Day 3: Pompeii

I’m going to try something somewhat different in this post. In an attempt to not flood you with quite as many pictures as I’d like, I’m going to try linking to some of them instead. If you hold the mouse over the link but don’t click on it, it’ll tell you if it’s to Flickr (a picture) or Wikipedia (some other random information.) Click or don’t click–it’s up to you. But at least that way you know where they fit in the narrative. :-)

Day 3 started… well, I was going to say bright and early, but it was actually dark and early. Ugh. We had to catch an early train out of Rome south to Pompeii, so we pried ourselves out of bed at some ungodly hour, threw our stuff together, and stumbled over to Termini in the pre-dawn blackness. Actually, though, this was worth it, because I got to see a fog-edged sunrise over the Italian countryside, and it was amazingly beautiful. I tried to take a couple of pictures, but between the graffiti etching and reflection on the train’s window and the speed at which we were moving, they just didn’t come out. So you’ll just have to imagine it.

We disembarked in the town of Pompei, the actual town where people still live and daily life goes on, and discovered for the first time one of the hard truths about Italy — everything is “five to ten minutes” on foot. It doesn’t matter how far you are from something, it’ll only take five to ten minutes to walk there. Ok, so this didn’t really hold true almost ever, hence the reason why I called it a hard truth. In this instance, we walked for at least 20 minutes, lugging all of our luggage, through the town of Pompei and around the outer edge of the ruins to reach the Pompeii Scavi side, where it turns out the station for the train we SHOULD have taken is.  Whoops. We came in on Trenitalia, the national rail line, and we should have switched to the Circumvesuviana, a narrow-gauge local train that, you guessed it, does a big lap around Mt. Vesuvius. Oh well. At least we were able to leave our bags (for free, nonetheless!) at the Pompeii Scavi entrance, and then we went around to Porta Marina to go in.

The ancient Porta Marina entrance to Pompeii. In case you haven't guessed, "Porta" is Italian for door/gate.

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We procured a couple of audioguides and proceeded to listen our way through the ruins. We saw a lot of neat old stuff, but what I really wanted to see was more signs of inhabitation than just a bunch of ruins. Don’t get me wrong — the ruins were neat too! But I wanted to see the casts of people that you always see pictures of when you read something about Pompeii. I wanted to see pottery, frescoes, etc.

It didn’t take long before we hit our first plaster cast.

Ok, so that’s a real dog, and it’s asleep. Pompeii actually has a fair number of stray dogs, but rather than just let them roam at will, they track them as best as they can, feed and house them, and they even have an adopt-a-dog program where you can sponsor a dog in Pompeii.

Anyway, I posted this picture because Pompeii has been a canine-inhabited city since it was actually a city and not just a ruin. The very first “beware of dogs” sign (or, rather, a mosaic) was actually unearthed at Pompeii, and I have a picture of a similar mosaic (this must have been a somewhat common thing?) but without the text. So this leads into my next picture, and the first plaster cast I saw.

In Pompeii’s day, this room was a granary (grain storeroom). Now it’s used to store artifacts from all over the city, as well as several plaster casts. The one in this picture is a dog. Wikipedia has a much better (and closer!) shot of this — you can actually see its collar! Archeologists believe that this dog was chained behind someone’s house when it was buried in ash.

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The storeroom held a couple of other plaster casts.

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The guy in the picture below is actually sucking his thumb. No, I’m not kidding.

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The next room over was a bit more light-hearted — an ancient latrine, according to the audioguide. I showed someone this picture and they asked me if it smelled… heh. No.

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Heading back to death, we walked down a part of the city known as the necropolis — city of the dead. It was a wide road on a hill that was lined with tombs and crypts. Pretty crazy.  Something struck me about seeing graves of people who died and were given a proper burial… what a contrast with the way the city ended.

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The weather had been really really hazy all day, with clouds shrouding Vesuvius, but finally around mid-day, they parted long enough for me to get the best shot of the mountain that I was going to get the entire time.

The mountain that started it all.

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As far as volcanoes go, it was fairly underwhelming, actually. I mean, when I think of volcano, I think of something craggy and snow-capped, like St. Helens or Lassen, or totally dominating, like Mauna Loa, or spread out and erupting constantly, like Kilauea. Vesuvius could have almost been Saddleback, the two peaks that looked over the valley I lived in while growing up in southern California. I was kind of surprised by that — I was definitely expecting something that dominated the landscape a bit more.

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A quick note about Pompeii — it’s HUGE. Much much bigger than any of the three of us were expecting (while we we all agreed that Pompeii wasn’t what we were expecting, none of us was really sure what we HAD expected. Hard to explain.) We realized after an hour or two that there was no way we’d get through everything in the audioguide in a single day, so we consulted the map in an effort to find the highlights, and opted to go to the Villa of the Mysteries next. This is a quite-well-preserved villa that’s not actually in Pompeii — it’s just outside the city wall. One of the things I found really neat about it was that, in a couple of rooms, they have glass cases with plaster casts of the bodies that were found in the rooms. Crazy.

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Another neat thing about the house was that the frescoes and mosaics were AMAZING — they were so well-preserved that it was almost breathtaking. I just couldn’t get over the vibrance of the colors.

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According to the audioguide, this is one of the earliest extant glazed tile floors (as opposed to mosaic or stone, I guess.)

