Pompeii and Circumstance

I'm so proud of myself for the title of this blog post, but M never finds my puns as funny as I do. After Cinque Terre, I was so excited to visit Pompeii (which I've always wanted to do but never have before), so when I saw it was an option from our stop in Naples I booked it early. I remember learning in school about this fascinating and tragic city buried under volcanic ash, providing the most complete preservations of ancient Roman life we have in modernity.

I learned so much on my tour, including the fact that archaeological research is still ongoing on these 2,000-year-old ruins - archaeologists have only uncovered about two-thirds of Pompeii so far and they're discovering new things all the time. For example, recently they uncovered evidence that people returned to live in the ash-encrusted ruins of Pompeii even after the major eruption that buried it.

Pompeii was obviously a city rich in the literal and metaphorical sense. It amazed me that some of the homes still showed signs of the elaborate architecture and painting, and I can only imagine how lavish it looked before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius buried it in ash. One of the reasons the disaster captured the imaginations of so much of Europe was because the city had been well-known as a center of trade and culture.

At the same time, there were plenty of the indignities of ancient life to learn about: the example that stuck out to me was how servants would dump human waste-filled chamberpots in the sloped streets and rely on water and gravity to wash it away; however, the horses and animals would still walk in it. I guess they did what they had to do.

They also had an interesting concept of sex back then, and we visited the ruins of several brothels. The women who worked there were known as "lupa" meaning "prostitute" or "she-wolf" and apparently some of them actually howled like wolves to get clients... There was also a street so known for sex work that it had a mounted sculptue of male genitalia attached to the building. (See, these are the fun facts you miss if you just wander the ruins yourself without any kind of a guide.) I learn something new every day.

The Pompeii Antiquarium is also a must, offering a stunning array of artifacts including casts of perfectly preserved victims and well-preserved items. One of my favorite things I saw in there was a beautiful segment of an elaborately painted wall of one of the wealthier homes with what looked like cave art scratched on top of it. A plaque explained children had scrawled their drawings on top of what was likely a very expensive wall, and it occurred to me that children thousands of years ago weren't too different from children today.

For any lover of history and culture, I would put Pompeii on your bucket list. Given that it's thousands of years old, many of the paths we walked were not accessible so I would keep that in mind when planning a trip. And I think you really need a knowledgeable guide (or at a minimum a bunch of advance reading and studying) to get the most out of it. But if you have the opportunity to go, you won't regret it. That's it until next time, when I write all about Crete in Greece!