice. In the rhythm.
I have spent so much time during this journey looking at stones. The columns of Paestum. The streets of Pompeii. The houses of Herculaneum. The churches of Napoli. Castel dell'Ovo. Castel Nuovo. They have all told me something about the people who built them. But now I want to listen to the people who came afterwards. Because the history of Napoli did not end when its kings disappeared. It did not end when its kingdoms changed. It did not end when its walls became monuments. It continued in kitchens, workshops, harbours, churches, squares and family celebrations. It continued in songs. And it continued in dance.
Castles preserve the memory of kingdoms. Songs and dances preserve the memory of people. Perhaps that is why the tarantella is so important. It reminds us that history is not only what survives in stone. Sometimes history is what survives in us.
There is something wonderfully rebellious about that. You can conquer a city. You can change its rulers. You can redraw its borders. You can build new palaces over old foundations. You can change its language. You can change its name. But if its people continue to sing, something remains. If they continue to gather, something remains. If they continue to dance, something remains. And so, after walking through the Napoli of emperors, kings, saints, fishermen and sailors, I arrive at another Napoli. A Napoli without a throne. Without an army. Without a crown. Just a drum, a song and a human body moving to a rhythm that has travelled across centuries. Perhaps this is the most democratic monument of all. No marble. No bronze. No fortress. Just people. Keeping something alive.
And somewhere in the streets of Napoli, the tammorra begins again. The hands strike the drum. The rhythm accelerates. Someone laughs. Someone starts singing. And Napoli dances. Because some cities preserve their history in monuments. Napoli preserves part of hers in movement.
Perhaps that is what the tammurriata has always been: not simply a dance, but a people remembering who they are.
More information: L'Italo-Americano
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There are places that tell the history of a city. And then there are places that seem to tell the history of an entire sea. Castel Nuovo is one of them.
Standing beside the harbour of Napoli, the massive medieval fortress known as Maschio Angioino is impossible to ignore. Its towers, walls and monumental entrance have watched over the city for centuries, witnessing the rise and fall of dynasties, wars, earthquakes, political transformations and the endless movement of people across the Mediterranean.
But for me, Castel Nuovo has another meaning. Every time I see it, I see Napoli -but I also see Barcelona. Because carved into this fortress is part of a history that Napoli and the Crown of Aragon once shared. And perhaps this is one of the things I love most about the Mediterranean: our history has never respected modern borders.
When Castel Nuovo was built in the thirteenth century, Napoli was entering a new political era. Charles I of Anjou conquered the Kingdom of Sicily in 1266 and established Napoli as the centre of his continental kingdom. The old Norman-Swabian political order had been replaced by Angevin power, and a new royal residence was needed.
Castel Nuovo was therefore not conceived merely as a defensive fortress. It was a statement. The Angevin kings wanted a royal palace that would demonstrate the importance of Napoli as a political and cultural centre. Its position beside the sea was strategic, but it was also symbolic: the castle faced the Mediterranean, the great highway through which armies, merchants, artists, pilgrims and ideas had travelled for centuries.
Napoli was not a peripheral city. It was a capital. And for several centuries, the Kingdom of Napoli would remain one of the great political entities of medieval and early modern Europe.
The castle itself would change with the rulers who occupied it. The Angevins built it. The Aragonese transformed it. And that transformation is where my own story becomes entangled with the history of Napoli.
There is a Catalan-Aragonese connection. In 1442, Alfons V of Aragon conquered Napoli and entered the city as its new king. He was not simply another foreign ruler arriving in Napoli. He was a Mediterranean monarch whose domains connected territories separated by hundreds of kilometres of sea: the Crown of Aragon included the Kingdom of Aragon, the Principality of Catalonia, the Kingdom of Valencia, the Kingdom of Majorca and other territories across the Mediterranean.
Napoli consequently became part of a much larger Mediterranean political world. And Alfons understood perfectly the symbolic importance of Castel Nuovo. He transformed the Angevin fortress into an extraordinary royal residence and gave it one of the most magnificent entrances of the Italian Renaissance: the monumental triumphal arch built between the towers. It celebrates his arrival in Napoli. But it also tells us something fascinating about power in the fifteenth-century Mediterranean.
Look carefully at the decoration and you will find the heraldic language of the Crown of Aragon. The bars of Aragon, the Balears Islands, Catalunya and València are there in stone. For a Catalan visitor, there is something unexpectedly emotional about seeing them in Napoli. They are not a modern addition. They are not there because someone wanted to create a symbolic connection between Barcelona and Napoli centuries later. They are there because Barcelona, Napoli and the wider Mediterranean were once part of the same political and commercial world. The Mediterranean was not a frontier separating us. It was the road connecting us.
This is also why Castel Nuovo has always made me smile. When I lived in Napoli during my Erasmus years in the 1990s, I spent an enormous amount of time near the harbour. I needed the Mediterranean. I still do. I would walk towards the port, wander along the waterfront and simply watch the sea. Napoli was never just the city where I happened to be studying. It became a place that entered my emotional geography. And, somehow, my being Catalan became useful. When people at the port knew that I was Catalan, they would sometimes send me towards places connected with Catalan-speaking visitors. I remember thinking that it was rather funny. I had come from Barcelona to Napoli , and suddenly my identity as a Mediterranean person was becoming part of my everyday life.
But perhaps it shouldn't be surprising. The connection between Barcelona and Napoli is older than any modern idea of tourism. It belongs to a time when ships connected our cities, when merchants crossed the sea, when soldiers and sailors moved between ports, when kings ruled territories on both sides of the Mediterranean and when languages travelled with them.
The Napoli of the Aragonese period was a city of extraordinary ambition. Alfons V did not merely conquer Napoli. He wanted to make it one of the great cultural capitals of his world. His court attracted humanists, architects, artists and intellectuals. The city became an important centre of Renaissance culture, and Castel Nuovo became one of the great symbols of this transformation. The monumental triumphal arch is therefore more than an impressive doorway. It is propaganda carved in marble. It announces the arrival of a new king. It celebrates military victory. It associates Alfons with the traditions of ancient Rome. And it places Napoli within the cultural universe of the Renaissance.
