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Herculaneum & Vesuvius Oct 19

It seemed to us that modern Herculaneum is covered, like most of what we saw of urban southern Italy, by a lot of graffiti.


Kind of liked this street name:

And then we found it…

And it was amazing that anyone found anything here. The town was well buried, beneath another town. This is the depth of lava they had to dig through to find what was buried.

The streets of Herculaneum, unlike those of Pompeii, did not run with odure. They were straight and clean

because householders could empty waste into the drains. The drains are in such good shape here there’s a whole field of study around them.

A 2000 year old bed

and the corner of another one:

And some 2000 year old rope. For some things, surprisingly little has changed.

The baths, in good condition: benches still in place…

and a beautiful floor.

More amazing wall paintings…


and mosaics

Had time to notice the interesting labels on the recycling bins near the mini-bus service to Vesuvius.

We had a swift and occasionally alarming ascent up to the summit of Vesuvius. It’s about a 20 minute drive followed by a 20 minute or so walk up the trail to the top.

Helpful signpost.

Hard to know whether the inside or the outside of the path felt safer!

Rewards are many and heavy if you make it to the top. Or even nearly to the top. There were at least two souvenir stands up there. The local wine, Lacryma Christi del Vesuvio, is made, so they say, from the many vines growing on the slopes of Vesuvius and is named for the emotion Christ felt upon noticing the beauty of the Bay of Naples while he was ascending to heaven… or else for the tears Christ shed when Lucifer grabbed a chunk of heaven and threw it into the Bay of Naples. Or something. Anyway, we tried the red one night and found it a nice southern Italian wine, dark and mineral.

Big, big hole.

Still smoking. Quick visit.

We zoomed down the hill again in our mini-van. Front seat passengers later revealed that the vehicle had no working speedometer (pah, who needs that??) and we’d already figured out there were only four working seatbelts… lucky for us there were only four passengers. Nobody was brave enough to point out to the driver what that ‘no passing’ sign meant as he had clearly decided it was not relevant to drivers in a hurry. However, we were under the protection of the caped crusader, so no harm befell us.

Pompeii – Oct 17-18

Pompeii is a many-faced city. There is tat

and moonlight;

and a fine basilica…

We started off our weekend with an excellent meal at La Madia, where the degustazione menu was too much but too good to stop. Melanzane Parmigiana

followed by pasta, with cream, veal and potatoes

– wonderful but so filling it was all I could do to enjoy the tagliata that followed – could be the best steak I’ve ever had.

Our dessert – a regional specialty – was a layered excess of chocolate, custard and marzipan…

Thus fortified we were equipped to spend the following day in the ruins of Pompeii.

It would have taken several days to see them properly, but we did what we could. The wall paintings were wonderful:






The baths were impressive…



Many fountains in town, most still giving drinkable water:




This one sweetly decorated with shells:

The mosaic floors were stunning:



Pompeiians obviously enjoyed their bread; there was more than one bakery with its own flour mills:


and ovens, of course:


They ate out a lot too, at thermopolii, where amphorae were propped in holes in the counter; the food stayed hot without flame, because of the heat-preserving properties of terra cotta.



And the colosseum is in pretty good shape, at least on the outside:

Back in town, the preparations for the papal visit were well underway, which included taping up the mail slots and garbage bins and installing some rather fetching porta-loos.


We decided to splash out on a meal at the town’s finest dining establishment, Il Principe, and what a disappointment that was. We were ushered into a near-empty restaurant, sat next to a giant arrangment of fake flowers. The appetisers were good and interesting, souffles of cheese with various vegetables:

Things went really wrong when it was time for our second courses. The sea bass was ok, but like the meals of all four of us, was nearly stone cold when it was served.

And the quality was just not worth the price tag. The proprietor appeared to be too busy catering to the only other table in the restaurant – clearly peopled by old friends and/or local dignitaries – to trouble his head with a quartet of stranieri. We were so disheartened by the experience we fled immediately for a little cafe near the hotel, where we were served nicely decorated and not over-priced caffe macchiato by friendly proprietors.

In Italia

Don’t have my laptop and so unable to download the squillions of photos I took in Pompeii and Herculaneum last weekend… will have to post these retrospectively when I can. Suffice to say we had a delicious time with perfect weather.

There were three celebrity sightings to round things out: I was seated on the plane next to Bob Geldof (who might not be a foodie, as he ate the horrible BA sandwich and said he thought it was tragic that I had brought my own food on the plane… though whether he meant it was pathetic behaviour on my part or that the tragedy is that the airlines serve such abominations wasn’t clear, so I can choose to believe the latter). Upon disembarking we saw him hook up with star journalist John Simpson. And on Sunday we returned from Herculaneum and Vesuvius in time to see the pope leave town after his all-day visit to Pompeii.

After a day in Rome – main excursion was to see Keats’ house – and two good meals, I left yesterday for an epic train journey. It took about seven and a half hours to get to Turin and I arrived to mild foggy weather. Just about to set off for Terra Madre. More as it unfolds.

Borough Market

Treated myself to a soothing time at Borough Market today; Thursdays are less fraught than Saturdays, and the weather was fine and the food looking good as ever.

Some Spanish cheeses at Brindisi..

Nice sausages, and plenty of them.


Tis the season of squash.

