The next day we got up bright and early, piled onto a bus and headed for Pompeii and Herculaneum. It took us a couple of hours to get down there, but there was plenty of beautiful scenery along the way.
This was my very first glimpse of the deadly Mt. Vesuvius, which erupted in 79AD and completely covered the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum.
We walked up a hill and into Pompeii by the same road that people would have used in 79AD. These are the houses that sit just outside of the city walls.
Once inside the city walls the streets continued to be my favorite thing. They were perfectly preserved just the way they had been in ancient times. Carts would have been driven along the road itself, while pedestrians used the sidewalks and crossed the street on the raised stones that you can see in the distance. This is because the streets were also used to wash sewage out of the city, and citizens didn't want to step in it.
From the main street we turned off into the town's basilica. This is where court cases would have been heard and important governmental decisions would have been made.
Inside the basilica we could see the architectural secrets of the Romans. While the Greeks always built their columns and buildings out of solid stone or marble, the Romans almost always built their underlying structures with brick (even their columns as you can see here) and then covered the outside with stone, marble, or plaster. Crafty Romans. I love them so.
This is the marketplace. It would have been full of little shops both in the middle and on the sides. The central courtyard would also have been surrounded by a covered walkway, part of which has been reconstructed on the left. From the market you can see Vesuvius looming ominously in the distance.
At the far end of the marketplace was a very ancient temple to Zeus. The center of it was actually Greek and then the Romans added on to it when they built their city there.
Along the sides of the marketplace were storerooms that the modern day excavators use to house excess artifacts that they find. They also had a few plaster casts of people who had died in the eruption for visitors to see.
All the streets were labeled with pictures rather than words, so that the many people in Pompeii who were illiterate or foreign could still tell where that street went or what types of shops were on it. The writing underneath the picture is modern and tells the archaeologists where they are.
Pompeii is full of stray dogs. At the entrance there is even a sign telling you what to do if you want to adopt one. This one didn't even crack an eyelid as our noisy group walked by. Really though, it's no wonder they have so many strays. I never saw a single neutered dog on my entire trip.
This was our tour guide for Pompeii and Herculaneum. She spoke English very well, but you reeeeeeally had to pay attention to understand her thick accent.
Throughout Pompeii you can still see some of the ancient frescoes that once occupied every wall. There are four different styles of fresco in Pompeii, each corresponding to a certain period of time. I've had to learn the details of these styles, but I won't bore you with all that.
occasionally throughout the site the archaeologists left some of the plaster casts of the Romans who died in the eruption. The decaying bodies left cavities in the solidified ash which the excavators filled with plaster as they found them. This one was particularly haunting. You can see his bones and, even worse, the expression on his face as he tried to gasp for air. These casts really helped us get a better concept of what happened in Pompeii that day in 79AD.
There is so much beautiful artwork preserved at Pompeii. This famous mosaic of a chained up dog sits at the entrance to a house. Underneath it says "cave canem" which is literally Latin for "beware of dog."
Even more impressive than the mosaics are the preserved frescoes. They're still so colorful and tell us an awful lot about ancient Roman society.
This is the central courtyard of a Roman house. In it they would have kept a little garden with useful plants, and in the center of the picture you can see the household shrine or "lararium." Every house had one of these structures where small sacrifices could be made to the household gods or "lares."
I loved walking down the actual streets of an ancient Roman town. It's the closest you can get to going back in time.
We stopped in a bakery and could still see the entire Roman process of making bread. Above is a mill stone. They would pour grain into the top, have a donkey or slaves turn the top stone by means of a wooden post sticking out of the hole in the side, and then flour would fall out at the bottom.
Not very many feet away from the mill stone was an oven where they would have baked the dough into bread.
Then just next door to the bakers house was a bar where working class Romans would come up to the counter and buy the bread and wine that were in the jars that you can see.
In certain sections of the road you can see ruts from cart wheels. This must have been a popular road.
This was the atrium of a rather richly decorated house. The pit you see is called an "impluvium" and is meant to catch rainwater that comes through the hole in the roof, or "compluvium," which would then drain into a cistern and provide the household with drinking water. Absolutely every house in Pompeii has this.