Standing beneath it today, it is easy to forget how radical this transformation must have seemed. The medieval fortress had become a Renaissance royal palace. And Napoli had become the centre of a kingdom whose influence extended far beyond the walls of the city.
There is something deeply Mediterranean about this story. Barcelona and Napoli are separated by hundreds of kilometres, but the sea between them has always been a connection rather than a barrier. Both cities grew through their relationship with the Mediterranean. Both became major ports. Both received people, languages, religions, food, music and ideas from elsewhere. Both have been conquered and ruled by others. Both have suffered wars and bombardments. Both have rebuilt themselves. And both have populations who can be extraordinarily proud of their city -sometimes with a level of passion that outsiders may find difficult to understand. Perhaps this is one of the defining characteristics of Mediterranean cities. We are constantly being told that cities are defined by their borders. But ports know better. A port is defined by what arrives. And by what leaves.
Today, millions of people pass through Napoli without necessarily noticing the small details that reveal this shared history. They see a castle. They photograph the towers. They walk through the triumphal arch. They admire the architecture. But I always look for those familiar heraldic symbols. The red and gold. The bars. The signs of a political world that disappeared centuries ago but left its fingerprints in stone. And when I see them, I think of Barcelona. Not necessarily the Barcelona of today, but the Barcelona of the Mediterranean -the city of sailors, merchants, shipyards, traders and travellers; a city whose history was inseparable from the sea.
That Barcelona and that Napoli understood something that modern Europe sometimes forgets: the Mediterranean has always been a space of connection.
History should not be used to recreate old kingdoms. It should be used to understand how deeply connected we have always been. The Crown of Aragon is history. The Kingdom of Napoli is history. The medieval Mediterranean is history. But Barcelona and Napoli are still here. Still looking towards the same sea. Still functioning as major Mediterranean cities. Still shaped by their ports. Still receiving people from every corner of the world. And perhaps that is the most beautiful legacy of Castel Nuovo. Its stones remind us that cities can share a past without needing to be identical. They can have different languages, traditions and identities and still belong to the same cultural landscape.
The Mediterranean does not erase our differences. It makes them visible. And somehow, it also connects them.
I have visited Castel Nuovo many times. I have walked towards it from the harbour, as I did so many years ago when Napoli was my home. I have walked past its towers without thinking about kings or dynasties. I have simply walked towards the sea. And yet, every time I return to its façade, I am reminded of how quickly human life passes. The stones remain. The towers remain. The sea remains. The flags and coats of arms have outlived the people who ordered them to be carved. The kingdoms disappeared. The kings disappeared. The political borders changed. And we are still here, walking along the same Mediterranean shore.
Perhaps this is what the Mediterranean teaches us best. We are temporary. The sea is not.
Castel Nuovo has stood beside the harbour for centuries, watching generations come and go. I was once a young woman from Barcelona arriving in Napoli. Today I return in memory, older, carrying photographs, stories and a little more history. And when I see those red and golden bars carved into the stone, I don't see a forgotten political empire. I see a connection. Between Napoli and Barcelona. Between past and present. Between two great Mediterranean ports. And between all of us who, in one way or another, have learned to live looking towards the same sea.
Tempus fugit. The castle remains. The Mediterranean remains. And we keep walking.
More information: Ruins & Remnants
Alfons, prince among kings, built this fortress.
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There are places in Napoli where history is written in stone. And then there are places where history is written in salt. Borgo Marinari belongs to the second kind.
Built on the small island of Megaride, beside Castel dell'Ovo, the Borgo is one of those places where Napoli seems to have grown directly out of the Mediterranean. The little harbour, the boats, the stone buildings, the narrow passage connecting the island to the city and the constant presence of the sea create a landscape that feels almost detached from the Napoli around it.
Today, it is a beautiful and much-loved place. Restaurants, cafés, boats and visitors have transformed it into one of the city's most attractive corners. But before the visitors came, there were people who simply worked here. People whose lives depended on the sea. And that is the story I want to remember.
When we visit a Mediterranean harbour today, we tend to look at it as scenery. We admire the boats. We photograph the water. We sit at a restaurant overlooking the sea. We watch the sunset. But there was a time when the sea was not scenery. It was work. It was food. It was uncertainty. It was the family income. It was the reason someone got up before dawn. And sometimes, it was the reason someone did not come home.
Borgo Marinari developed around its relationship with the sea, particularly fishing. The small harbour was part of a much larger maritime world connected with neighbouring Santa Lucia. I like to imagine this place before it became one of the picturesque corners of Napoli. I imagine a fisherman waking up while the city was still asleep. There would be no tourists. No cameras. No restaurants preparing tables for lunch. Only the darkness, the smell of the sea and the sound of a boat being prepared. He would check the nets, the ropes, the engine or the oars. He would probably know the weather better than any forecast could tell him. He would know the sea in the same intimate way that a farmer knows his fields. And then he would leave. Perhaps his wife would still be awake. Perhaps she had helped prepare the boat. Perhaps she would spend the morning repairing or preparing nets, sorting the catch when it returned, taking care of the household and the children, and helping to sustain an occupation that was never exclusively the work of the person who went to sea. Because fishing has always been much more than fishermen. It has been families.
One of the things I find most fascinating about traditional fishing communities is how much of the work happens without ever leaving the shore. A fishing boat may belong to the person who goes out to sea, but the life surrounding that boat belongs to many more people. There are nets to prepare and repair. Fish to clean. Equipment to maintain. Boats to look after. Food to prepare. Children to raise. Accounts to manage. And there are the endless domestic tasks that have historically fallen disproportionately on women, often without being recognised as part of the economic activity of the family.
The Mediterranean fishing tradition was therefore also a story of women. Women who waited. Women who worked. Women who repaired. Women who sold. Women who carried the household when the sea took the men away for days or weeks. Women who understood that a change in the wind could change the entire day. Their work was often invisible precisely because it happened on land. Yet without it, the boat could not leave.
