Day Trip to Pompeii

When my brother and I were kids we were gifted, or came into possession, a box with National Geographic VHS cassettes of their special programs. Maybe it was just a single cassette, because either the first one we saw, or the only one we had, was the episode about Mt. Vesuvius destroying Pompeii and Herculaneum.

Seeing those poor people frozen by the ash in the throes of death fascinated the hell out of me. Our cabin in the mountains is in the vicinity of a live volcano that last erupted in 1914, so images of volcanic activity were already in my imagination.

But with Vesuvius, criminy, two cities were fully destroyed and thousands of people were killed.

That I could one day go visit the 2/3 excavated ruins of Pompeii wasn't a thing for me. Maybe it was, buried in the recesses of my brain, waiting for an opportunity to come out.

Over the years and the courses of our travels, Corrie and I have seen a great many ruins, and by the time we made it Pompeii, another stifling day with a worn out toddler, I was as ready as ever to check out the site.

Quick background that fascinated me this time around: After the eruption in August of 79 CE, some attempts to recover bronze and some other precious items were carried out, but eventually those efforts petered out in a few  months, and both Pompeii and Herculaneum were eventually lost, as in fully. From history books, from cartography, even their names. For over 1600 years both places remained forgotten. It wasn't until the late 1700s that they were rediscoverd and the excavations began. That work remains unfinished at Pompeii, as a third of the site is yet to be reclaimed.

Forgotten, for 1600 years...

We took a train down to the stop, and were accompanied by thousands of our closest tourist-sisters and brothers.

Gotta love Italian: excavation = scavi

The trip took about forty minutes, but we traveled through city the whole way, the southern hinterlands of Napoli and the northern reaches of Sorrento, all merging as one metropolitan area.

We paid for an English language walking tour which helped us skip lines, and would give both Corrie and Lola some historical background to the remaining structures. Having Cass in my purview meant I missed most of the talks; he was very interested in chasing pigeons and not doing anything else.

One thing stood out for me while at the site: it's friggin' huge! They say it clocks in at 140 acres, which sounds big, right? But in practice, that's like the Lower East Side. Check out the Google Map photo grab:

That entire oval is nearly the entire town! In the upper left quadrant you can see two roads meeting as they leave the frame. that was the route to the Villa dei Misteri, a wealthy person's coastal villa that we didn't have the energy to see. The coast used to be right up to the left flank of that oval above, but the lava floes added a few hundred meters of land, pushing the coast away.

One could easily spend a few days exploring the various neighborhoods of ancient Pompeii. We didn't have the energy nor the time, but what can you do.

Our tour started at some form of public space, Vesuvius visible off in the distance:

Much of the ruins looks like the bottom picture---house after house laid out in nice streetly rows, a dense community swallowed up by ash:

Frankly, those rows of living quarters goes on and on, in most directions, and it would be easy to get lost in the mix.

We did venture to the little theater (as opposed to the big theater), and Cass showed off his habitual line-stepping:

The little theater hosted smaller events than the large Colosseum-like large theater on the other side of town.

Many of the floor mosaics still existed in some degree of completion, like the entrance to this home showing off their pet:

Apparently the lucky charm image of Pompeii was a boner:

I'm not joking. The erect phallus and testes were mostly all over the place. On the cobbled streets you could see them pointing in a certain direction; we were told this meant that a popular prostitute lived at the end of the pointing, seeing as how prostitution was a prized and prominent profession.

Lotta' good all those boners did that August day in the year 79, am I right? Too soon?

The only bathhouse open to the viewing public was the men's, and here's a picture of both the natural light streaming in and the stacks of floor tiles designed, Corrie tells us, to keep the floor elevated so warm air could be sent underneath, keeping it heated:

Many of the corpse casts have been moved to museums, as the Italian government would like those macabre dudes like me who wanted to see them to go to separate facilities and keep the coffers full, as maintaining these sites isn't free. They did have some, though, and one of the spookiest is the following, a dog spazzing out, spazzing to death, actually, in the super-heated poisonous air of the pyroclastic flow:

Not to end on the crazy bummer of dying pets, I'll share an analogous thing from today, a crosswalk:

Well, that picture kinda sucks...the three elevated street boulders near the center frame acted as a crosswalk. The spacing between them corresponded to the wheelbase of the era's wagons and their elevation to the height of the sidewalks meant that your robes or gowns would not be in the muck of the street. Pretty cool.

Afterwards we ate at an expensive touristy restaurant right outside the exit, and then bolted for our place in Napoli. Cass was in good spirits as we waited for our return train: