We headed north skirting the eastern slopes of Vesuvius. This side is no less developed than the one overlooking the bay of Naples, it is estimated that two million people live in the vicinity of the volcano, 800,000 of them in the 'red zone', requiring evacuation in the event of a major eruption.
This level of 'dead cat on the table' thinking does not bode well for humanity's capacity to deal with impending environmental disasters more generally.
We stopped at Lidl in Caserta for a few bits and pieces. The town is Italy's Versaille, home to an enormous Baroque palace built by the king of Naples. We visited it in 2013, I remember the beautiful gardens better than the palace. It was big, cold and ugly. These days Caserta itself has a less salubrious reputation, the apartment blocks hereabouts built as a Naples overspill are blighted by extreme poverty and are hot-beds for organised crime. None of this was obvious in Lidl, which as always achieved its surreptitious mission to be a haven of squeaky clean Germanic orderliness within Europe's more chaotic and dishevelled communities.
Chat in the cab as we sped up the A1 towards Rome became fixated on spot heights. The motorway follows the valleys of the Liri and Sacco, southerly tributaries of the Tiber.
The hills are to the west were around 1000 metres, that's higher than any mountain in England. To the east the Appennines rise towards 2000 metres, brown bears are making a comeback. Outside of the Alpine regions stereotypical images of the Italian countryside tends towards the bucolic - the sunny vine clad slopes of the Chianti or Umbria, in truth the reality is more epic, much of Italy is dizzily mountainous. In a motorhome great to drive past, but a nightmare to drive through.
Somewhere close to the border between Campania and Lazio autumn arrived - trees with yellowing leaves. Deciduous woods are definitely one of the defining sights of more northerly latitudes, the south is greener in winter than in summer which feels odd to people used to four distinct seasons. It's a sign of having many consecutive 'blue Med days' when you begin to regard the landscape a little to the south of Rome as a bit northern looking.
Past the Albano hills, skirting Frascati - you never see it these days in UK supermarkets I remarked. If you are planning to drive around the Rome tangentiale, half past four in the afternoon is not a good time to do it. The motorway itself was busy but free flowing but interchanges and slip roads were a dog eat dog scrum. If it was a single lane, three queues of cars formed, in two lane slip roads a gaggle gathered with much nudging forward, squeezing through and furious horn peeping.
We did well until we reached the vicinity of the Ostia Antica campsite. The road to it involved a 'hamburger roundabout' controlled by lights. Clearly at rush hour no self respecting Italian commuter is going to pay any attention whatsoever to signals. To keep some semblance of order the polizia stradale were on hand to act as referees. We managed to turn left, 1km to our destination the sat nav announced. Sadly the entrance to the site was actually 900m so we sailed straight past it. What I felt like doing was pulling over onto the verge an having a Basil Fawlty style nervous breakdown, what I actually did was drive on, taking a side road for a kilometre or so before finding some waste ground big enough to turn around in. Ten minutes later we were safely installed in Camping Ostia Antica.
Pleasantly situated among umbrella pines, the place has excellent facilities and is next to a cycleway to the famous archaeological remains nearby. Note to self, if you ever decide to revisit Rome arrive in the middle of the day, the city's rush hour is strictly for the natives or foreigners with a death wish.
The remains at Ostia Antica are not as famous as Pompeii or Herculaneum but arguably they are more significant. Though Pompeii is somewhat more extensive, like Herculaneum it is an example of a large Roman provincial town. Ostia was ancient Rome's main port. As the city's population grew to a million during the 1st century CE the goods shipped to Ostia, particularly the grain imports were crucial to sustain the Imperial capital's population. The Emperor may have provided the circuses, Ostia supplied the bread!
The size of the site is overwhelming, it would have taken two or three days to see everything. After about three hours we had reached our limit. Still we managed to explore the central area where the main public buildings were situated:
The commercial area with warehouses and merchant's houses:
Rich citizens' mansions and villas:
An area of upscale apartments:
Parts of Ostia are exceptionally well preserved with the second storey of buildings still intact.
What you have to imagine is the grandeur of the place, buildings' rough brick finish would have been faced in marble. Even more modest or utilitarian structures would have been covered in stucco and decorated.
It was mid-afternoon by the time we exited the site. Though lunch service was coming to a close in the café and restaurants near the entrance we managed to order a couple of sandwiches.
Service was chaotic and slow, but we were in no hurry. The group on the table next to us kept bursting into song, Monteverdi or Palestrina maybe, certainly pre-Baroque. Definitely some choral society's grand day out, they were very good.
We pedalled back to the site. Luckily the rush hour had not yet reached the mass hysteria stage; we had to negotiate the hamburger roundabout from hell in order to reach the bike track back to the campsite. There are pedestrian crossings, we could push our bikes across, but some Italian drivers regard red lights as red rags, so you can't be certain the traffic will stop for you. The polizia stradale had already taken up their positions waving us across without a drama.
On the way to the ruins this morning we noticed a small local Conad supermarket, we needed a few things so we locked up the bikes and headed in. In fact the place had a series of hidden annexes and wasn't small at all. Prize purchase - a big basil plant ..
We head northwards tomorrow, a one night stopover in Tuscany then three nights in Bologna. We are not at the endishness stage yet, but with a ferry booked from Calais in 12 days time journey's end begins to looms on the horizon. It takes an act of will to drive from southern light towards northern gloom. I am not saying it is an act of deliberate self harm, but the prospect is not exactly self care either. It doesn't help that we are heading back to a country whose leader is trending worldwide on social media as a slowly decomposing lettuce. "Why are we going home?" We keep asking each other.
"Oh yes, our 90 days are up on November Ist, that's it, we have no choice." Still it doesn't stop me being...
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