The sea is beautiful. It is also dangerous. This is perhaps something we forget when we romanticise the Mediterranean. We have turned the sea into an image. Blue water. White boats. Sunsets. Pine trees. Lemons. Fishing villages. Postcards. But for the people who make their living from it, the Mediterranean has never been merely beautiful. It can be violent. A sudden storm can transform the sea in minutes. Engines fail. Nets become entangled. Boats collide. Visibility disappears. And weather that looks insignificant from the shore can become a serious threat several kilometres offshore.
Fishing remains one of the world's most dangerous occupations. And yet, when we talk about Mediterranean culture, we often talk about food, architecture, mythology, music, literature and art. We talk much less about the people who actually went out into that sea and brought part of it back to us. Perhaps we should.
There is something deeply Mediterranean about fishing communities. Not because all Mediterranean fishermen live in the same way -they certainly do not- but because the sea has created connections between very different cultures for thousands of years. The same sea connects Napoli with Barcelona. Napoli with Marseille. Napoli with Sicily. Napoli with Greece. With Tunisia. With Malta. With the Balearic Islands. Different languages. Different histories. Different religions. Different political borders. But the same sea. And, for centuries, remarkably similar rhythms of life.
The fisherman leaving before sunrise. The family waiting on shore. The fish arriving at the harbour. The nets drying in the sun. The smell of salt and diesel. The morning market. The knowledge passed from father to son -and increasingly, from one generation to another in ways that do not always follow traditional gender roles. This is not folklore. It is intangible cultural heritage.
Perhaps I feel this particularly strongly because I come from Barcelona. Barcelona has always had a complicated relationship with the sea, but fishing is an essential part of its history. The fishermen's relationship with the area that would become Barceloneta goes back centuries, and the fishing community became deeply intertwined with the neighbourhood. For generations, Barceloneta was not simply a neighbourhood next to the sea. It was a neighbourhood of the sea. The fishermen's boats occupied the waterfront. Their families lived nearby. Nets were repaired. Fish was sold. Maritime trades shaped the identity of the community. Even Santa Maria del Mar carries traces of that maritime history: fishermen and sailors contributed to its construction and were represented within the basilica.
Today, Barceloneta is one of Barcelona's most visited neighbourhoods. People come for the beach. For the restaurants. For the views. For the Mediterranean lifestyle. And there is nothing wrong with that. But sometimes I wonder whether, when we look at the sea from Barceloneta, we remember the people who once looked at exactly the same sea because their livelihood depended on it.
Much of Barcelona's fishing activity has moved away from the old neighbourhood, while ports such as Vilanova i la Geltrú continue to maintain an important fishing tradition.
The transformation of Barceloneta is a familiar Mediterranean story: places created by maritime communities can eventually become places consumed as picturesque versions of the very culture that created them. This is where the story becomes uncomfortable. Fishing communities are ageing. Young people are often reluctant to enter a profession that can be physically demanding, dangerous and economically uncertain.
The European Union itself recognises the problems of generational renewal, economic pressure and the particular difficulties faced by small-scale fisheries. In 2021, small-scale fisheries employed around 60,000 fishers in the EU and accounted for 49% of employment in EU fisheries; more than half of this sector is concentrated in the Mediterranean. At the same time, the European Commission acknowledges that young people are turning away from fishing and that small-scale fishing communities face economic hardship.
And this creates a paradox. We want sustainable seas. We want healthy fish stocks. We want responsible consumption. We want Mediterranean cuisine. We want local products. We want traditional coastal communities. But none of these things can survive if there are no people left willing or able to work at sea. Protecting the Mediterranean cannot mean protecting only the fish. We must also protect the people whose lives have been intertwined with those fish for generations. Sustainability must include them.
There is something almost poetic about the fact that fishing is simultaneously one of humanity's oldest occupations and one of the professions whose future is increasingly uncertain. We have sophisticated boats. Satellite navigation. Weather forecasting. Modern engines. Scientific monitoring. European policies. And yet the fundamental relationship remains extraordinarily simple: Someone goes out to sea. Someone waits for them to return. The sea provides. And the sea demands respect.
Perhaps that is why fishing has always generated such strong communities. You cannot negotiate with the sea. You cannot order it to behave. You can only learn it. Respect it. Read it. And accept that you are never completely in control. There is a humility in that which modern life sometimes forgets.
Today, Borgo Marinari is no longer the fishing village it once was. Its identity has changed, as almost every Mediterranean coastal community has changed. The little harbour is now surrounded by tourism, culture, restaurants and leisure activities. Official tourism information describes it today as a place centred on culture, art and tourism, while its maritime past remains part of its identity. But I do not want to look at Borgo Marinari and see only what it has become. I want to imagine what it remembers. I want to imagine the boats leaving before dawn. The fishermen checking their nets. The women working on shore. Children growing up knowing the names of the winds. The smell of fish arriving at the harbour. The tired faces at the end of a long day. The relief when the boats returned. And the silence when one did not.
Because behind every picturesque Mediterranean harbour there is a human history that is much less picturesque. There is work. There is sacrifice. There is danger. There is love. There is waiting. And there is an extraordinary amount of knowledge accumulated over generations.
Perhaps this is what I want to say today. The Mediterranean is not simply the sea that surrounds us. It is one of the great cultural forces that made us who we are. It crossed our borders before our borders existed. It connected languages that were supposedly different. It carried merchants, soldiers, migrants, philosophers, artists and travellers. It carried wars and ideas. It carried food, music and stories. And it carried fishermen. Thousands upon thousands of them. Men and women whose names will never appear in history books, but whose work fed cities and communities for generations.
So when I look at Borgo Marinari, I do not want to see only Castel dell'Ovo rising above the water. I want to see the people beneath its shadow. The people who knew the Mediterranean not as a postcard, but as a workplace. The people who understood that the sea could be generous one day and merciless the next. The people who left home before sunrise so that someone else could have fish on their table. And the women whose hands, often invisible to history, helped hold that entire world together.
