Pompeii

Sunday, April 10th- Pompeii

Well, I do not think I am going to be able to post pictures as the internet is so sporadic and slow over here. I will just have to add them in when I get back.....sorry!

Today we took a day trip to Pompeii. Pompeii is huge! I was not expecting it to be so large and to have so much of it excavated. It was a town of 20,000 people and most had escaped before the town was buried in lava from Mt. Vesuvius. The town just went on and on and on! Some of the highlights were walking through some of the homes, a bath house, tavern, theater, and brothel.

The brothel was probably the funniest to me. When you walked in, there were three small rooms on each side with a stone bed and a stone pillow (hopefully they put a mattress on top?) Along the top of the ceiling were frescoes showing different ummm...positions--a menu of sorts! It totally cracked me up!

The homes were great to walk through. Front rooms held the family's business goods, next room was the office and then a center courtyard with the family wing all around it. The rooms were frescoed, and though most have been moved to a museum, you could still see enough to get a glimpse into what they might have looked like.

Another interesting place was the Roman styled bath house. It had the cold room, warm water room and the steaming hot room. They build rivets along the barrel of the ceiling so that the condensation would not drip on them and would instead, just run harmlessly back to the floor. The whole thing looked quite lavish with statues and reliefs decorating it.

Apparently, Romans did not really like to cook, and they ate fast food a lot!!!! Outside of all the places where people would gather, like the bath house, you would find little stands with round basins in them. These held the different soups and dishes that customers would eat. Who knew?

The roads were also very interesting. They would have pedestrian only streets, one way traffic, two lane traffic, and major streets. The streets were quite a bit lower than the side walks because each day they would flood the streets and wash the debris away. To cross the street during these times, large stones were put at the intersections. One stone was a one way street, two stones for two lanes, and three for the major roads. The stone were high enough that a cart's axis would clear them and spaced perfectly for the uniform width of Roman carts.

One thing that was fascinating to me were the casts made of the humans who had been buried alive. When the archeologists were excavating, they would come across cavities where a body had been and had since rotted away. So in some of these cavities, they poured plaster into them and then the shape of that person could be excavated intact with some of the bones as well. It was fascinating and sad all at the same time. What a horrible way to die. One of them had his arms up as if protecting himself from the lava....

After Pompeii we went back to Naples to see the Archeological Museum which holds all of the treasures from Pompeii. Getting to the museum was a bit of an adventure. We got a bit lost wandering the winding streets and they were not pretty. I have never seen so much garbage everywhere. It is as if someone would rip open garbage bags and just scatter the garbage everywhere. It was disgusting. I was SO glad to get to the museum and although the museum was worth that quick stop in Naples, I would take the metro instead of walking. It was the only place we have felt a little unsafe.

After we found the museum, we had a very nice lunch and the most delicious pepperoni pizza I have ever had. Apparently, in Italy their pepperoni is usually vegetarian but I ordered the pork one. Yummy! Pizza and a nice glass of wine--as I had totally had it by the time we had wandered all over Naples-- and I was ready to conquer the museum.

There were lots a Greek and Roman statues, mosaics, frescoes, jewelry, pottery, etc. What astounded me the most was the beautiful glass bowls and cups. The glass was so thin it was transparent even though the glass itself was a beautiful green. I just kept wondering how something SO fragile had survived.

After the museum we took the metro to the train station to travel back to Rome. It had been a long, but extremely interesting day.