Chapter 3 - Pompeii

Ever since I was a little girl, I have wanted to visit Pompeii. I have no idea why. Maybe it was some imaginative elementary school teacher who painted a visual picture I just had to see, maybe I read a book, maybe it was just the universal human fascination with both the beauty and destruction of volcanoes? And of course, my travel companions here in Italy thought it was a great idea!

Well, the next morning after the longest car ride of our lives, not really scary, just creepy and terrible enough that no one was mad, just happy to have slept in a nice hotel that had a great breakfast buffet. We had freshly baked brioche con cioccolato, ham, eggs, coffee, hot chocolate, cheese, fruit, cereal . . . We then headed across the street to ancient Pompeii/the ruins which are separate from the actual modern day city of Pompeii. Ancient Pompeii is a magical and wonderful place to visit. While not all of it has been recovered through excavations, etc. a large part of it is revealed. There are streets, houses, bakeries, governmental buildings, bathhouses, cemetery, gardens, temples, a few plaster molds of bodies that have been found, etc. – and you see all this with Vesuvius looming large over the city. The Pompeii ruins are 164 acres with a little more than half uncovered. All of the artwork and other precious items have been removed to the big archeological museum in Naples, but there are still a few tile mosaics, marble structures and wall paintings in place. It was a great place to visit with kids because they could run around, climb, explore and see the remnants of an ancient world. We read Pliny the Younger’s famous letters describing the eruption and its aftermath before we embarked on our trip and again that morning. All of our imaginations ran wild with the idea of Pompeii as a live city, the volcano erupting and what it must have been like. Pompeii was actually destroyed by the ash a couple of days after a big eruption, so only 2000 of the 20,000 inhabitants actually died. We spent many hours just wandering through the ancient ruins and glancing up at Vesuvius every so often. We bought a small tour guide which shows a photograph of the ruins and then a transparency which you fold on top that recreates what the building/area would have looked like before the city was buried. We have lots of video which I’m sure we will bore many of you with it when we get home next year (or if you are lucky we will send you one now and you can just pretend to watch it, thereby saving yourself the pretense of interest in the future.)

The weather was chilly but the bright sun was out. Even in November, I’m sure there were a couple of thousand visitors that day. I can’t imagine what it is like in the heat of the summer and the hordes of people on vacation! The only not-so-pleasant aspect of Pompeii is that there are feral dogs everywhere and I really mean everywhere, when you are outdoors. They aren’t threatening because they obviously have learned that to survive you must be nice to the things on two legs who might give you food, but they can be a little too friendly. For the most part, they all looked kinda healthy and not that many of them were too mangy looking and/or dirty – but it was still off-putting when they followed you or tried to make friends with you. (They were really much more of a problem in the actual city where we stayed because it appears that they wander in from the ruins at night begging for food. One of our children was a little afraid of them because they are much more assertive with you at night in the city – especially when you walk out of a restaurant smelling like food. It appears that the locals just ignore them, they aren’t mean to them, but they certainly don’t treat them as pets of any sort. I told the kids they were like the pigeons in Venice, squirrels in the park or bunnies in our backyard in Grosse Pointe – they are just there.) So we all just ignored the dogs and they mostly left us alone except for the one white dog who just wanted to be in our video standing right next to a child who did not want to stand next to the white dog (or any other dog in Pompeii).

I have to imagine that this certainly will be one of our most memorable sight-seeing trips this year. We were all awed and amazed by Pompeii. Bill couldn't get over the sheer size of it and I was fascinated by seeing the ingenuity of this large city that was built and functioned without a tenth of the technology we have today. The kids loved the stepping stones to cross the street so you wouldn't have to step in the water that was used to funnel out horse poop and other waste being washed out of the city, the dog mosaics that were common at the entryway of many homes to warn "beware of the dog" and the thought of the whole thing being dug up from under all the dirt and ash so many years later. What an awesome place!