We went to Rome last week, and while it was all incredible, the highlight was the day trip we took to Pompeii. That was bucket list stuff for me, and guys…I was not prepared.
Pompeii is huge, and much less haunted than I imagined it would be. Even the visit to the plaster cast of one of the bodies wasn’t so much haunted as heartbreaking, and the city itself is so…it’s so well preserved that I think the state of preservation itself eradicates the hauntedness.
What I could not get over was its size. It’s HUGE. HUGE. I think I thought it was a village, maybe? But it’s a city. It’s HUGE. And… it’s simply unbelievable.
One of the things I struggle with in trying to envision cities as they used to be (I mean, aside from the fact that I literally don’t visualize) is that I can look at maps and recognize road patterns and everything, but trying to realistically imagine the differences in the buildings, in the streets, in where the rivers used to run, etc, is beyond me, and because living cities have changed as the years have passed, even if they’ve got remnants of the old city, those are really only displaced bits to me, not enough to gain what feels like a meaningful understanding of what it was really like.
Pompeii, though…it just stopped overnight. We all know that, obviously. But this is exactly what it looked like, two thousand years ago. The streets are literally exactly the same. And it’s an incredible revelation. I am desperate for them to reconstruct even just a half dozen buildings together in order to see where the skyline really was, to see how shadows fell, to see how much of the volcano five miles away is blocked off by the buildings, because as it stands now, as my son keeps saying, “That mountain is LOOMING MENACINGLY IN THE BACKGROUND,” and my god, it really is. You can look down almost any of the INCREDIBLY STRAIGHT, WELL-LAID STREETS and Vesuvius is in fact looming menacingly at the end of them, thusly:
This ⋁⋁⋁⋁⋁⋁ is the SMALL amphitheatre at the front of Pompeii. It only held some 4,000 people. The large one, at the back, held twice as many. We didn’t get anywhere near it; the guide told us we’d covered about a quarter of the unearthed city, and that nearly half of it was still buried.
Roman streets were every bit as straight and incredibly well-engineered as one has always heard, but I never knew they had CROSSWALKS!!!! Also you can see where the metal-wheeled carts passed through the crosswalks and wore divots into the flagstone pavement!
This ⋁⋁⋁⋁⋁⋁ is a rich dude’s atrium inside their home. The marble square there was the cistern/well, which had an incredibly complex city-wide system beneath it to make it all work.
The bathhouses were one of the few places in Pompeii that had slate roofs instead of wooden ones, and as a result, are almost completely intact. Although the next room over had a new roof because it accidentally got bombed during WW2.
The public square, which was incomprehensibly massive, with the Temple of Jupiter at the far end, and Vesuvius MENACING in the background.
A clear shot of Vesuvius from the road above Naples. The entire mountain used to be a single conical peak slightly higher than the highest surviving peak. Everything between the highest peak and the lowest just…blew up. And a massive amount of it landed on Pompeii in a matter of hours. The guide said if you didn’t leave when the eruption started, by an hour later, it was too late: there was a foot of ash on the ground, and you couldn’t move fast enough to get far enough away, at that point.
I learned a LOT about the city that I hadn’t known, but if I spend the time to tell you all about it, I’ll never get my work done and I can’t afford to do that. :p
Someone in our tour group said “I would love to just spend days getting lost in here,” and our tour guide said, “People actually get lost in here ALL THE TIME,” which, like, guys? You would. I know I said this before, but it’s HUGE. So, so, SO MUCH bigger than I ever imagined. It’s incredible!