Just down this back alley we headed to Pompeii's only brothel, the Lupanar. Lupanar means "den of the she-wolves" and is so named because it the prostitutes sounded like howling wolves when they called out to passers by.
Inside the Lupanar there are several cells with pornographic pictures above the doors. I have more explicit pictures than this one but I won't offend you with them here.
There are lots of penises carved into the walls and streets of Pompeii. Some say that they point the way to the brothel, but really they are just meant to ward off the evil eye at crossroads.
Like this one.
This was the small theater used for music concerts.
This is the courtyard outside of the bigger theater. People would have come here during or after a show to buy food and chat.
This is part of the big theater which they have rebuilt and were setting up for a modern concert.
This was the garden out behind one of the houses in town. Archaeologist have replanted it with the same plants it would have contained before the eruption based on the seeds and parts of plants that were found under the ash.
Everything in Pompeii was highly decorated. Even the sidewalks were made up of shards of colorful stone.
Entrance ways to houses were frequently decorated with mosaic floors. This one even had a scene of a boar hunt at the top.
After we left Pompeii we ate lunch at a little cafe nearby.
I had ravioli stuffed with cheese and spinach coated with olive oil and Parmesan cheese.
From there we took a 30 minute bus ride to Herculaneum, which is on the other side of the volcano.
Herculaneum was not as big a town as Pompeii, but even so not all of it has been excavated. This is mostly because a modern town has been built on top of it. Herculaneum is also better preserved than Pompeii because the way it was covered created an anaerobic environment where nothing would rot. Wood and even food has been found preserved there.
The series of arches that you see are the boathouses. Before the eruption in 79AD they sat on the shoreline, but the eruption created new land so now the beach is many yards away.
This balcony was actually found preserved this way. Since they originally dug it out the wood has been replaced but it's still amazing.
Our tour guide explained the details of each house to us. Here she is going over the workings of the impluvium/compluvium system.
The details of the frescoes were amazing.
As were the elaborate floor mosaics.
Not all the houses are still intact, but it felt amazing to wander the streets.
It always amazed me how much detail and color was still in the frescoes.
This colorful tile work was in the entrance way to a house.
Some more fresco detail.
This statue and table are replicas of what was actually found in this household garden.
Colors and details.
This place was just heaven for me!
Here you can see some of the original wood of this door frame.
We came across plenty of conservationists carefully fixing things up and keeping them from falling apart any further.
This was the most beautiful mosaic I saw the entire trip. It shows the god Neptune and his wife Amphitrite.
The rest of the walls in that room were equally beautiful. They were covered in mosaics which showed elaborate hunting scenes.
Continuing the ocean theme, we then headed to the public baths. The changing room of the women's bath had a mosaic floor showing various sea creatures with Triton, who was the son of the God Neptune and Amphitrite.
The next room had this mazelike design with small symbols interspersed.
This was the caldarium or hot room.
In addition to being hot and humid it had a large tub which would have been full of hot water.
Every time we walked through a door it was a reminder of how much shorter people were back in Roman times. It wasn't so bad for me since I'm only 5'4" but the guys (like Will here) really had to bend over.
The floor in the caldarium in the men's baths had fallen down and you could see how the room was kept warm. The floor was raised with stacks of bricks and hot air from a fire was pumped under the floor and behind the walls.
Just outside the baths was a latrine. It's not as bad as it looks. Water flowed into and out of the ditches you see here through lead pipes.
Eventually we made our way down to the boathouses for a somber reminder. When Herculaneum was first excavated the archaeologists only found a few bodies, so they thought that most of the people had escaped the blast. Unfortunately, when they excavated the boathouses they found out the truth. Much of the rest of the city was packed in the boathouses trying to escape, and that's just where their bones were found.
That's an awfully disturbing note to end on but that's where the tour ended so.....yeah. Apart from that wandering around these two ancient cities was a fantastic trip back in time. I was pretty exhausted though, and took a nice nap on the ride back to Rome.