This is my small tribute to them. To the fishermen. To the sailors. To the women who repaired the nets. To the families who waited. To the communities that grew around the harbours. To those who came home. And to those who did not.
Because the Mediterranean we love was not created only by poets, emperors, architects and sailors of ancient legend. It was also created by ordinary people who woke up in the darkness, pushed a boat into the water and went to work. And perhaps the most respectful thing we can do today, when we sit beside the sea and admire its beauty, is to remember that someone once risked everything to make a living from it.
The sea is beautiful. But for those who work on it, it has never been just beautiful. It has been home. It has been work. It has been life.
More information: Castel dell'Ovo
At sea, there are no taverns.
Neapolitan proverb
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There are places that you visit once. And there are places that become part of you. For me, Castel dell'Ovo belongs firmly to the second category.
When I lived in Napoli, I used to walk down to the port almost every day. I needed the Mediterranean the way some people need music, coffee or fresh air. I would walk along the waterfront, following the sea, until the paved path carried me towards the ancient fortress standing on the small island-like promontory of Megaride.
I have been to Castel dell'Ovo many times. But one visit remains particularly vivid. It was my thirtieth birthday. Claire Fontaine came from Barcelona to visit to me and she had bought a tiny Neapolitan cake and brought some candles with her. We sat there in the late afternoon, looking towards the bay, trying to keep the candles alight while the sea breeze repeatedly blew them out. We laughed. We tried again. The candles went out again. And again. More than twenty years have passed since then. The castle is still there. The sea is still there. Napoli is still there. But we are not the same people who sat there that evening. Perhaps this is what places like Castel dell'Ovo teach us. Stone has an extraordinary memory. Human beings do not.
The first surprise about Castel dell'Ovo is that it is considerably older than its medieval appearance suggests. Much older. The fortress we see today is only the latest chapter of a story that began long before medieval Napoli existed.
The rocky promontory of Megaride occupies a remarkable position at the edge of the Bay of Napoli. It is almost impossible to imagine a better place from which to understand why this coastline has attracted human beings for thousands of years.
Before the castle, before the Roman villa, before the medieval fortress, there was the Greek world. The story of Napoli is deeply connected with the Greek settlements of Campania. The ancient city of Neapolis -the “new city”- emerged within a landscape already shaped by earlier Greek foundations, including Parthenope.
Megaride belongs to that very early layer of the city's history. And this is why I find Castel dell'Ovo so fascinating. It is not simply a castle. It is a historical palimpsest. One civilisation built upon the traces of another. One era transformed the structures left by the previous one. Names changed. Gods changed. Languages changed. Political powers changed. But the rock remained. And the sea remained.
Then came Rome. And the story of Megaride took another extraordinary turn. The promontory became associated with the Castrum Lucullanum, the luxurious seaside complex traditionally connected with the Roman statesman Lucius Licinius Lucullus. Lucullus is remembered not only as a military commander and politician, but also for his legendary wealth and extravagant lifestyle. His villa complex in Napoli became almost synonymous with Roman luxury. Gardens. Terraces. Exotic plants. Fishponds. Banquets. Libraries. The kind of wealth that eventually gave rise to the word Lucullan -something extraordinarily luxurious or sumptuous.
It is difficult to reconcile that image with the fortress we see today. And yet this is precisely what makes Napoli so extraordinary. The same piece of land can be, at different moments, a Greek settlement, a Roman villa, a fortified site, a monastic complex and a medieval castle. Napoli does not erase its past. It builds over it.
Perhaps one of the most extraordinary chapters in the history of Megaride came at the end of the Western Roman Empire. In the fifth century, the complex was fortified. And in 476, after the young emperor Romulus Augustulus was deposed, he was sent into exile in Napoli. Think about that for a moment. The same Mediterranean landscape that had witnessed Greek colonisation, Roman expansion and extraordinary imperial wealth was now witnessing the end of the Western Roman imperial tradition. One world was disappearing. Another was beginning. And Megaride was still there. Watching. A castle that wasn't always a castle Over the centuries, the site continued to change.
There was a monastic presence. There were fortifications. There were Norman transformations. The strategic importance of the promontory increased as Napoli developed into one of the great cities of the Mediterranean. Eventually, the medieval fortress that we recognise today emerged. But I think calling it simply a “medieval castle” is slightly misleading. Because when you stand there, you are standing on layer upon layer of history. Greek Napoli. Roman Napoli. Late Antiquity. Medieval Napoli. And, eventually, modern Napoli. It is almost as if the city has compressed more than two thousand years into a single rock.
Of course, no story about Castel dell'Ovo would be complete without its most famous legend. The name itself means “Castle of the Egg.” According to medieval tradition, the Roman poet Virgil -who was already surrounded by a considerable aura of magic and mystery in the medieval imagination- supposedly hid a magical egg somewhere within the castle. As long as the egg remained intact, the castle -and even Napoli itself- would remain safe. If the egg were ever broken, disaster would follow. It is an extraordinary legend. But perhaps it is also an extraordinarily Neapolitan one.
Because Napoli has always lived comfortably alongside the boundary between history and legend, faith and superstition, the sacred and the everyday. The city that venerates Saint Januarius can also turn Diego Armando Maradona into a deity. The city that celebrates its saints can be fascinated by ghosts and the souls of the dead. The city that preserves Roman ruins can tell stories about magical eggs. In Napoli, these things do not necessarily contradict one another. They simply coexist.
There is another reason Castel dell'Ovo means so much to me. Its position makes it impossible to forget the sea. And the sea is the thread that connects so many of the places I have been writing about. At Paestum, I found the Greek Mediterranean. At Pompeii and Herculaneum, the Roman Mediterranean. At Procida, Ischia, Capri and Baia, I found islands and coastlines shaped by the same sea. And here, at Castel dell'Ovo, all those layers seem to converge.
The Mediterranean was never simply a geographical boundary. It was a highway. Greek ships crossed it. Phoenician ships crossed it. Roman ships crossed it. Merchants, soldiers, migrants, artists, philosophers and travellers crossed it. Languages travelled across it. Religions travelled across it. Recipes travelled across it. Ideas travelled across it. Cultures collided, mixed and transformed one another. And Napoli was always there, facing the sea.
