POMPEI, ITALY
4th June 2002
Hope that volcano is quiet....
Pompei was planned for Tuesday and maybe Herculaneum... time permitting. We had to get to Naples first as this is where the sites are. We took the 9.00am train to Naples which took 3 hours and then found the train that would take us to the archaeological sites. We of course jumped on the wrong train and instead of heading for Pompei the ancient we were heading to Pompei the city...like we knew there was a new one :(
The conductor saw that we were puzzled, as Rob would get up at every stop to see where we were and he told us to jump off at the next stop and catch the next train. We were dropped off at this dingy little station with graffiti everywhere. We were the only people on the station and were preying to God that we would not get stranded in this hell hole. Finally another train came along and we got to Pompei.. two stops later:)
Let me give you a bit of history: The city of Pompei existed from early 6th century BC. On the 24th August 79AD, the volcano Vesuvius erupted and covered the town of Herculaneum under mud whilst hitting Pompei with clouds of poisonous gasses, ash, lapilli and hot white volcanic stones that buried monuments and people under debris of up to 7m deep.
People never had a chance of escaping and a lot of bodies were found in
awful positions of pain and distress once excavations began.
Pompei, although huge.. is amazing. At first glance, it seems like just a
hell of lot more ruins, but when you start walking around and looking at the
remains that have been preserved and uncovered, you realise exactly what you
are looking at. This is the way people lived over 2000 years ago. It was
like walking into peoples houses back in time (uninvited).
There were paintings on walls that have survived, whole bedrooms with ceilings and floors. Mosaics can still be seen in most houses. You can discern who was wealthy and who poor by the size of their domains. You can clearly define a wine cellar from a snack shop and see who was a baker by the kilns and ovens in the workshops. In one bakery they found the skeleton of a mule still tethered to the grinding mill. This shows you just how quick the devastation happened.
Kat hiding behind a column in Pompei
The streets are quite interesting; the pavement must be about half a metre higher than the street itself and the streets are made up of these huge cobbled stones. You can see carriage wheel marks in a lot of areas. Now and then, especially at corners, we came across 2 or 3 large smooth boulders, about the height of the pavement, running across the street. Rob and I were having bets as to what these things were used for. First we thought they were height measurements for carts ( cart must be "x" high to be on this road), then we though they might be speed humps ( to stop carriages from speeding. hehehe), we played with the idea of stop signs but then settled on the fact that this must be like pedestrian crossings. It was much easier to cross to the other side of the road by using these stones rather than get down onto the road and back up the pavement again. We'd hit the nail on the head... we were geniuses:).... ( we were told later that they were meant to be like stop signs to prevent people from crashing their carriages at the intersections).. oh well... I like our idea better:)
Kat trying to convince me these boulders in the streets are for traffic policemen...
Our travels even took us past a brothel, which was quite common in those days. This brothel though was quite posh and had many rooms - 5 on the bottom floor and 5 on top (most others only had a couple of rooms). The other difference was that this brothel had pornographic pictures / frescoes on the walls depicting all kinds of naughty scenes. In fact, each girl had specific frescoes done in her room to show what services she provided:).. a lot of these frescoes can still be seen today, although not clearly.. it doesn't leave much to the imagination:)
One thing's for sure though, people took a lot more time with their decorations. Every possible minutest detail was looked at and addressed. Every room in a house was not just painted in one colour, like white or green or even orange, instead all the walls were painted with various scenes depicting different gods, hunts, animals from nature, stories from mythology etc etc. It looked great believe it or not:) Pompei and tons more pictures
Kat in the House of Octavius Quartio, Pompei
Our visit to Pompei definitely consolidated our trip to Rome. It allowed us to give meaning and form to a lot of the ruins that we had seen in Palatine and the forums. It is very hard to imagine what a place looked like when only it's bare skeleton remains. No matter how well a book describes something, you still have to have a pretty good imagination to picture it all. Pompei put form, colour, shape and dimension to all of this and it was fantastic!!!
Kat in Pompei
Walking the streets of Pompei took a good 6 hours or so and saw us trying to catch the 6pm train back to Rome. Our original plan was to leave at 7pm but Rob thought that we could make the 6pm as we had arrived in Naples 10 minutes before the 6pm train was meant to leave ( he also wanted to get home to watch the US stock market close :). Firstly we got off a stop too late which meant we had to power walk to the correct station which was about 10 minutes away, Rob still thought we could make it... red faced and puffy we ran like lunatics through the traffic and made it with 5 minutes to spare. Quickly to get tickets... ticket machines don't accept cash.. cash function not working in all machines.. damn!!!! Stand in queue with Rob swearing and mad look in his eyes.
Finally get to front of queue and by my watch might just be able to make it if the train is running late, Rob orders tickets, guy at counter tries to tell Rob that next train is at 7pm, Rob insists that he wants tickets for the 6pm train... Teller sees wild maniacal look in Rob's eyes, shrugs and doesn't argue. We get tickets and start sprinting towards lane 4..wich just happens to be round the corner right at the back of the station...but of course...
Train is not there...we look at tickets, once we have caught our breath and realise that there was no way in hell we would have made it as our tickets were only issued at 6.10pm and train left at 6.04pm....we had a good giggle afterwards but boy was it a stressful lead up!
The train trip home, even though only 3hrs long, was probably the longest trip of our lives. It felt like it took forever to get there. It was also a noisy carriage with a broken wheel or something that squeaked consistently and we couldn't sleep. Got to Rome just after 10pm and went to bed quite pooped. Rob of course woke up several times to watch the Australian stock market at various stages of trade. The free internet in our room sure didn't allow him to sleep much while in Rome...