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Right around this point, the guys sat down and declared that they needed a break, and Joel! congratulated me for outwalking a Hong Konger. I could have totally kept going, but since I’m nice (and since John was being awesome and carrying my camera backpack) I sat down with them for a bit. :-)

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After we’d rested a bit, we headed back out and up a hill along the city wall to the other side of the ruins, to see the amphitheaters. On the way, I FINALLY got a picture of one of the small lizards that populated the ruins but that had been eluding my camera all day. Actually, they’d been eluding me all day. John kept saying that he’d see them running to and fro whenever he’d cast a shadow on a sunny stone wall, but I had yet to see a single one. I guess they really do exist. Pretty little buggers.

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Our recurring problem all day was that we kept getting side-tracked. We’d make the mistake of looking down a road we didn’t intend to walk down, and then someone would see something he or she would find fascinating and want to “just run over and check out”, and next thing you knew, we’d spent another half hour wandering something else. But there were so many random and interesting things to see!

Ancient bathhouse--the tubs were heated from a fire that was built beneath them, and they were sheathed in lead to keep in the water and provide insulation.

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Ancient lunch counter. The wells in the countertop held different kinds of food, kind of like a cafeteria or buffet. Some of the wells had niches beneath them for the proprietor to build a small fire to keep the food within heated. These were scattered all over the city--some had many more wells, some had fewer. What impressed us was how well-preserved many of the countertops were. They looked like all they needed was a bit of a polish before you could start serving off of them. Neat!

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Ancient graffiti -- apparently this was a slogan for some politician. The fact that Italy still to this day has a rich tradition of graffiti amuses me, for some reason.

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We kept seeing these tall, spaced-out stones in the middle of the road, but we couldn't figure out what they were for. Finally it dawned on Joel! that they were ancient crosswalks, so that the citizens of Pompeii didn't have to walk amidst the muck of the street to cross from side to side. For this picture, I tried to get the guys to do a bit of a Beatles/Abbey Road kind of thing, but this is as close as they'd get. They were remarkably patient with me and my weird whims the entire time. :-)

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Check out the wheel ruts! I never did find out if those were carved there on purpose in order to make cart passage easier, or if they just wore into the road gradually. Still, it's neat to think of the carts that must have traveled in those ruts. Also, if you look at the center of the picture, you can see more crosswalk stones.

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Something I thought was neat — pretty much every large villa was laid out essentially the same, with an entryway called an atrium, which contained  a small, concrete/stone-lined pool, rooms around the perimeter of the house, and a garden/courtyard in the center. The above picture is a close-up of one of those pools. In the roof above the pool, there’d be a hole, and the roof would be sloped so that rainwater would roll off the roof, through the hole, and into the pool. Underneath the pool was a cistern to hold extra rainwater. In this picture, you can see the square stone that covers the opening to the cistern in between the two pillars on the right. The hole in the ceiling also served to illuminate the surrounding rooms. Here’s a better-preserved example of an entry pool — I’d say the linked picture is more typical of what we saw.

Also neat — in the back left corner of this picture, partially hidden by John, is a cast of an old wooden cabinet that was found in this house when it was excavated. The cabinet apparently held a bunch of well-preserved household items. This was my favorite of the houses we wandered through, because for some reason it was really easy for me to imagine people living in it.

The last neat thing about this house I noticed? The front door. See that crusty-looking door behind the metal security door in the picture below? It’s a plaster cast of the original front door of the house. I’m not sure why I found this particular detail so neat, but I did. Incidentally, no bodies were found in this house when it was excavated in the early 1900s, but they did find the skeleton of a tortoise in the garden. Random.

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A couple hours later than we’d planned, we finally got to the amphitheater. Pompeii actually has three — a large one, a medium one, and a small one. The medium one is undergoing some sort of restoration/renovation, so we couldn’t go in, but we did go in both of the others.

Large amphitheater -- what we'd think of as a colosseum, really, but as the original name of the Colosseum in Rome was the Flavian Amphitheater, and it was only named the Colosseum after a colossal statue that stood nearby, I guess "amphitheater" is the correct name.

Weirdos.

Sometimes it's just better to smile politely, nod, and walk away.

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Inside the amphitheater.

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Random factoid: like the Colosseum in Rome, the better/more expensive seats were closer to the arena. Also like the Colosseum in Rome, the wealthy people and politicians would have their own permanent box seating, and they’d signify which seats were theirs via a stone with their name carved in it. The audioguide didn’t mention this, but I thought to look for it, and I’m glad I did. Neat.

Last but not least, we made it to the small amphitheater. Unlike the two larger ones, this one was originally completely covered, and as such, had the best acoustics of any of the three.

After this, tired, cold and hungry, we tromped back to the entrance, where we picked up our luggage, climbed on the correct train this time, and rode it to Sorrento while watching the sun set. Thankfully, no pictures exist of when we first got to Sorrento… I kind of got us lost. Ok, not lost… but let’s just say that a GPS is only as accurate as the (correct!) address you put into it. Heh. Whoops. The fact that it kept telling us we were 120KM off should have been a sign. :facepalm: So we spent a while wandering Sorrento with our luggage, looking for our hotel. Joel! finally got us in the right neighborhood, and John spotted both the street sign and the hotel sign. Whew. We found a really nice little pizzeria for dinner — decent food, free bread, AND the waiter brought us a free appetizer! OK, no free water, but we didn’t expect any (which is why we didn’t drink any with dinner.) After dinner we went in search of gelato but ended up at a cheese shop instead (:innocentlook:), then went back to the hotel and crashed early.