Pompei

After 5 days in Rome Taylor and I felt like we'd seen everything important and we were ready for a day in the car just sitting.  Ok so we just got a half day since everything's pretty close in Italy, but we made it to Pompei after just one wrong, ridiculously scary wrong turn into the slums of Naples.  But we survived and the cloud cover and cooler weather was a treat.  Taylor had been to Pompei before on a cruise with his family and he was excited to see it again and for me to see it.  

There it is, off in the distance, up on a hill.

The amazing thing about Pompei is that it is so well preserved after all these years.  In Rome we got to see the stones that were still standing and that was amazing, but to see a whole town almost with all the buildings and statues mostly intact and even some of the mural paintings still preserved, well it was really neat to get that kind of a glimpse into what life was like.  The reds and blues here on the walls are original paintings.

The size and number of statues was staggering.  I'm just not used to seeing that much in the United States, but they had them everywhere.  They really loved art.

This is the main town square where there would have been shopping and commerce.

Of course some parts of the pieces aren't perfectly intact, but it was amazing to see how close they were.  There was a motif in Pompei of small heads being added to random parts.  Here there's a miniature head added to the horse's side.

Some of the buildings are crumbling after years of erosion and it was lovely to see the grass and wildflowers blooming everywhere.

Taylor had told me about these stones but it was still amazing to see.  For a city that didn't have sewers for the water and waste to run off into, this was a great innovation.  The sidewalks are raised above street level and these stones are placed at the right distance so a wheeled cart can go through them and also people can walk across the stones without having to step into the dirty road (extra dirty with horse and other animal leftovers).  Genius!

Seeing the preserved pottery and even some of the petrified people was very sad and creepy.  This town was full of life and it was a good life for most people.  Sad to see a normal reaction of curling into the fetal position and know that that was an actual person's last moment.

It's really amazing how much is preserved.

Even a wooden wagon survived.

And sadly a child did not but the ash preserved his last moments.

This was kind of a neat room to see.  It was the public washrooms.  Water poured in from each of the rocks and went down the opening you can see in the back.

The amazing amount of details was the same as Rome.

And these streets are better preserved than the Appian Way but you can see how it would really have been a great road to use.  The interesting thing here is you can kind of see how they've graded the road so it slopes down toward the sidewalk on each side so that water and waste will run to the gutters.

Taylor wanted to reenact this statue they've found.

The wagon ruts next to the stones was neat to see.

We wandered through Pompei until we got to these unexcavated hills on the outskirts.

Gorgeous!

Must have been something back in the day.  It sure is now.  This is a view of the modern town of Pompei.

Pompei had it's own ampitheater as well as army barracks and training facilities.

This is an ancient stone bed found in one of the more interesting buildings in town.  The walls have painted frescoes of shall we say menu options for the services provided inside on these beds.  Pompei was a port town and apparently this was a necessary, thriving business.

And I just had to take one picture of this because it was the bane of my trip.  Honestly, there bathrooms were so few and far between that when I finally found one it was for sure time to go.  And 99% of the time this is what I found.  Seriously?  Why is there not a toilet seat?  I've been out walking in the heat all day and I can't even sit on a seat?  And of course no toilet paper but that was expected and I was prepared.  But no seat!!!