Pompeii

Dan, Scott, Mike and I headed to Pompeii from Rome.  My Mom and Jill wanted to do some more shopping, so they walked around Rome while we went to Pompeii.

We had to get on the Metro, head to Termini, go upstairs to the train station to get on a train to Naples.  It took about 2 hours.  Once at the Naples train station we took a commuter train to Pompeii Scavi, which took about 30 minutes.  Seems like a long time, but it didn’t seem too bad. 

Pompeii was really neat, we loved it.  Here is a little history, copied from the web of course!

The city of Pompeii is a partially buried Roman town-city. Pompeii was destroyed and completely buried during a long catastrophic eruption of the volcano Mount Vesuvius spanning two days in the year AD 79. The eruption buried Pompeii under 4 to 6 meters of ash and pumice, and it was lost for nearly 1700 years before its accidental rediscovery in 1749. Since then, its excavation has provided an extraordinarily detailed insight into the life of a city at the height of the Roman Empire. Today, this UNESCO World Heritage Site is one of the most popular tourist attractions of Italy.

They also say that going to Pompeii today is like being in Rome 2000 years ago, pretty neat, huh?  Here are some pics!

One of the many places people took their food to be cooked

Mount Vesuvius

Garden of Fugitives. These are casts that were made of bodies that were once there.  Read below.

So cool how you can see the ruts in the road from the wagons

Mosiac floor that was in the richest house in Pompeii

Inside one of the baths

During early excavations of the site, occasional voids in the ash layer had been found that contained human remains. It was Fiorelli who realized these were spaces left by the decomposed bodies and so devised the technique of injecting plaster into them to perfectly recreate the forms of Vesuvius's victims. What resulted were highly accurate and eerie forms of the doomed Pompeiani who failed to escape, in their last moment of life, with the expression of terror often quite clearly visible .

A dog :(

 

Pretty crazy, huh?  It was an awesome trip, the ride back was also nice.  Scott and I talked it up with the Italians.  There was one guy who spoke English, he was an Italian cop and he was translating to the other 3 guys who were also in the same “cart” as us. They were very nice.  We also had some wonderful views on the way back of the Mediterranean Sea.