No visit to Borough Market complete without dropping in at Neal’s Yard:




And it is, again and no doubt about it, mushroom season.


Note the giant puffball slices at the front…

and all manner of others.

Ginger Pig has lovely ham, and bacon, and a few faggots. And lots of sausages.

Fish, looking fresh.



But it was, above all, lunchtime. The man at the fish stall puts together a stew…

The Argentinian empanadas were popular.

Maybe a chocolate to finish?

And now I’m away to Italy, not taking my laptop so postings may be erratic till I catch up with myself. A presto…

Rambling in London

Have spent a pleasant – if still snivelly – couple of days wandering familiar streets and revisiting what old haunts remain, like my beloved Food For Thought, whose quiche and salad plate has changed little in the 20 years I’ve been eating it – still a good deal and a good meal with no room for the unfailingly tempting desserts. You still queue up on a narrow staircase, take your earthenware plate to the nearest corner of the nearest unfailingly occupied table, grab yourself a glass and drink from the unfailingly replenished jugs of tap water, and sprinkle on a bit of salt and pepper from the bowls in front of you.

No mistaking mushroom season is here. I had a really nice wild mushroom soup the other day at a most unlikely place. The croutons were particularly good (I suspect nice bread that was given a good dredging in tasty olive oil helped them along)

and the bruschetta wasn’t bad either.

Speaking of fungi, some of the more interesting mushrooms on sale at Mortimer’s just now..

The Bath House, although part of the evil empire, (since 1996, the Greene King chain has bought up 2,200 pubs in Britain, taking its total to 2,587 pubs and restaurants across the country; it’s notorious for buying up small breweries and closing them down, reducing the number of traditional beers on the market) has for the moment at least agreed to host Ambit’s poetry readings (as long, goes the dark clause, as we spend enough money to make it worth their while)(Ambit could use a hand too, having become one of the latest casualties of cultural funding cuts – they only need 200 subscribers to break even).

I passed on any “home made coleslaw” or “British beef” they might have on offer in favour of a lotus seed bun from an old familiar Chinese bakery en route.

One of Tony Blair’s London neighbours overstayed his welcome and is going nowhere fast.

A visit to the most lovely and useful of bookshops, Daunt’s on Marylebone High Street.

I saw a most astonishingly fabulous film in a favourite old cinema in Notting Hill.


In other news, there was an update in the Guardian the other day about the debate over GM crops which makes interesting reading. Although how anyone can say they will solve world hunger is beyond me, when they are developed with corporate interests in mind: corporate profits for multinationals inevitably have pretty questionable benefits for everyone else, in the old ‘someone has to win’ equation. That is, such profit-oriented products (in this case, remember, this time it’s food) are marketed in order to create an enduring economic bond with purchasers (farmers) by requiring the annual purchase of seed (an attempt to eliminate the rights of farmers to develop and save seed) and associated technologies (e.g. specialised pesticides and fertilisers) so that they can be grown in some cases (e.g. soya in Brazil) in eco-systems that cannot sustain them, with the profits going to multinationals while the local economy is driven ever lower.

Catching up with food, poetry and a great big cold

Time has been slipping by and a bout of flu stopped me from catching up earlier.

Here are a couple of pictures from a French market which sprang up out of nowhere in the N1 Centre in Islington one chilly day. This one’s for the Prosciutto di Parma consortium sleuths to track down… These certainly didn’t resemble any Parma Hams I’d ever seen.

Nice looking garlic though.

I was fortunate enough to receive an invitation to one of Islington’s more sought-after culinary hotspots, chez Nancy et Mike, where I dined on a Moro-inspired paella

and an Ottolenghi tart (reminds me I must go and worship in his temple of goodness before I leave town)

a Torta Especial Almendra, from Brindisi

and a nice bit of fruit and Manchego.

I was at a housewarming party last weekend, for a neighbour of this property. Big houses are hard to heat in the chilly sea winds they get on Sheppey and the small but beautiful fireplace I huddled near was apparently not enough to protect me from cultivating an ominous sore throat, which I took along on Sunday night to Tammy and Leah’s reading at Torriano, hosted as ever by John Rety.

I then succumbed to a brutal cold/flu thing which laid me low until Wednesday, when I dragged myself into the dusk to attend the Forward Prize do, which was – by spooky coincidence, Georgian properties occurring rather often in my life lately – held in the Georgian Group headquarters on lovely Fitzroy Square. Overcrowding (a superfluity of poets?) led to a dramatic incident – one person fainted – and was tended by paramedics, followed up by an ambulance.

Afterwards we wandered down Charlotte Street in search of a food type that our Lake District companions would be unlikely to find (passing along the way Passione, the restaurant of Jamie Oliver’s now slightly eclipsed mentor), and settled on Phillippine cuisine at Josephine’s. Although I wasn’t fully in control of my taste-buds at the time, I’m inclined to agree with the “not bad, not great” review of the place that I read later. We had the set menu which included a kind of chicken soup with green beans (and one green chili hiding on top)

and a pork dish which looked good

but was a bit sweet for my taste. I ordered it because it featured annatto seed; when I asked what this was, it appeared to be untranslatable: “from a tree” was the answer. I still don’t know what it tasted like; maybe next time.

And that, other than the previously reported efforts to exercise my civic duty, is it… for now.