Towards the end of a very hot May, we spent a week in Narbonne in France. Narbonne is an old Roman town, once called Narbo Martius, that forms one point of a shallow triangle with the medieval walled city of Carcassonne and the bullfighting mecca of Béziers. It’s a nice little place; somewhere between a tourist trap and a working town, with plenty to see and do in and around the local area.
Apologies for the relaxed pace of posts here; I’ve been hard at work on the manuscript for Empire of the Sum, which is currently ping-ponging between New York and Birmingham as my editor helps knock it into shape. There isn’t much time left for writing anything else!
Hadrian’s Wall is quite a thing. Its construction is linked to a visit to Britain, in 122 CE, of the Emperor Hadrian, although work may have been underway before then. Conventional wisdom says that Hadrian wanted to keep the restive Celts out of Roman Britain to the south; another interpretation is that the wall was a means to collect tolls and duties from whomever might have cause to pass through it, Celt or otherwise. Whatever the case, the finished wall was eighty miles long, running almost from coast to coast, and it became the abiding symbol of Roman rule in the island of Britain.1,2
At the Royal Observatory of Edinburgh on the city’s Blackford Hill, in the depths of its oldest building, is a locked, climate-controlled room. That room is a library, and it houses the world’s most important collection of antiquarian books on astronomy.
The trip from the tourist town of Sorrento, clinging to the cliffs on the southern edge of the Bay of Naples, to the ancient settlement of Pompeii is an engaging one. Sorrento is the end of line, literally speaking: the railway track comes to an end there and so there is often a ticking, cooling train waiting on which to grab a seat before the journey begins. It’s also the place where the line’s itinerant folk bands take a cigarette break before the train beeps to signal its imminent departure. You will put a euro or two into their proffered caps, mostly because the weather is sunny and warm and you’re about to visit one of the most important archaeological sites in Europe, but also because it is physiologically impossible not to tap your foot along with upbeat accordion music.