Herculaneum Tours with Vesuvius and Pompeii

The distinction is worth getting right, because it explains everything you will look at. Pompeii spent most of that day under a fall of pumice, roughly three metres of it, which accumulated slowly enough that people had hours to decide whether to leave. Roofs collapsed under the weight. Air got in afterwards, and organic material rotted or burned in the normal way.

Herculaneum, upwind of the column, got almost no fallout. What reached it were the surges: clouds of gas and ash moving downhill fast, at several hundred degrees, with no free oxygen in them. Wood in that environment does not combust, it carbonises. So the town kept its roof beams, its staircases, a wooden partition screen with its bronze fittings, a bed, a cradle, rope, cloth and food. Then twenty metres of material piled on top and set like rock.

That last part is why the excavation has never finished. Herculaneum is not cleared, it is cut, which is slow and expensive. And the modern town of Ercolano sits directly on the lid: the site today is a rectangular pit with apartment blocks around the rim, looking down into a Roman street. The dig stops where the twentieth century begins, and it is not going to move.

For two centuries the accepted story was that Herculaneum had emptied in time. Hardly any bodies were being found in the houses, and the obvious reading was that a small town with the sea at the end of the street had got its people onto boats.

Then, from 1980, archaeologists dug out the ancient shoreline. It is now several hundred metres inland, because the eruption pushed the coast out into the bay, and along it ran a row of twelve vaulted chambers open to the sea, used as stores and boat sheds. In nine of the twelve they found around three hundred skeletons, packed together, all dead at the same instant.

They had not escaped. They were waiting on the beach for boats that never came, and the first surge reached them there. As a group they are one of the most valuable skeletal samples anywhere in the ancient world, precisely because they are not a cemetery: a cemetery accumulates over generations, whereas this is a cross-section of one community at one moment, men, women, children, slaves and householders in the same rooms.

You can see the vaults from the terrace above the site, and walk down to the level of the old shoreline. It is the quietest part of a quiet site, and it is the part people remember.

North-west of the excavated town, still mostly under the modern one, is a very large seafront villa that Bourbon engineers reached in the 1750s by sinking shafts and driving tunnels through the hardened tuff. They worked by lamplight in the dark, hauling out bronzes and marbles that now fill rooms of the archaeological museum in Naples, and about eighteen hundred carbonised scrolls that nobody could open without destroying them.

That is the part that matters. Everything else we have from classical literature reached us as copies of copies, made by people who chose what was worth recopying. The Herculaneum scrolls are a working library, carbonised on its shelves, exactly as somebody left it. The villa is generally thought to have belonged to Julius Caesar's father-in-law, and most of it is still down there, below the modern streets and below the water table.

Do not expect to walk through it. A small part is accessible and the rest is a hole in the ground with a pump in it. What you can do is stand at the western end of the site and understand that the interesting thing about Herculaneum is not what has been dug up, it is the proportion that has not.

Here is the uncomfortable fact about this page. Not one of the five listings sells Herculaneum on its own. Every single one attaches it to Pompeii, to the volcano, or to both, and that tells you how the trade values it.

The one shared product, at 120 EUR, does Herculaneum, Vesuvius and Pompeii in a single day. Three sites, one day, and it is not hard to work out which of the three gets compressed. If Herculaneum is the reason you are here, that is the wrong product to buy, however good the price looks against the alternatives.

The other four run from 265 to 890 EUR and are private. What that money buys is not access, since the ticket is the same ticket, but time and the ability to stop. At the top of the range one operator sells a full private day with a named archaeologist, and the reviews on it are as good as reviews get. Whether a day out is worth 890 EUR is your call, but the reason those listings exist is that the site rewards somebody who can explain a carbonised roof beam for five minutes.

There is a third option nobody sells you: go by yourself. The Circumvesuviana runs from Naples to Ercolano Scavi and the entrance is about five hundred metres downhill from the station. The park's own site gives a working day from 8.30 to 17.00, with last admission earlier, as everywhere. It is one of the easiest major sites in Italy to reach without a car.

The approach is the best thing about arriving. You come in from the Corso Resina and walk down a long ramp along the edge of the pit, with the whole excavation open below you and the modern town at your shoulder. A rushed tour covers that ramp in ninety seconds. Take five.

Then the Decumanus Maximus, and the buildings that make the case for this place: the House of the Wooden Partition, where the screen that divided the atrium is still standing on its hinges; the House of Neptune and Amphitrite, with a mosaic in colours that have no business being that bright; the Central Baths, where you can see the suspended floor of the heating system in section; the College of the Augustales with its paintings; and finally the ramp down to the vaults on the old beach.

Ninety minutes at a walking pace, two hours if you keep stopping. And unlike Pompeii, a decent share of it is under a roof, which is why Herculaneum in August is a civilised experience and Pompeii in August is an endurance event.