Perhaps this is why I love returning to Castel dell'Ovo. Every time I walk towards it, I see the same stones. But I am never the same person. When I was thirty, Claire and I sat there with our little cake and our hopeless candles, fighting against the evening breeze. We were young. We had no idea how quickly the following twenty years would disappear.
Today, when I think about that evening, the memory feels almost like an archaeological layer of my own life. The castle has survived centuries. It has survived political upheavals, wars, earthquakes, bombardments and the transformation of Napoli around it. We have not. And perhaps that is the most humbling thing about ancient places. They make us realise how brief our own existence is. Tempus fugit. Time flies. Or perhaps, more accurately, time simply moves forward while we remain for a moment in its path.
This is something I have learned repeatedly while travelling through Campania. At Paestum, the Greek temples remain standing. At Pompeii, an entire Roman city was preserved by catastrophe. At Herculaneum, streets and houses still tell us about people who lived almost two thousand years ago. At Castel dell'Ovo, different civilisations have left their traces on the same piece of land. The monuments remain. We change. Our bodies age. Our friendships evolve. People we loved disappear. Cities transform. And yet, sometimes, we can return to the same place and recover a moment that we thought had been lost.
That is what happened to me at Castel dell'Ovo. I can still see the late afternoon. I can still see the bay. I can still see that tiny cake. And I can still see the candles being extinguished by the Mediterranean breeze. For a few seconds, twenty years disappear. And I am thirty again.
Perhaps that is the real magic of Castel dell'Ovo. Not the egg. Not the legend. Not even the extraordinary history of Megaride. It is the fact that the place has witnessed so much human history while remaining stubbornly present. Greek settlers came. Romans came. Emperors disappeared. Kings came. Monks came. Armies came. Cities changed. People were born and died. And the Mediterranean continued to breathe beside the rock.
Castel dell'Ovo remains there, looking across the Bay of Naples as it has done for centuries. And every time I walk towards it, I am reminded of something both beautiful and slightly painful: the monuments endure, but our lives are only a brief visit.
Perhaps that is why we should look. Really look. At the temples. At the castles. At the sea. At the people sitting beside us. At the friends who share the journey. At the tiny cakes. At the candles that refuse to stay alight. Because one day, those small moments will become our own archaeology. And perhaps, after we are gone, someone else will walk along the same path, look at the same stones and remember that human beings once stood there too.
Tempus fugit. The castle remains. The sea remains. And for one brief moment, we are here.
Mediterranean, as always.
More information: LBV
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There are places you visit. And then there are places that seem to recognise you. Paestum is one of them.
I had visited it several times before, always arriving by car. I knew the road, the landscape, the approach, and the extraordinary moment when the ancient temples began to emerge from the Mediterranean countryside. But one year, when my friend Claire Fontaine travelled with me through Campania, I decided to show her Paestum without telling her where we were going. I wanted her to discover it. We took the train and got off at Paestum station. And then, for the first time, I realised that there was a small problem. I had always arrived by car. I knew where Paestum was. I simply wasn't entirely sure how to get there from the railway station. So I did what generations of travellers had done before smartphones, GPS and Google Maps: I looked at the sun, tried to work out where the sea was, and confidently started walking.
About one or two hundred metres later, I had to confess. "I don't actually know where we are." Claire was not particularly impressed. Especially because it was very hot. We continued walking. And then, suddenly, we crossed a small pine grove. And there they were. The temples. I will never forget Claire's face. "Oh my God." It was not the reaction of someone looking at a collection of archaeological ruins. It was the reaction of someone suddenly confronted with something extraordinarily beautiful. Something ancient. Something that had survived.
There, beneath the Campanian sun, stood the monumental Greek temples of Paestum, astonishingly preserved after more than two thousand years. And there were hardly any people around. For a moment, it felt as though we had discovered them ourselves.
Paestum was originally founded by the Greeks as Poseidonia, probably towards the end of the 7th century BC. It was part of the extraordinary Greek presence in southern Italy that we call Magna Graecia -Megálē Hellás, Greater Greece. This is one of the things that makes southern Italy so fascinating. The ancient Mediterranean was never a collection of isolated civilisations. It was a network. People travelled. They sailed. They traded. They founded cities. They carried their gods, languages, artistic traditions, architectural ideas, food and customs with them.
The Greeks reached the shores of southern Italy and Sicily and established communities that became some of the most remarkable centres of the ancient Mediterranean. Poseidonia was one of them. Later, the city came under Lucanian control and eventually became a Roman colony, receiving the name Paestum. And yet, standing there today, it is the Greek character of the place that overwhelms you.
The temples are impossible to ignore. They dominate the landscape not because they are surrounded by modern buildings or monuments, but precisely because they are not. They stand among fields, trees and Mediterranean vegetation. The landscape has not completely surrendered to the city. And perhaps that is why Paestum feels so powerful.
Paestum's three great Greek temples are among the best-preserved Doric temples anywhere in the ancient world.
The building traditionally known as the Temple of Hera, the great temple traditionally called the Temple of Neptune, and the Temple of Athena form an extraordinary architectural ensemble. Their traditional names, however, should be treated with some caution. Archaeologists have debated the precise identities of the deities to whom the temples were dedicated, and the evidence does not always allow us to be certain. But perhaps that uncertainty makes them even more fascinating. Because what remains is not simply the name of a god. What remains is the physical expression of a civilisation. Columns. Stone. Proportion. Light. Geometry. Space. And an extraordinary understanding of how architecture can transform the relationship between human beings and the landscape.
The temples do not simply occupy the landscape. They converse with it. Claire and I spent more than three hours there. We sat beneath a large olive tree, close to one of the temples. I don't remember which one. But I remember the shade. I remember the heat. I remember the silence. And I remember looking at those stones and feeling something that is difficult to explain. It was not simply admiration for ancient architecture. It was something closer to pride. An external pride in what we were seeing. And an internal pride in what we are. Mediterranean.
