(Sat. Dec. 5th)
Woot. Time for another repeat visit from 2002, but no matter. I chose it. A lot of my friends wanted to go to Pompeii, and though yes I'd been already, I wasn't an architecture student traveling with architecture student friends at the time. So I thought I'd really enjoy it, and learn a lot from it. Both were true.
We did a round-trip day: a few hours down to Naples, another almost hour to Pompeii, however many hours there, and then the same trip back. Not bad for one day. I brought my computer, determined to do school work and photo stuff rather than nothing for the whole time. We got up pretty early. My friends slept :) I was pretty sure I could check my bag at the door, and willing to take the risk anyway. Can't waste the time sleeping!
What was past Pompeii was one of my favorite places in the world, Sorrento. Probably due to unique circumstances at the time, I had a bloody fantastic time when I was there with my dad and my brother. We went to Pompeii, we did a lot of relaxing, a lot of eating, a lot of wine drinking, and had a room with floor-to-ceiling shuttered doors onto a balcony that overlooked the Adriatic waves lapping at the rocks a hundred feet below. We had just spent a week walking around all day, sleeping in places with no A/C, and having 50 lb. backpacks on our backs. So we enjoyed ourselves there.
Anyway, as we got near Pompeii, I at least considered for a minute staying on the train a little long and heading around the coast to Sorrento. I mean I could see it, around the bay across the water! But I stayed.
And we arrived. Pompeii!! Scavi means ruins. And below it says, apparently there was also the "house of mysteries" that I don't remember visiting before. Well we'll hafta do that...
As soon as you enter, you realize that its basically an entire town, whose ground plane at least was nearly totally intact...and many of the houses were intact all the way up to the roofs. You see the town walls, walk up the road made of large smooth stones (the predecessor to cobblestone) and through the gate in the wall.
And here you are- immediately in large open-wide public spaces- forums (fora is really the correct plural :) and temples and town square type places. You can see the bases of all the columns, which are all made of brick...
If you look closer, you can see how the columns were made. diamond-shaped bricks around a center brick, all stacked together, mortared, and then the columns were faced with limestone or marble.
This is the largest public open space near the front (all the sports/theater facilities were off to the side of the town). It was a large open grassy area that was originally surrounded by an arcade, or a long barrel-vault-covered walkway with two stories of columns. At the end was a temple of some god(dess).
Here is a great example of how intact the place was. This is inside someone's house, with existing frescoes on surviving plaster spread over the walls (and spread pretty thick!). And on the floor is a mosaic of two guys doing...something. I dunno what.
Here's a good example of one of the many, many let me emphasis, town streets. On each side you can see what is basically the sidewalk, then a giant curb, then the street, DEEPLY rutted from chariots (we're talking STONES here, cut in grooves from that many chariots).
To cross the street they had tall stones that you could walk across, which allowed the chariot to drive through still but a person to walk *above* the street, since they were often running with water either from rain, or else from the giant cistern at the back edge of the town, at the top of a hill, that they could open to let water run downwards down the streets into the town to wash the town streets- since they didn't have gutters or drains or sewers. Pretty sophisticated though!
When we got to the back, we got in one of the (multiple) amphitheaters to get a photo op. My friends were posing and yelling at me to get over there and get in the picture :)
I don't often pose photos, preferring just to get action shots- even not caring if people are looking or smiling. But on the flipside, I do enjoy an occasional posed shot that is just perfect.
Here for example. Crossing "Abbey Road". If only we were wearing all white, and barefoot. If you don't get the reference, at least Google Abbey Road, click "Images", and maybe you'll see what I'm talking about.
At some point, we found out that part of the town was the shady area. If they did drugs back then, they sold em here. Our professor had told us about this area of Pompeii, but I wouldn't have believed it if I didn't see it.
We walked in a particular building that was apparently a brothel. No way. There were many small rooms, complete with stone beds (with stone pillows) and each room had pictures above it- as if you could choose the room based on uh, what you wanted. Like...you know...what position. Below is a less-graphic example.
This is what our professor had told us about. Apparently an image is a reliable way of communcating across languages, since at one point this was a trade town on the sea with Greeks and other nationalities coming through. So sure, a bunch of penises (peni? penisi?) was the perfect way to say "Hi, I'm a brothel! We service you here!"
There was also a water fountain, pressurized just by the water coming down from the mountain. Doesn't dispense water anymore, but it DOES still suck on Dave's thumb...
After rounding the back of the town and seeing the other side of the city walls (the place is flipping huge) we found the House of Mysteries. Didn't seem too mysterious. I also found a pen someone dropped, back outside the city walls, and I have it still- its my Pompeii pen now :)
The "Villa dei Misteri" did have some frescoes even though it didn't have many mysteries.
Despite the fact that we were there for hours, we did hafta start hurrying at the end- partly because I need to get back to the check-in place to get my laptop (it closed before the park did) and partly because we hadta make our train back to Rome. Or we'd be spending the night in lovely Naples.
Near the end, which was near the entrance, we found one of the main attractions- the cast plaster people. This guy was basically rapidly buried in place by volcano ash, and then his body decomposed and left an empty hole in the ash, which excavations found 2,000 years later and they made impressions of the spaces, and found people in contorted positions- freaky!
If you can ignore the bright red light (Shauna turned on her pre-flash red light on her camera so I could take an illuminated picture of it...or maybe Jessica did that, I forget) you can see that this is someone's face, in a grimace, with teeth and everything. So they were obviously buried (and killed) very quickly to have died in positions like this. Unreal.
Also nearby in another little villa was my favorite courtyard. Many of the houses that were in this good shape we weren't allowed in. I composited this from a bunch of photos, because I couldn't back up since I was right against the wall. So I took a bunch and Photoshop put them together (hence the jagged corners). I love this little space though. Smaller than it looks in this stretched out photo.
Here's another famous symbol of Pompeii- the dog mosaic. It says "beware of the dog" in Latin. Can you believe that? Some things never change...
This was way cool. The bathhouse. Frescoed inside, with the tradition calidarium and frigidarium (hot and cold water rooms) and cool skylights in the barrel-vault roof. Very dark, but nothing MY camera couldn't handle :)
Back where we began, this was the main public forum that used to be surrounded by two stories of colonnade. The main temple (I think to Minerva) is at the end of the forum. Its a cool space, decent grass...how did the grass survive the volcano ash...
Clearly, it was getting dark. And we hadta get outta there . Beautiful sunsets, and this is the only photo that got CLOSE to capturing it- and believe me I tried a bunch of different exposures and stuff.
Success! They gave me back my laptop, and no one had stolen it. We went to wait for our train back to Naples, and a few people got some delicious looking pizza on the way. There was also a sweet stand of lemon-y stuff, mostly limoncello. Most limoncello is made down in the south, specifically Sorrento, and we saw lots of it for sale when I was there with my dad and Chris- so whenever I see all this limoncello stuff, it reminds me of them. They also make it with oranges and tangerines and stuff. Tasty, but liquor-y :)
And that concludes our day trip to Pompeii. We headed back up to Rome, I tried to work on pictures and school work more, and it was almost time for Tiffany to visit too...
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