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When I was in about the 3rd grade I remember that there was an issue of National Geographic that showed up in our classroom with pictures of Pompeii in it, including a very dramatic picture of one of those frozen-in-time bodies that most people have seen images of on the cover. My previous interest in National Geographic had, somewhat embarrassingly, been almost strictly limited to a search for pictures of scantily clad villagers, but this was another thing entirely. This story had everything a little kid could want… really old historical things, buried treasure, and - most importantly - a massive, exploding volcano. Who could ask for more? I’ve wanted to go ever since, and while we were down in the South, we spent a day there.

Pompeii was entirely covered by the explosion of Mt. Vesuvius in A.D. 79, only 16 years after a huge earthquake had destroyed a good deal of the city. I always thought the explosion was sudden, without warning and covered just about everything, but it turns out that ash and pumice had been raining down on the town for several days before the hammer fell. One lesson to take from Pompeii, then, would be that if you wake up to see your town being rained on by pumice stone, you should immediately go very, very far away, preferably in the opposite direction of the local active volcano. This seems relatively obvious to me, but about 2,000 people (10% of the population) either weren’t all that bright or weren’t capable of leaving and died in the explosion.

I read a good bit about the city before we got there, but there wasn’t much that prepared me for how well preserved it would be. Unless you’ve been to Hurculaneum (in two more posts), there’s probably not much that would. The difference between reading about or seeing pictures of a place like that and actually standing in it, feeling like a part of how these people lived 2000 years ago, is really striking. I seriously doubt that they had a gift shop with little porcelain coliseums on sale back then, but the rest seems straight out of history. I mean, there are paintings on the walls. There is plumbing, there are rooms that look like they could be lived in, kitchens!

The truly amazing thing is that when they began real excavation of the city in the 1700s, they found that the Pompeiians were in many ways more technologically advanced than the people doing the digging. Craziness… damn dark ages! Damn barbarians! Damn lead pipes! We might all be able to fly or something by now if it wasn’t for you!

In any case, here are some pictures that ought to be fairly self-explanatory. The last two are of the most well-preserved temple on the site.

Finally, here are some pictures of the insane human (and one dog) remains that everybody’s been waiting to see. They call them body casts… apparently when they were doing the early excavations they kept finding air pockets that had a pile of bones at the bottom. Eventually they wised up and started pouring plaster into the holes, with the following results.