Proudly Mediterranean.
Because the Mediterranean is not merely a sea. It is a cultural space. A meeting place. A crossroads that has connected people for thousands of years. Its shores speak different languages, belong to different countries and have developed very different histories. And yet there are things that repeatedly connect them. The landscape. The light. The olive tree. The vine. The sea. The markets. The food. The architecture. The way people occupy public space. The sound of voices in the streets. The music. The relationship with death. The relationship with family. The extraordinary ability to sit around a table for hours. We may disagree about almost everything. But sometimes, beneath all those differences, there is something recognisable. Something Mediterranean.
We often look at maps and see borders. Ancient people saw routes. The sea that separates us today was also the sea that connected people yesterday. Greek ships crossed it. Phoenician ships crossed it. Roman ships crossed it. Merchants, sailors, soldiers, philosophers, migrants and travellers crossed it. Ideas crossed it. Religions crossed it. Recipes crossed it. Words crossed it. Music crossed it. Civilisations crossed it. And they left traces of themselves on shores that today belong to completely different nations. That is why I have always found the concept of Mare Nostrum fascinating.
The Romans called the Mediterranean Mare Nostrum -"Our Sea"- after establishing control over much of its coastline. But perhaps today we should be careful with the possessive. It is not really our sea. It belongs to all the people who have lived around it. To Greeks and Italians. To Catalans and Sicilians. To Andalusians and Provençals. To Maltese and Tunisians. To Croats and Albanians. To Egyptians and Lebanese. To Turks and Cypriots. To countless peoples whose histories have been intertwined by this enormous blue space. The Mediterranean does not belong to one civilisation. It is one of the places where civilisations met. And Paestum is one of its most beautiful testimonies.
Perhaps this is why I feel that Paestum deserves to be remembered not merely as an archaeological site, but as a symbol of Hellenism. Hellenism is sometimes reduced to marble statues, philosophers and temples. But it was much more than that. It was a way of understanding the world. An extraordinary intellectual, artistic and cultural tradition that travelled far beyond mainland Greece. And southern Italy became one of its great homes.
Walking through Paestum, you realise that the Greek world was not something distant, confined to the Aegean. It was here. In Campania. On the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Under the same Mediterranean sun that shines today. And perhaps that is what makes the experience so overwhelming. You are not simply looking at the past. You are looking at one of the foundations of the cultural landscape in which we still live.
I often think about that olive tree. There was nothing particularly monumental about it. It wasn't a temple. It wasn't a column. It wasn't a piece of sculpture. It was simply an olive tree. But it gave us shade. And for three hours, Claire and I sat beneath it looking at the temples. The irony is beautiful. The temples had survived for more than two thousand years. The olive tree belonged to the living landscape. And for a few hours, we occupied the space between them. Ancient stone behind us. Living tree above us. Mediterranean light everywhere.
It felt almost like being temporarily inserted into a very long story. A story that had begun long before us and would continue long after we had left.
That first sight of Paestum was, quite simply, a cultural slap in the face. A magnificent one. And perhaps I needed it. Because there is something wonderfully humbling about standing in front of something built by people who lived more than two thousand years ago and realising that their sense of proportion, beauty and permanence can still leave us speechless. We like to think of ourselves as modern. Connected. Advanced. Unprecedented. And then we arrive at Paestum. And a column looks at us. And suddenly our sense of importance becomes slightly smaller. Not insignificant. Just... smaller. And I think that is a good thing. Ancient places can teach us humility.
I wanted Claire to see a magical place. Instead, Paestum reminded both of us that magic does not always need to be invented. Sometimes it is already there. It has simply been waiting for us. We walked there through the heat, slightly lost, following the sun and trying to find the sea. And then a small pine grove opened. And beyond it stood the temples. Thousands of years old. Silent. Beautiful. Still standing. Claire looked at them and said: "Oh my God." I understood exactly what she meant. Because sometimes there are no better words.
Paestum is not simply a place where the past has survived. It is a place where the Mediterranean still speaks. Through its stone. Through its olive trees. Through its light. Through its silence. And through the people who continue to stand beneath that sun, looking at those temples and feeling, perhaps without even knowing why, that they are looking at something that belongs to all of us. Not because we own it. But because we are part of the same sea of history. The same light. The same cultural memory. The same Mediterranean.
Proudly Mediterranean.
And, just for a moment, very small beneath those enormous stones.
More information: Paestum Velia
Πάντων χρημάτων μέτρον ἐστὶν ἄνθρωπος
Man is the measure of all things.
Protagoras
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There are cities where religion is something you enter through the doors of a church. And then there is Napoli. In Napoli, religion is not necessarily inside the church. It is on the walls. It is in the streets. It is in the flowers placed beneath a tiny image of a saint. It is in the candles burning beside a photograph. It is in the voices of people talking to saints as if they were old friends. It is in miracles, promises, processions, superstition, music and football. And sometimes, perhaps inevitably in Napoli, it is also in death.
In the heart of the historic centre stands the monumental complex of Santa Chiara, one of the great medieval foundations of Napoli. The complex dates from the Angevin period and became one of the city's most important religious institutions. Its history is inseparable from the history of Napoli itself, and its architecture reflects the successive layers of cultures that have shaped the city. UNESCO includes Santa Chiara among the outstanding monuments of Napoli' historic centre.
But there is something about Santa Chiara that interests me even more than its architecture. It is what the place represents. Because if you want to understand Napoli, you have to understand that faith here has never been entirely obedient.
Napoli has its saints. Plenty of them. But the relationship between the city and its saints is wonderfully peculiar. The most famous is undoubtedly Saint Januarius -San Gennaro, the patron saint of Napoli. His blood is traditionally kept in two glass ampoules in the Chapel of the Treasury of Napoli Cathedral, and on several occasions each year the faithful gather to witness the expected liquefaction of the relic. The phenomenon has generated centuries of devotion, debate and popular fascination.
