Ercolano

Until 1969 the town was called Resina, and nobody quite knows why: perhaps after Rectina, the patrician lady who owned a villa here and who, according to Pliny the Younger's letter, sent for help while Vesuvius was exploding; perhaps after the nets of the fishermen, perhaps after the resin of the trees that grew on the lava. Some even read it as an anagram of sirena, mermaid — and a mermaid did indeed sit on the town's coat of arms. Then the ancient name took its place back.

The eruption of 79 AD did not bury this place: it sealed it. Pompeii got the pumice; Herculaneum got the pyroclastic surges, which killed instantly by thermal shock and then covered everything in mud. That mud hardened into a soft rock, the pappamonte, and it preserved wood, papyri and even food. The excavations — a UNESCO site with Pompeii — give back two-storey houses with their original beams: smaller and more intact, they are visited at a different pace, and the Villa of the Papyri handed us the only ancient library that has come down to us. Above the ancient city lives the Bourbon one of the Miglio d'Oro, with its eighteenth-century villas; from here the road climbs to the crater, inside the Vesuvius national park, one of the smallest in Italy. The Resina market, kingdom of vintage clothes, keeps the old name alive.