After seeing the treasures of Pompeii in the museum in Naples, I felt ready to visit the ancient city. We got an early start, leaving Sorrento at 7:45am for the hour-long drive to the archaeological park. Lodo had told us to be prepared for big crowds and a chaotic mess at the entrance. The park can admit 15,00 to 20,000 visitors a day. It’s one of the most popular tourist attractions in Italy, with four and half million visitors every year. Even families with children visit the site although there are definitely some X-rated statues and paintings.
Because we arrived about 15 minutes before the gates opened at 9am, we had to wait, along with several hundred other people, to get in. Once we made it past the entrance gate, the first thing we did was wait another 15 minutes in line for the toilet – at least that’s what the women had to do. The relatively small number of men on the trip didn’t have to wait at all. Without going into detail, I’ll just say that the facilities were less than pristine - no toilet paper, no toilet seats, no flush.
I knew from my pre-trip research that before becoming a Roman city, Pompeii was inhabited by Greeks and Etruscans. During Roman times, it was a prosperous commercial city with a population of about 20,000 people. The main local products were olive oil and wine. In addition, wheat, millet, and barley were grown in the fertile volcanic soil of the surrounding area. Mount Vesuvius was only 16 miles (26 kilometers) away from the city.
17 years before the big eruption of Vesuvius, an earthquake had caused many buildings in Pompeii to collapse. At the time, people believed that natural disasters occurred because the gods were unhappy with them. But the residents of Pompeii apparently weren’t concerned about living in close proximity to Vesuvius. Believing that their conduct hadn’t angered the gods, they were confident that they had nothing to fear.
A warning sign of the October, 79 CE eruption was the appearance of a huge cloud of ash and rock. The wind carried these ashes and poisonous gases towards Pompeii. For several hours, small rock fragments rained down on the city and roofs started to collapse. During this time, most of Pompeii’s residents (80-90 percent of the people, according to scholars) managed to flee to safety. Those who remained were taken by surprise the following day, when a pyroclastic flow raced down the side of the volcano and swept into the city. (A pyroclastic flow is a fast-moving, extremely hot mix of gas, ash, and rock.) The city was quickly covered with a layer of fine ash that was up to 6 meters (20 feet) deep in places.
The first excavations at the site of ancient Pompeii took place in 1748. In the mid-1800s, workers digging with shovels realized that there were air pockets in the ashes. This is where the bodies of the approximately 1150 people who were unable to escape were found. Casts of the victims were made by pouring liquid plaster into the cavities. We saw casts of both human and animal victims in the on-site museum.
There’s much more in the archaeological park than you could possibly see all in a single day. Because Pompeii was a wealthy city, it had a vast number of buildings, including many on a monumental scale. This included a forum, a huge amphitheater (capacity – 20,000 people), theaters, temples, thermal public baths, and markets. There were also plenty of pubs, inns, brothels (as a commercial center, Pompeii was famous for these), bakeries (31 have been identified), and street food establishments. And all of this is in addition to the private houses and multi-family residential buildings.
As our excellent guide at the site said as we began our walk, Pompeii had everything you’d expect to find in a growing city with a lot of money and a lot of vices. The wealthy residents of Pompeii had made their money relatively recently through commercial activities and enjoyed showing off their riches through conspicuous consumption of luxury goods and lavish decoration that was meant to impress. Meanwhile, the long-established Roman elite looked down on them as nouveau riche upstarts and considered their decorative style overdone and tacky.
From the archaeological site, we had a great view of Mount Vesuvius, just as the residents of Pompeii would have had. Our guide reminded us that prior to the eruption in 79CE, the volcano had a single cone which was twice as high as the two cones we could see now. As in ancient times, the volcano is surrounded today by groves of olive trees and vineyards.
We walked into the sprawling space of the ancient forum, Pompeii’s main public square. It served as the center of commercial, political, religious, and social life. Before the destruction of Pompeii, the forum was paved with white limestone.