But San Gennaro is not some distant celestial bureaucrat. He belongs to Napoli. And Napoli expects things from him. In one particularly extraordinary aspect of the tradition, if the blood does not liquefy, the reaction of the faithful has historically not always been one of quiet resignation. They can complain. They can scold him. They can even insult him. Because the relationship is personal. You are our saint. You are supposed to look after us.
Treccani describes this popular relationship with San Gennaro as one of the great contradictions of Neapolitan spirituality: the saint is expected to descend from his elevated position and share the difficulties, injustices and suffering of his city. That is Napoli. Even heaven is expected to participate in everyday life.
San Gennaro is not alone. The devotion to Padre Pio of Pietrelcina is enormous throughout Campania and southern Italy. There is something particularly Neapolitan about this form of spirituality: the saint is not simply an historical figure. He is someone you can ask for help. Someone whose photograph can be kept at home. Someone whose image can appear beside family photographs. Someone you can speak to. Someone who is expected to listen. The boundary between the sacred and the everyday becomes wonderfully blurred. And perhaps that is why Napoli has always produced such a powerful culture of popular devotion.
Religion here is not necessarily an abstract theological system. It is a relationship. And, of course, Napoli eventually solved the problem of finding a new deity. His name was Diego Armando Maradona. I remember this very well. When people discovered that I came from Barcelona and was a Barça supporter, they once took me to a tiny shrine on Via Benedetto Croce. I looked at the little altar. Flowers. Devotion. Hair. I asked: "Is it the hair of a saint? Padre Pio? A famous artist? Someone from the neighbourhood?" They looked at me as if I had just asked the most ridiculous question imaginable. "È Dio. È Diego Armando Maradona." It is God. Diego Armando Maradona. And I suddenly understood something about Napoli.
The Neapolitans did not necessarily need to separate the sacred from the profane. They could put them together. With flowers. And humour. And absolute sincerity. As a Catalan, I like to think that we had recognised the divinity of the number 10 before anybody else. And then, rather generously, we were given a MESSIah.
But there is another side to Neapolitan spirituality that fascinates me even more. The relationship with death. Napoli does not hide death particularly well. And perhaps that is why death seems less frightening here. You see death represented in art. You see memorials and images of the dead in the streets. You see funeral notices attached to walls announcing the death of a neighbour. You find catacombs beneath the city. You encounter the famous Neapolitan devotion to the anime pezzentelle, the forgotten souls of Purgatory.
The historic centre has an extraordinary subterranean dimension: Roman remains, catacombs and layers of earlier cities exist beneath the streets where modern Neapolitans live. UNESCO itself describes Napoli as a profoundly stratified city in which remains from different historical periods often lie remarkably close together.
The dead are not necessarily somewhere else. They are underneath us. And sometimes, metaphorically, they are beside us. Treccani has described this Neapolitan "underground" not only in archaeological terms, but also as a world of souls, spirits, superstition and relationships with the dead. That is a fascinating coincidence. Beneath Napoli there is an archaeological city. And beneath Napoli' culture there is another invisible city. The city of the dead. Superstition or spirituality? Perhaps we should be careful with the word superstition.
From the outside, it is easy to dismiss beliefs that do not fit neatly into institutional religion as irrational. But cultural anthropology tells us something more interesting. Superstitious practices often emerge where people seek forms of protection, certainty or personal connection that official religion does not necessarily provide. And Napoli has always had plenty of reasons to seek protection. Earthquakes. Volcanoes. Epidemics. Wars. Poverty. Sudden death. An unpredictable sea. An unpredictable city. And Vesuvius watching over everything.
Perhaps when life is uncertain, people develop a particularly intimate relationship with whatever they believe might protect them. A saint. A relic. A lucky number. A prayer. A dream. A dead relative. Or, occasionally, a footballer wearing number 10.
This is why I would hesitate to describe Napoli simply as a religious city. It is more complicated than that. Napoli is devotional. It is superstitious. It is irreverent. It is deeply emotional. It is capable of laughing at its saints while loving them fiercely. It can place flowers before a dead neighbour's photograph and, a few metres away, fill the street with music and celebration. It can pray to San Gennaro and curse him in the same afternoon. It can worship Padre Pio. It can worship Maradona. And it can do all of this without necessarily seeing the contradictions. Perhaps because, in Napoli, contradictions are not problems. They are part of life.
And perhaps that is why today's visit to Santa Chiara has a meaning for The Grandma. Because one of the people who has accompanied her through so many of these Italian adventures is her friend Claire Fontaine.
Claire has been there for the rainstorms, the ferries, the Roman ruins, the impossible roads, the archaeological sites, the last-minute adventures and the occasions when we probably should have made more sensible decisions.
So today, on the feast of Saint Clare, this post is also a little tribute to her. To friendship. To memory. To the people who make places meaningful.
Perhaps this is what I love most about Napoli. It does not always draw the boundaries we expect. Between sacred and profane. Between faith and superstition. Between life and death. Between history and everyday life. Between a saint and a footballer. Between prayer and a joke. Between a church and the street outside it. Everything seems to overlap. And perhaps Santa Chiara is the perfect place from which to contemplate this strange, beautiful city.
Because Napoli has survived empires, dynasties, wars, earthquakes, eruptions and political upheavals. Its churches survived. Its streets survived. Its traditions survived. Its dead survived in memory. And its people continued to laugh, sing, argue, pray, celebrate and fall in love. This is Napoli. A city where faith does not always look like faith. Where death does not always mean absence. Where saints can be scolded. Where gods can wear number 10. And where, beneath the noise, the laughter and the extraordinary vitality of the streets, there is an ancient understanding: We are here for a while.
The dead were here before us. And those who come after us will inherit what we leave behind. Perhaps that is why Napoli celebrates life with such extraordinary intensity. Because it has always known how fragile it is. And perhaps that is why, after all these years, I still feel that when you leave Napoli... you have barely left before you already want to return.
Napoli lives by an unwritten rule: live and let live.
