Midwestern Girl in Paris: Rome, Part Two

My second day in Rome was actually not spent in Rome at all. That morning we hopped on a train down to Naples and then hopped on another train to the town of Pompei (with one i). A two minute walk down the street from the train station lie the ruins of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii (with two i's).

Pompeii is one of the most popular tourist attractions in all of Italy and has been for about 250 years. The town was completely buried in ash from the nearby (still technically active) volcano Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD. August 24th of that year has been the usually accepted date for the eruption, but actually evidence now leads archaeologists and historians to think that the eruption occurred in October or November.

Roughly 2,000 of the 20,000 people who lived in Pompeii at the time of the eruption died as a result of it (although 16,000 people in total from the surrounding region were ultimately killed). It was thought for a long time that the main cause of death was ash suffocation, but a recent study from 2010 actually suggests that most people died as a result of the intense heat of the pyroclastic flows, whose temperatures reached upwards of 250 degrees Celsius (about 482 degrees Fahrenheit).

As a result of the eruption, which buried the city over several hours in up to 25 meters of ash and debris, the entire city was abandoned and forgotten until it was rediscovered in 1748. It was in a remarkable state of preservation when it was first found, although in the past few decades people have become concerned of the negative effect the wear and tear of having several million tourists a year visiting the site is having upon it.

The city used to be situated right up on the sea, which now lies several miles to the west. We entered the site the way its citizens used to, up a very steep hill that leads to the main gate:

The view out from said very steep hill.

The big gate on the right was used during the day, and the smaller one was used at night.

Vesuvius, off in the distance. It's the only volcano known to have erupted on the European mainland in the last century (the last having occurred in March of 1944). There are 3 million people who live near the volcano, making it the most densely populated and one of the most dangerous volcanic zones in the world.

Much of Pompeii looks like this:

Just the remains of walls from what used to be homes or businesses.

But there are also a number of temples...

And statues, which somehow escaped being destroyed during the eruption.

A short walk down the main road from the gate leads you into the forum:

One of the coolest (and creepiest) things we saw were some of the body casts. When Pompeii was covered up in ash, the bodies of the dead were completely encased wherever they lay in the city. The bodies eventually decayed, but they left behind a perfectly human-shaped hole in the ash. When the archaeologists excavating Pompeii realized this, they would fill the holes with plaster to make a cast of the person (or animal, in some cases).

The ash filled in around them to the extent that when they made a cast of this victim you can see the outline of the sandals he was wearing when he died.

This one that looks like she's crying really gets to me.

The courtyard of the baths.

Two things about this picture: One, you can still see the grooves the many chariots made coming up and down this street from 2,000 years ago (chariot axel lengths were standardized by this point in the Roman Empire). Maybe it's just because I'm a history major, but there's something about that that I find SO COOL. And two, there are stepping stones across the streets like these all over the city. Apparently either once or twice a day Pompeii flushed out its streets with water to help keep them clean, and when they did that pedestrians could use the stepping stones to cross the street without getting wet. One stepping stone was used for a small backroad-type street, two stones for a medium-sized street, and three stones like this for major thoroughfares. And as you can see, they made them just the right size and spaced them out so that you could drive your chariot right over them!

There are two theaters in Pompeii. This is the little theater, and right next to it is the grand theater...

...where I found a stray dog just chillin'. There are stray dogs ALL OVER Pompeii, along with lots of signs warning idiot tourists not to try and touch the stray dogs.

The view from the top of the grand theater.

The view out over Pompeii from the top of the grand theater.

Many of the houses and businesses are open for visitors to come in and wander through. Many of the walls, especially of private homes, are painted with reds and blues and yellows and show little figures and gods engaged in various activities, like in this room.

But here's probably my favorite thing that I saw in Pompeii:

This is ancient graffiti scrawled on the outer walls of a building. It's written in "Vulgar Latin," which is different from classical Latin. There's an excellent collection of what various portions of Pompeii graffiti mean here, but I must warn you that most of it centers on sex, genitalia, drinking, defecating, and insults. And it's rather hilarious. It reads like antiquity's version of the back of a middle school bathroom stall door.

I feel like these writings are the aspect of Pompeii that makes it seem the most real that people actually once lived here. That's what I found so fascinating and so powerful about Pompeii as a whole. It's one thing to see frescos and floor mosaics and bits of pottery in a museum, but it's a completely different thing to see the whole picture, the whole houses still with their paintings and floor mosaics and bits of pottery.

Pompeii's version of a bar!

The main amphitheater, a good 20-25 minute walk clear on the other side of the city from the main gate.

The vineyards across from the amphitheater.

Inside the amphitheater itself.

Fun fact: Apparently in 1971 Pink Floyd performed and filmed six songs here. It was called "Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii" (how original), but the only audience actually in attendance was the camera crew and some local children.

And then sometimes when we were wandering around through some random house we'd come across plaster casts of people casually sitting right in the actual spot where they died:

It was creepy.

Another stray dog. Just a purebred German Shepherd, no big deal.

Inside one of the temples.

I can't tell you how many times I almost twisted an ankle trying to walk down these damn streets.

Looking out over the mountains on the other side of Pompeii.

It was via this building at the top of the slight hill on which Pompeii is built that the people pumped water down into the city. You can still see where the pipes came out at the bottom.