2004 Europe

Pompeii & Mt. Vesuvius



May 24 – It’s up and at ‘em early today. We have to be up at the parking lot by 7:30AM for the car to take us to Amalfi for our tour of Pompeii and Vesuvius. In the picture above you can see Mount Vesuvius in the distanced behind the city it buried, Pompeii. We joined a family of four in the van for the ride. The parents and daughter are here meeting their son who is traveling around the world on a fellowship from UC Berkley studying architecture. He will circle the globe in a year gathering information for his master’s thesis. Not a bad way to spend a year of college. When we got to Amalfi met our guide, Leonardo, and boarded a bus for the trip. The bus was fairly empty but we learned that we would be making stops as we drove to Salerno to pick up more passengers. By the time we hit the Autostrata the bus was almost full.



Our first stop was Pompeii. I’d read so much about the place that I felt like I’d been there before. I have never seen anything from the Roman era so well preserved that was not a reconstruction. Very little of that has been done here. Things have been preserved as they were excavated, for the most part. The city was amazing. A short walk from the Porto ta Marina (Sea Gate) there’s a large square, bounded on one side by the Basilica and the Temple of Venus (below) and the other side by the Macellium, this is the Roman Forum. It’s at the intersection of two very broad boulevards, one named The Way of Abundance (Abondanza) and the other unnamed on my map but it may have been a porch of the Forum as it is paved with marble slabs. These are the widest streets I’ve seen in a Roman town, easily wide enough for two cars to pass. The Way of Abundance paved with the more normal paving stones. As we walked down the marble pavement street we came to an archway that delineated the transition from the governmental zone to the commercial zone. Just before the archway was a large building with several small rooms built into its front wall. This was the Macellium and the small rooms were money-changing booths so the attendees could get the Roman currency required inside. Sound familiar to anyone? A good part of the perimeter walls of the building are intact. Some columns still held up their lintels. Some of the murals inside the Macellium are still visible and they have two of the mummies preserved by the volcanic ash that buried the city on display.



Just in case you don’t know the story of Pompeii I’ll recap. It was first a Greek town of fairly small size, but the Romans conquered it and expanded it to a city of about 25,000. In AD 79 nearby Mt. Vesuvius erupted suddenly burying the entire town and all its inhabitants under 20-23 feet of very hot volcanic ash. Almost everything was saved intact. The people were turned into mummies in whatever position they were in when it happened. Food that had been recently prepared was still on the tables ready to eat. It was not discovered until the 18th century. Much of the art has been moved to a museum in Naples but some mosaic floors and wall frescos are still on the site. Most are in pretty bad shape; the good ones were taken for preservation.



The next stop was the main public bath. They had small baths all over the city but this one was for the upper crust only. Even though they have seen some hard times the opulence of the rooms was still evident. What remains of the wall decorations is lush and detailed. In the changing room there are small areas around the wall for people to place their clothing. Between each space is a 3-foot tall very muscular man (below) holding up the lintel above.



Next we visited a small bar. Our guide, Lorenzo, told us that there’s a bar at every intersection of main boulevards in the city. The counters were still mostly intact. They were covered in tile and had 12 inch in diameter bowl built right into the top. These bowls were used to mix drinks for serving, wine with spices, wine and honey, etc. Diana and I couldn’t resist posing for a picture there among the pots (below).



We walked up the Via de Nola to the Casa de Centenario, the largest villa in the city. This would have been the home of the Centurion in charge of the cities forces. It was a large home built around a large patio. It had elaborate gardens and some of the mosaics were still there. The Romans had used the same construction techniques here that they did at Herculeum and Masada in Israel. They built the buildings out of local stone and brick and then plastered the walls and painted them to mimic marble. They were actually quite good at it and when you look at what remains of the plaster and paint it looks very authentic. They even built their columns out of brick and then plastered them in a fluted design that mimics carved marble columns. You can see this construction style in the picture of the Temple of “Venus above. Very creative.



Next we cut across the city to get to the Grand Roman Theater (below). On the way we passed a flourmill. Four of the mills were still there intact and were exactly the same as the Roman mills we had seen in Israel. The theater was a fairly large one. The guide said it could seat 20,000 and it looked like it might. That’s 80% of the population of the city. Of course, the city was a major center for commerce and would have had a large number of visitors at any given time. Plus it was a religious center for the area and hosted many feasts and festivals. After visiting the theater it was back to the bus to head to Vesuvius.



Vesuvius last erupted in 1944 but is not extinct. It still emits steam and has occasional tremors. The lava flow from the last eruption is clearly visible on the mountainside. Two small cities were largely destroyed in that event. The bus could only take us part way up to the peak. The caldera is so badly broken that each side has a name of its own. Mt. Somma is 3.714 feet (on the right in the picture at the top) and Mt. Vesuvius in 4,150 feet (on the left in the same picture). The caldera is in between them. I started out to climb to the top but the path was steep and made up of crushed lava rock. Very much like walking in soft sand. I got about half way up and decided enough was enough. I settled for some good views of the Bay of Naples, Naples and the Isle of Capri (below) and headed back down, wimp that I am.



After that we paid a visit to a cameo factory to see a man carving the shell. The prices at the factory were not good. The small cameo shop in Ravello had better carvings at about 2/3 the price. Oh well, we didn’t want one anyway.



Next back to the hotel for another wonderful meal prepared by Franco and served by Gianado.

(c) 2004 Rod Longenberger