Trip to Italy Part 5: Pompeii

The last thing we visited while we were in Italy was Pompeii.  It is a city that was destroyed in AD79 by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, along with some neighboring cities.  Archeologists and others love it because it was sort of frozen right then and well preserved in ash and lava so now we can see it just as it was on that day, almost 2000 years ago, with no changes since then.  (Except you'll see in the pictures that they have put modern roofs over some the areas to protect them and put up fences and gates to protect other areas.)  It was a middle class city with about 20,000 residents and "they" think that 2,000 residents were still there and died immediately from the heat or ash cloud when Vesuvius erupted.  "They" think that there must have been warnings that the volcano was going to erupt and most of the people left.  The next two pictures are from Bing images.  The three after that we took.

This is a picture of what it looks like today

There's modern Pompeii in the background and Mount Vesuvius.

As the city was being excavated they came upon empty spaces that they figured out were spaces where a person or animal had been but the body had disintegrated.  So they would pour plaster in the spaces when they found them and that would make a perfect replica of whatever had been there.  That was a little eerie.  These next two pictures are from Bing images.

The excavators have a storehouse around the edge of the main square where they keep many of the items they have dug up and some of the plaster casts are stored in there too.

This is a pretty big town so we couldn't see everything. We tried to see the things that are named on the map. These are places where they could tell something about the people who lived there or the business that was there.  There was a main Forum, a Basilica (meaning house of justice), a House of the Tragic Poet, a House of the Faun, the House of the Vetti, a Temple of Isis, an Amphitheatre and Theatre and many others.  Rick Steve's says that there were 40 bakeries, 30 brothels and 130 bars, restaurants or hotels.  There was even a public baths.  The following picture is from what they say is a fast food restaurant.  They would make food and keep it in the pots in the counter.  Supposedly there would be paintings on the wall indicating the menu.  But I can't tell from the painting in this picture what they served here.

The following pictures are from the main forum (including a modern addition to serve tourists).

The nicer houses had inner courtyards with statues

The normal houses had just rooms

Many of the houses had art on the walls

This house had a scary watch dog mosaic at the entrance.

There were some small empty spaces within the city where there were vineyards and lots of farm space around the city.  The city perservers of today have planted what they think was there 2000 years ago.

They had their own amphitheatre, a mini coliseum.

Attached to the amphitheatre was a smaller theatre.  In this picture a school group was listening to their teacher.

The most interesting thing to me was about the streets.  Rick says they would flood the streets every day to clean them and it would take a little while for the water to drain away.  So they put these raised crosswalks in the street for people to walk on above the water.  You can see that chariots could drive over the stones.  This picture is of a two-way street.  A one-way street would have only one stone for the crosswalk.

And amazingly there were wheel ruts in the stone!  Very deep ones.

And they had pipes in the ground for carrying water to houses.  They had a system of viaducts and water tanks to provide pressure for the water.

I'm not sure what this is.  It makes me think of a cattle guard.

We drove back to Rome from Pompeii and the next day we drove back to Munich.