Let's Talk Pompeii

Do you like really old stuff? How about volcanoes? How about time travel?? Well, if you like the first two, have I got a couple places for you to see! If you like the third then read a damn book or go watch Star Trek or something. We're talking old ruined towns here, not Picard's journey back to the 19th century*, and Pompeii and Herculaneum are certainly world-class.

So, brief, relatively accurate historical summary: in the early centuries B.C. there were people around Mount Vesuvius and they were living the life. They built their little stone cities, they partied on the beach, they oppressed the women and slaves, or whatever they did for fun back then. Then, in 62 A.D. there was a gnarly earthquake that knocked a lot of their neat little un-engineered buildings down. They started to put them back up, but just 17 years later in 79, Mount Vesuvius threw a huge hissy fit and rained ash and pumice down on all the surrounding little towns killing everyone around and burying everything under tons and tons of volcano goo.

Fast forward to 1700 years later when someone accidentally finds these buried towns and begins unofficial excavations. A bunch of cool stuff was pillaged from the sites for the next many years and then real excavations started in the mid-1800's. Even today both sites are still being excavated, and a good chunk of Herculaneum is trapped under the modern day city with no apparent plans to unearth it.

Whew! Ok, so there you go. Obviously, the cool thing about these places is the way that the volcano's ashes covered the cities, preserving them almost perfectly for so long. Pompeii was buried below 12-60 feet of ash and mud and Herculaneum below around 60 feet (though there appears to be some discrepancy - get it together Wikipedia editors!) and besides the burnt remains of any organics (wood, people, food, clothes) and the structural collapses from the weight of the debris, most everything else in the city remained intact underground for 1700 years.

During the extensive excavations, they have found all sorts of pottery, tools, statues, frescoes on the walls, and mosaic tiled floors, in addition, of course, to half of all the buildings (the bottom half, typically) revealing the exact layout of the towns' streets and structures. The archaeologists seem to know the purpose of each of the buildings (houses, stores, brothels, etc) and, often, who the owners of the residences were. It's pretty amazing.

If you've never heard of Herculaneum, it's basically just another town about 10 miles away from Pompeii that suffered a similar fate. The place is far smaller but even better preserved. The cool thing about Herculaneum is that it wasn't initially in the path of the volcano's main pyroclastic flows so many of the houses filled up with ash and debris before the wind shifted and the real poo hit the fan. Therefore, many of the structures were all nicely supported by this debris and many of the roofs didn't collapse. So there's a bunch of buildings almost entirely in-tact, roof and all. It's so cool!


Also, since the initial stuff that rained down on Herculaneum wasn't a bagillion-gillion degrees, it didn't entirely destroy every piece of wood in the place. It singed most of it to hell and certainly killed all the people no problem, but there are still some of the wood beams in place that were there 2000 years ago. Now that is rad.

On Sunday, after taking longer to figure out the stupid train system than we actually spent at the site, we finally made it to Herculaneum for a mid-afternoon visit. It was a beautiful day, as seems to be standard in southern Italy in October, and the place was stunning. This site is far smaller than Pompeii and is therefore a bit more manageable. Though I think I still could go back ten more times and find something new each time. It's a maze of cobbled streets with a grid of ruins all around it. But, as I mentioned, some of the structures are almost completely in-tact. Click the collage to see it larger:


Plus, since it's totally a tourist thing, it's cleaner and quieter than any place around**, which was a nice change from hanging out in Naples. Loved it, would highly recommend.

Monday we took the same train (less difficulty this time - we're pros now) further down and walked around the sprawling ruins of Pompeii. The place is 164 acres, 2/3 of which is excavated (or so they tell me). It's massive. You might imagine, knowing our patience levels, that we did not see every building . And, to be honest, by the end they sort of all look the same. But still, super awesome ruins, beautiful surrounding area, and most excellent prehistoric brothel ever (complete with stone beds - ouch!).


I'm really glad we decided to do one site each day instead of cram them both together one after another. They really are both worth a good look. Apparently there are three smaller sites around there too which we did not have time for. I certainly would not mind returning someday to do it all again and stop by the smaller ones as well.

So, until next time Pompeii, I hope you can stick around for another few years so that we may meet again.

*As seen in the last episode of Season 5: Time's Arrow. I wasn't hating on Star Trek nerds, I was just pointing out that this is not today's topic.

**There was definitely a barrier of garbage bags that built up on a street between the ruins and the train station such that we were able to skirt the garbage on the way down but had to find an alternate route on the way back up. These people have a serious garbage problem.