Perhaps that is why its spirituality feels so different. It is not a faith imposed from above, but a faith lived from below -in the streets, in the homes, in the neighbourhoods and in the hearts of its people.
More information: Monastero di Santa Chiara
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There are places you visit for their monuments. There are places you visit for their beauty. And then there are places that make you look at the world around you differently. Herculaneum is one of them.
I first visited the ancient city many years ago, during my Erasmus years in Napoli. I returned on one of my trips with my friend Claire Fontaine, who has accompanied The Grandma on many of her adventures.
That particular visit began at Mount Vesuvius. By the time we came down from the volcano, it was already late afternoon. We decided to visit Herculaneum, assuming that the archaeological site would still be open. It wasn't. We had arrived just as it was closing.
There was no internet, no mobile phone, no online booking system and no way of checking opening hours at the touch of a screen. We simply stood there, rather disappointed, and explained to the man at the entrance that we had come from Barcelona and had no idea whether we would ever have another opportunity to return. He looked at us. Then he let us in. Not officially, not really. He told us that he had to finish closing the site, but that we could spend a few minutes looking from the entrance and take as many photographs as we wanted. We had film cameras with us, and after a long day at Vesuvius we had almost forgotten that we were carrying them. So we did something very different from what we would do today. We simply looked. We stood there and looked at Herculaneum. And I still remember that view. I can close my eyes even now and see the ancient city spread out below us.
From that elevated position, something caught our attention. The streets. We could identify the two fundamental directions of Roman urban planning: the cardines, running across the city, and the decumani, running in the other direction. The regularity of the plan was extraordinary.
The Archaeological Park itself describes Herculaneum's urban layout as remarkably regular, with the decumani running parallel to the coastline and the cardines perpendicular to them, defining rectangular residential blocks. We mentioned this to the man who had let us in. He clearly had not expected that observation. And then something even better happened. He asked us: "Are you in a hurry?" We told him that we had until the last Circumvesuviana train. So instead of spending fifteen minutes there, we spent a couple of hours. That evening became one of those encounters that you remember for decades. We talked about Roman cities. About streets. About orientation. About the relationship between public and private space. About how people moved through a city. About why a city is not simply a collection of buildings, but a system designed around the movement and needs of human beings. And, because we were in Napoli, the conversation somehow also included music. There were wonderful sfogliatellas, delicious ice cream and an unforgettable coffee.
It was not the visit we had planned. It was infinitely better.
The man who had been supposed to close the archaeological site had given us something much more valuable than a few extra minutes inside it. He had given us his time. I don't even know whether he is still with us. He must surely be retired by now. But I have never forgotten him. And this post is, in a way, my small tribute to him.
There is another reason why Herculaneum has always fascinated me. I come from Barcelona. And if you live in Barcelona, you live inside one of the most recognisable urban grids in Europe. The Eixample, designed by Ildefons Cerdà in the nineteenth century, was conceived as a rational extension of the city, based on a regular network of streets and blocks. Cerdà's plan was approved in 1859, and the expansion began after Barcelona's medieval walls were finally demolished.
The standard Eixample block measures approximately 133 metres by 133 metres, while the streets were designed to be around 20 metres wide. The famous chamfered corners were another characteristic element of Cerdà's design.
Of course, Herculaneum and Barcelona are not the same thing. They were separated by almost two thousand years. Cerdà did not simply copy a Roman city. But standing in Herculaneum and looking at its streets, it is impossible for someone from Barcelona not to recognise something familiar. The idea that a city can be planned rather than allowed to grow entirely at random. The idea that streets create relationships between buildings. That orientation matters. That movement matters. That public space matters. That the shape of a city influences the lives of the people who inhabit it.
And suddenly the Roman cardo and decumanus stop being archaeological vocabulary. They become something much more immediate. They become urban language. This is perhaps what makes Herculaneum so extraordinary. The archaeological remains do not merely tell us where people lived. They allow us to reconstruct, with remarkable detail, how they lived.
The site preserves residential and commercial areas, workshops, baths, public buildings and houses with gardens and terraces. The Archaeological Park emphasises precisely this extraordinary ability to reconstruct everyday life at a particular moment in the ancient world. And that is what I find most fascinating. Not the ruins themselves. The people who once walked between them. Someone opening a shop in the morning. Someone carrying food home. Children running through a street. Someone going to the baths. Someone meeting a friend. Someone complaining about the heat. Someone falling in love. Someone making plans for the following day.
People who had no idea that almost two thousand years later, someone would stand above their streets and try to imagine them. The city that disappeared Herculaneum, like Pompeii, was overwhelmed by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. But its fate was different. The volcanic material that buried the city preserved an extraordinary amount of organic material and architectural detail, giving archaeologists an exceptional window into Roman daily life. And there is something deeply moving about that. Because preservation is a strange thing. We celebrate it as archaeologists and historians. We marvel at the mosaics, the wooden objects, the houses, the streets and the inscriptions. But behind every preserved object there was once a living person. Every doorway was someone's doorway. Every street was someone's route home. Every house contained somebody's life.
That is why I find it difficult to look at Herculaneum simply as an archaeological site. It was a city. And cities are made of people.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if that man had simply told us: "Sorry. We're closed." We would have gone away. We would probably have taken the train back to Napoli. And Herculaneum would have remained another archaeological site we had visited. Instead, he opened a door that was already supposed to be closed. He gave two young women from Barcelona a little of his time. And, without knowing it, he gave us a lesson that has stayed with me for decades. About Roman urbanism. About cities. About curiosity. And perhaps, above all, about generosity.
I don't remember his name. But I remember the city he helped us see. And whenever I walk through Barcelona, whenever I cross one of the long streets of the Eixample and look down the regular lines of buildings, I sometimes think about that evening in Herculaneum.
Two cities. Two very different worlds. Two very different moments in history. And between them, an idea that has survived for thousands of years: A city is not only the place where we live. It is the way we organise our lives together. And somewhere in Herculaneum, beneath the streets and houses that Vesuvius buried, there is still the trace of a city that knew that very well.
More information: Herculaneum
Dionysius of Halicarnassus
