Pompeii

** Some of the pictures at the end might disturb young viewers.  You might pre-view this one before showing the kids.  I include them because they, more than anything else, really made the impact of what a horror the eruption was for these people.  View with caution.**

This is the view from the visitor's center.  Vesuvius is to the left of the city.  The sea is more or less behind me (some ways away).  From what I remember, most of the city was built starting in 8BC, although they have evidence of habitation from much, much earlier.  Vesuvius erupted in AD 79 and caught the town by surprise.  The town was pretty instantly blasted by impossible heat and covered by about 9 feet of ash.  Those not killed by the heat and first round of ash were killed shortly thereafter when the pyroclastic flow hit the city and did it in.  The weight of that flow collapsed most of the roofs and second stories.  People and animals were either smothered or buried.  There was not time to escape.  The whole city was buried under 25 feet of volcanic ash.

This is looking down on the gladiator quarters.  Some of the room remains.  The colonade contines around on all four sides.

This is one of the two theatres found in Pompeii.  It was pretty cool to get to see a real roman theatre as I have been teaching about them for years. The stage floor is missing and most of the stage facade, but the house is pretty intact.  This is looking down at the orchestra and the stage area.

 This one is looking back up the area for the audience.  You can even still see the places where poles were inserted to support the sunshade canvases that were stretched overhead.

A shot of Mt. Vesuvius through the ruins.

 One of the rooms with surviving plaster frescos.  Pretty amazing that these lasted this long.  The colors are really rich and intense and the detail work still shows.

 I think the nice guard we talked to said this was a wine shop.  The round things are vases set into the counter top.  I'm assuming they were filled with various wines and they dipped out whatever you bought.  It has a great fresco still intact on the back wall.

A counter top in another shop.  It was gorgeous!

Some pots still enbedded in volcanic ash rock.

This was the old city wall.  The wall is cool, but the trees are even cooler.  These are Italian pines and we have seen them everywhere!

A really cool central courtyard in a home.  This house had a LOT of fresco work still intact, as well as a lot of floor mosaics.  It felt rich.

A street.  Pompeii was a Roman city and had streets laid out as close to a grid as they could given the terrain.  The streets are large flat stone and were constructed by the Roman empire as civic building.  The tall stones are stepping stones connecting the sidewalks.  We think the grooves in the rocks must have been from wheels wearing away the stone.  You saw them at lot around these stepping stones.

Part of the forum colanade.  It has Roman/latin writing on it.  I took this one for my sister's latin students.

The old grain storage shed is filled with these articles that have been excavated.  There are shelves and shelves and shelves of pottery and other house hold items.  A lot of things have been taken away to museums, but there is still a ton of it here.  I like how all these vases are different colors.

Some archeologist in the past realized that they kept coming to voids in the rock and that these voids had human bones in them.  He figured out that they were where people had fallen in the eruption and died.  Eventually her figured out a method to inject the voids with plaster.  The result was disturbingly detailed depictions of people in their final moments.

The floor mosaics are pretty spectacular.  This one if of a dog guarding the entry door.  It is in the House of the Tragic poet.  

This is a shot inside the baths.  The carving work is unbelieveable.

More floor patterning...

Much like in Rome, there are public water fountains everywhere.  These were built by the Romans to provide water for the city and are fed via underground plumbing.  The water is still drinkable and supposedly quite good.  Cate and I opted for bottled water, but we saw many, many people drinking from them.

This is the bakery.  They found carbonized loaves of bread still in the oven and the bones of the mules laying where they had been harnessed to the millstones.

A street.

A shot of some of the wall frescos.



All in all, Pompeii was pretty cool.  We are exhausted from all the clambering around.  Clearly the ancient romans had great leg muscles.  Those cobblestone are tricky to navigate.  The city was partially closed for winter so we didn't get to see everything we wanted to see, but it was still pretty phenomenal.

Tomorrow we are off to the airport and will be heading home.  I'll be cleaning out my 700+ pictures once I get there and will try to post more good ones from the trip.

It has been an excellent trip.