Several temples and markets were located not far from the forum. Vendors would set up their stalls in the center of a market complex called the macellum. This is where people would come to buy fish, chicken, bread, and other products. Our guide pointed out inclined tables where fish was sold. We could still see traces of advertisements that were painted on the walls.
Leaving the market area, we walked carefully (because those ancient stones are worn and slippery, not to mention uneven!) towards the public baths.
The thermal baths included a courtyard for pre-bath exercise and games. Some of the original decoration was still intact in the changing room, frigidarium (cold room), tepidarium (a warm room), and caldarium (hot room). There was also a super-heated sweating room with heated walls and floor and a grooved vaulted ceiling to channel humidity.
After seeing the statue of the dancing faun in the museum in Naples, I was eager to see the House of the Faun, where it was found. This domus was the largest and most luxurious private residence in Pompeii. It took up an entire city block. I was hard for me to imagine a house that occupied 32,000 square feet (3000 square meters).
We entered through a vestibule into one of the house’s two atria. A copy of the statue stood in the impluvium, which was used to collect rain water.
There were beautiful mosaic floors throughout the domus.
The House of the Faun had two peristyle courtyards. These are open-air courtyards surrounded by columns that are often filled with gardens.
On the floor of the dining room, located between the two courtyards, was a reproduction of the Alexander mosaic. The original is in the archaeological museum in Naples where it is undergoing restoration. The subject of this large mosaic is the battle between Alexander the Great and King Darius of Persia.
I noticed how the columns were constructed of brick that was covered with plaster and made to look like sculpted marble.
Another impressive domus, and one of the largest houses in Pompeii, was the House of the Vettii. It belonged to two brothers, former slaves who became rich through their work as wine traders. This is where we saw the art that was graphically sexual.
The subject of the first fresco that greets visitors who entered the house was the god Priapus, the god of fertility. I was confused by this image of Priapus weighing his extremely large phallus on a scale against a bag of gold coins and I had to do a little research in order to understand it. The weight of the coins exceeds the weight of the god’s phallus, symbolizing the great wealth of the owners of the house. Phallic images were commonly found in Roman homes as the Romans believed such images could ward off bad luck.
The next fresco we saw was much less problematic. It’s a domestic shrine. The central figure is pouring a drink onto the altar and the sacred serpent symbolizes prosperity.
There were a number of frescoes depicting scenes from mythology. The painting below shows Daedalus and the wife of the King Minos.
In the next fresco, Dionysus (Bacchus) is looking over Ariadne, daughter of King Minos, as she sleeps.
This one shows Ixion being punished by Zeus for lusting after Hera, Zeus’s wife.
There are also several purely erotic frescoes and a garden with an erotic statue. Our guide suggested that these images were useful when entertaining guests who didn’t speak same language. Our guide stressed that it wasn’t uncommon to find erotic art in private homes in Pompeii.
One thing I immediately noticed was the brilliance of the colors painted onto large areas of many of the walls in the House of the Vettii. The predominant colors were shades of red and ochre. I learned from our guide that blue was the most expensive color since it came from lapis, a stone imported from Afghanistan.
A question that came up during the course of our visit concerned bathrooms. We all wondered if people had toilets in their houses. The answer is No. Buckets were used in the houses, and the contents of the buckets were emptied out into the streets, which were built to slope away from the center and to descend in order to carry off waste. Thus, crossing streets could be quite hazardous. This explained the “stepping stones” that our guide pointed. The large raised stones allowed people to cross the street without actually putting their feet into the dirty water.
From our earlier visit to Herculaneum, I was familiar with the thermopolium, the fast-food shop that sold hot food and drinks for customers to carry out. There were many of these in Pompeii.
Poppies growing wild in the ruins – one of my most memorable images from Pompeii.
By the time we walked back towards the forum, the crowds had definitely increased.
We stopped briefly in the forum for a group photo on our way to the exit.
And then, four hours after we arrived, our visit was over. Although we’d only seen a portion of the site, the visit was quite overwhelming, and I’d accomplished one of the main goals of my trip: I’d finally seen the real Pompeii and I’d walked through its ancient streets, after only imagining it for years. Now I was content to go home with my photos and my memories.
