Friday 25 April: Pompeii; or, Beth and Dan and the volcano

EA and I had planned a day trip to Pompeii to see the incredibly preserved ruins there. I worked there years ago in grad school but had not been back since. We rose at about 5:30, had a quick breakfast, and caught a cab to the meeting point for our shuttle bus near Termini, the main bus and train station on the east side of Rome. We were supposed to meet at 7:15 am for a 7:30 departure. About two dozen other folks were waiting as well. When nobody came by 7:35, I called the “emergency number” provided by the tour company. The woman answering the phone asked what was wrong, and I said that we were waiting for our bus to Pompeii. She told me we must have missed it. I replied that we had been there since 7 with a bunch of other people. She said that was impossible, the bus had left with two dozen people on it. I told her there were another two dozen people who were waiting, and asked what she was going to do about it. This made me a hero with the crowd standing there. A couple minutes later, a young guy came running up, apologizing that he was late because it was a national holiday (Liberation Day) and the buses were running late.

We finally boarded the bus for a beautiful three-hour drive through Lazio and Campania, with the mountains getting ever closer to our side. We made one stop at the Italian equivalent of Howard Johnson’s, which was an absolute circus. The place was packed, and the line for the women’s room was about 200 people long. Still, we got back onto the bus within our half hour break, and finished our trip to Pompeii.

Beth and I had a quick pizza for lunch, and then spent several hours roaming the streets of the city. Pompeii was a small town near the much larger city of Neapolis, modern Naples, and was destroyed in the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius on 24 August 79. Luckily (for us, not for the poor Pompeians) the city was not buried by lava, but by volcanic ash. This preserved the city in midpoint of daily life for nearly 1700 years, until excavations began in the 1700s. Still only a quarter of the city is excavated. Many of the most valuable finds have been moved to the National Museum of Naples, but some remain, and you can walk through street after street of insulae (apartment complexes), mansions of the wealthy, shops, taverns, and temples. We entered near the theater, still in remarkable preservation, and headed toward the Forum. Like all Roman colonies, the Forum had a Capitol: a Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus just like the one on the Capitoline Hill in Rome (only not as immense or richly decorated). Beth and I explored the temple, the basilica or law court, and the shrine of the Divine Augustus (more stuff for my research!) at the Forum, as well as the Forum Baths, one of several bathing establishments discovered at Pompeii. We also visited the Temple of Apollo, and the Temple of Isis, which I had surveyed in graduate school.

We stopped at the bookstore/caffè for a drink (Coke for Beth, wine for me, and water for both) and to buy books (a guidebook of the city for Beth and a book of erotic art from Pompeii for me). The clerk at the bookstore was coughing from the dust, and EA gave him a piece of gum, which he enjoyed so much that he asked to examine the packaging so he could look for the brand. He refused her offer of a tissue, however.

We only had a couple of hours left, so Beth and I began our body hunt. You may have heard about the bodies at Pompeii. The volcano caught everyone in mid-day, and thousands of people were suffocated by the fumes and buried under volcanic ash. With time, their bodies decomposed (or were burnt up by the hot cinders), leaving a hollow in the shape of the corpse. Men, women, children, even dogs and other pets were buried. During excavations, many of these hollows were filled with plaster, and the resulting casts are disturbingly realistic. Sometimes you can read the facial expressions (agony and fear, usually). Some of these bodies were on display in a large room you can look into, where pottery, sculpture, and other artifacts are being cataloged by excavators. Since EA and I share a certain ghoulishly morbid streak, we wanted to see more of these. Near the edge of town is a promisingly-named “Garden of the Refugees” with fifteen of these bodies. The site is poorly marked, and we roamed a while looking for it, even after asking directions from a guard. We finally found it, and it really is planted as a garden. In a glassed-off corner are the fifteen bodies, mostly women and children, who died trying to escape the wrath of Vesuvius.

It was getting close to time to catch our bus back to Rome, and of course the exit we chose was temporarily closed. We headed out through the Necropolis, the street of tombs outside the city limits (like all Roman towns, Pompeii did not permit burial within the city walls). EA had time to purchase some excellent ceramic souvenirs at one of the vendor stalls outside the gates, and we caught the bus just in time. Back in Rome we were exhausted, but not too tired to eat a nice dinner. Beth took me out to a great place about two blocks from my apartment, where she had spaghetti with clams, I had the house rigatoni (mushroom and sausage in a cream sauce), and panna cotta for dessert. I was so beat, even the din of Trastevere couldn’t keep me awake long that night.

There are some pics of Pompeii on Flickr. If you ever get a chance to go there, do it! It’s an amazing and rare chance to see daily life almost two millennia ago. Histories, official records, and artwork record the lives of the rich and powerful, but the daily activities of the common people of the past are much harder to document. Pompeii is a powerful and moving record of everyday life in the Roman Empire.

And above the town, Vesuvius still sleeps, but restlessly; in 1944, an eruption destroyed several villages and suburbs of Naples. When I was there in grad school, I was eating in a caffè and suddenly the ground shook so hard that my wine glass nearly bounced off the table. A waiter rescued it, shrugging as he said “Vesuvio.” Over three million people live in the greater Naples metropolitan area. The Italian government has extensive evacuation plans and closely monitors the volcano’s activity.