Bless this House

One of the reasons I took this trip with this particular holiday company is that the itinerary included Herculaneum as well as Pompeii. Many tour companies seem to offer tours to the latter but Herculaneum is either offered as an optional excursion or omitted altogether.

It is really quite different to Pompeii as an archaeological site, partly because the Vesuvius eruption in 79AD affected the settlement in a different way - it was engulfed in a boiling mud slide several days after the volcanic ash rained down on Pompeii and, as a result, some of the buildings are better preserved (relatively speaking).

Anyway, our tour today took us to Herculaneum and one of the buildings featured this wonderful mosaic of Neptune and Amphitrite (who, according to a well-known search engine, was the sea-goddess wife of Neptune / Poseidon).