Herculaneum and Pompeii

Our next stop on our journey was Naples which we made our hub to see Herculaneum and Pompeii. Since we arrived midday and Herculaneum is smaller we headed there first.

This small town was buried in the eruption which also destroyed Pompeii, but it was discovered later and is less well-known. It is a smaller site and easily seen in a half day.

Here you can see how deeply the ash fell which buried the city.













All of Herculaneum will never be uncovered because the modern city of Ercolana - the Italian version of the city lies on top of it. Here you can see the ancient city in the foreground and the modern town in the back ground. This photo doesn't show the dozens of feet of height difference between the two.










This is a doorway leading into part of this house which extends under the hillside upon which rests modern Ercolana. It shows the kind of stuff they had to dig through to reveal this ancient town.



















The eruptions of the two cities were slightly different because they were in different directions. Herculaneum was hit with superheated gases which turned the wooden objects into charcoal preserving them to this day.











It was hot enough to melt glass.
















And sear the flesh from people's bones. All the bodies found here were skeletonized.














These are the boathouses of Herculaneum where hundreds of people perished waiting for a boat to come and rescue them.

They used to be along the water front but so much ash and rock fell that the shore is now quite a distance away.










This is the remains of the caretaker of a building which sounded like a lodge or club or union of sorts for freedmen in Herculaneum. The caretaker had a room in the building and he died here upon his bed.


















I really liked Herculaneum. There were a number of reasons for this. It was small and we had access to almost every building on the site.





















It feels like real streets...















.....and real houses.























There was still the color of paint.













And mosaics stand where they have stood for two millennia. They will not stand for long. The sun and weather will cause them to fade and to fall.

In Pompeii almost everything has been removed. Which is good for preservation, but it makes the buildings lack that sense of being homes and businesses










Looks like the shop owner just stepped out for a moment.



















There was more of a sense of the buildings being intact in Herculaneum. I think because almost all of the best houses and villas were inexplicably closed in Pompeii.

This is part of the decoration which has survived around the atrium of this home. The glass roof is modern, of course, to protect this ornamentation.

Bigger homes all had an open atrium with a shallow pool beneath to catch and collect rain water and channel it to a cistern.




One thing we did not enjoy was the school groups. They joined us in Florence, haunted us in Rome and plagued us in these two ancient sites. The problem with school groups is that you have 50 or 60 kids and they move and act as one entity. Part of this is necessary - they are a group after all, and if there was just one at a given place it wouldnt matter - you go ahead or behind the group, but there were dozens of these groups at the various places and there was no escaping them and it was with great difficulty at times that we were able to get access to a room of a museum or a particular building.

It was interesting that they took the children into the brothel at Pompeii with its erotic art upon the walls. I wonder if an American school group would do the same. In the National Archeology Museum in Naples where we hoped to find artifacts from Herculaneum and Pompeii ( there was almost nothing there) I heard the humming din of a school group and thought I was safe on the second floor. But,no, they weren't exploring the first floor first, they were headed straight up to the second one. In my attempt to keep ahead of them, in vane, I ended up in what is called the Secret Chamber. This is a room which used to be kept under lock and key. No one could see what was in here without the king's permission. This is where the lewd and kinky and lascivious art and artifacts were kept. I was now looking to get out but the kids were brought straight to this room first! I was utterly astounded. I had to wade through the crowd to get out.


Pompeii is fully excavated and covers 27 acres, I think. It takes a full day to explore the city. You can get a map of the site, which I recommend, but we still had difficulties finding out way around because, although the streets all have names, many of them aren't labeled and you can enter a building from one street and exit on another so it is easy to lose one's bearings.

Here are the stepping stones for crossing the wet street and the deep ruts made by the chariots over the decades before its destruction. The wheel gauge of ancient chariots became the gauge for the modern railway.






They have replanted some of the gardens and in the few villas we could enter, they added a lot to the feeling of being in a real place. Some places they have studied the remnants of the roots of the plants left in the ground and replanted the same type vegetation.


















We were fortunate that we happened to go to a museum in Rome which had an extensive exhibit of the mosaics and frescoes from Pompeii. We don't know if it was a temporary exhibit or a permanent one, but it took up most of the room in the museum.

Some frescoes were rather crudely done and some were exquisite in their detail and use of color. This is a section of one of the more beautifully rendered frescoes.








There were several rooms of nearly intact frescoes which had been taken from the ancient city. It was really neat to be able to have the feeling of being in one of these ancient rooms. Red seems to have been a favorite main color, as were a golden yellow color and black.













Some of the frescoes showed humor - Roman style. This is from a series along a wall which showed Nymphs and Centaurs. Nymphs purpose in Roman mythology, seems to have been, to be carried off by somebody for sexual purposes. This nymph seems to be getting the better of this Centaur.










There were mosaics too - many of them were hung on the wall which made them easier to see. Again, some were very crudely done in black and white and others had intricate patterns in tiny little stones in a whole range of colors. From a distance they looked like paintings. Mostly the mosaics were in geometrics or simple designs.








This is the corridor the gladiators would have taken to enter the field of the stadium in Pompeii






















Here is the stadium itself. I wish we could have climbed the seats to get a view of the city from the top of the bleachers.












Over 2000 bodies were found in Pompeii. Because the people were poisoned by gas and choked with ash, what remained after decomposition was a hole where their body had been. Archaeologists filled the holes with plaster and uncovered these rather detailed monuments to the last moments of these poor soul's suffering.








This group of people was found in a garden which is now called the Garden of the Fugitives. The garden was away from the shore which would be the natural place to flee for safety.

I wonder if they were from farther out in the country and if this is as far as they could get before being overcome or if they thought they would be safe in their home.

There was one man who stayed in his home with his beloved dog. They ended up sealed in together. It kept the poisonous gases out, but they were now entombed alive. The man succumbed first and the teeth marks upon his bones attest to his dog's survival for a while longer before he too died.









The suffering was intense as this man's face shows















There was heat here as well for the flesh has been burned off the back of his skull....






















....and from his toes.













Dogs were often used as guards. There is even a mosaic in an atrium of a villa warning people to beware of the dog. That was apparently what this dog's job was. He was chained in the atrium of a home. As the ash fell, he climbed on top of it until his collar and chain prevented him from going any further. There he lay and suffocated. When the people fled the home, I guess no one thought to take this faithful servant with them.







Vesuvius still looms in the distance. It is still an active volcano. If you draw a line up each side of the mountain to form a perfect cone, you will get an idea of what it looked like before the eruption. It is hard to comprehend the amount of materials that were spewed out by this volcano on that fateful day and to cover such wide distances as well. It is no trifling mountain, yet people still live all around it and hope for quiescence in their lifetime.