We took the ferry back across the Adriatic yesterday, arriving in Ancona, which was reasonably handy for Rome... but today was our only possibility to see Pompeii, which I had mistakenly located just north of Rome. To my chagrin, I was way out of whack -- Pompeii is actually just south of Naples. So we ended up driving two hours past Rome in -- you guessed it -- the foulest weather imaginable. When we had had the ferocious wet weather on the way from Florence to Venice, the motorway was at least fairly quiet. The drive to Pompeii was absolutely treacherous, with four to six lanes of traffic jockeying for lane space and hurtling along at 130 km in the dark and pouring rain. Eventually -- inevitably -- our poor van started to hydroplane, and with a less-skilled driver than Mitch our adventure may have come to an abrupt end then and there. That was it... we started looking for the next roadside hotel, whatever the price, before we paid with more than money! And as a result, we spent the night in a lovely hotel room in the middle of nowhere, Italy -- we stayed up late watching CNN and feeling luxurious.
Pompeii has been a big deal, "must see place" for us since Caelan started reading, as the first 'read-it-yourself-book' we got him was about the ancient eruption of Mount Vesuvius which buried the Roman town in its entirety in a matter of hours. As one historian I read put it "the rapid eruption was the best thing that could possibly have happened for Europe -- unless you happened to be a citizen of Pompeii"... because it has left a complete ancient city, incredibly preserved under layer-upon-layer of ash.
But I find it interesting that when I was rhapsodising about going to see Pompeii, the majority of people I talked to stared blankly at me -- it seems to remain off the charts of the must-see spots in Europe. Certainly, whoever made the road signs in Italy was pretty indifferent to its importance as a sight!! And our darned Google directions took us on a short cut off the main roads that left me cursing technology in language my children should not have heard and lamenting our lack of a decent map. We spent a good hour scrabbling around on little back roads with Mt. Vesuvius leering malevolently above us through a tattered cloak of dark cloud. (Why would people rebuild in the same spot that had known such tragedy? It's only a matter of time before it happens again...) After asking directions three or four times (in our fluent Italian!), we finally made it to this immense site -- and I mean HUGE! By that time, we only had a few hours to spend where one could easily wander for days -- but we made the best of it.
The horror of Pompeii's destruction was that by the time the people finally realised what was happening, there was no escape -- they were trapped between the volcano and the sea, and the fumes must have driven them to the ground as the ashes softly rained down upon them. The eruption happened in about 300 BC, so the bodies that were buried where they fell had long disintegrated before excavations happened. What they found as they excavated were only cavities showing where bodies would have been. On one street, before clearing the rubble they injected plaster into the cavities and were left with perfect moulds of thirteen people. Seeing those people as they lay smote my heart, particularly a painful grouping of an adult with a child pressed up close to her, as another adult (her husband? mother? sister? brother) a few feet away clearly made one last desperate effort to reach them. I didn't find this macabre, but poignant; what this time exploring other countries and histories has shown me over and over again is that life on this planet really is nothing without that interaction and love between people -- and this little unit of family or friends seemed to immortalise that the human condition is about reaching out to others.
After that, it felt like a gift to be able to see the homes and culture of those people, who radiated emotion almost two thousand years after their demise. Honestly, it was so interesting in such a non-'museumy' kind of way; almost like being on an ancient House & Garden tour. Cachell and I admired the kitchen designs and especially appreciated the little extras that some houses had -- a particularly intricate mosaic on the floor, or a tiled counter-top in jewel tones instead of just plain terra-cotta.
The gladiator stadium was of great interest to Caelan and I, as his book on Pompeii discussed the gladiators in detail. And it was there, in the very arena he first learned of in relationship to gladiators, that his mother showed him it will take more than a scrawny eleven-year-old to take her down! Bring on the gladiators!!
Their designs to manage water were also extremely interesting -- more than a thousand years later, my ancestors in the UK (birthplace of the next Empire) would still be dumping their chamber pots onto the streets below and using pipes and drains that were hopelessly inadequate and disease ridden. (in fact, Queen Victoria's husband, Albert, who was a champion of improving the quality of British drains, succumbed to typhoid brought on by the terrible quality of the sewers at Windsor Castle.) In Pompeii the pipes and channels are still plainly visible along the edges of streets, and what intrigued us more were the garden and roof designs. All the homes we saw (which perhaps did not include the poorer citizens...) had a covered garden. In the centre of the garden there was a box-like structure -- some very utilitarian, others obviously once ornate fountains). Above the fountains, the roof had a square hole, and the roof itself sloped down on all four sides towards this central opening; water then was collected on the roof in great quantity, and stored in the fountains below. This would cut down on run-off and provide a source of water. And all this, in the days before sheet metal and eavestroughing...
Anything to do with good rain management is of interest on this trip -- we see a lot of it! IN fact, we're starting to feel a certain moral obligation to travel to the drought-stricken parts of the world...!
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