I got up at 7:30, and began the journey towards the famed Roman ruins at Pompeii and Herculaneum (Ercolano). I say journey not because the ruins are far away, but because you have to catch two trains to get there, and Naples has taken a page out of St. Louis' book in terms of how often they run trains. Unfortunately, they actually have demand for their trains, so every single one is standing room only. Maybe if they would charge more (it's half the price of the German system), spend less on making stations that are works of art, and have all the lines be run by the same company they could run them more frequently, but that wouldn't be very Italian, now would it.
Anyhoo, after a lovely commute, I arrived in Herculaneum. The ruins of Herculaneum are much smaller than Pompeii, because 75% of the site is underneath modern housing, and will probably stay that way forever. This is a shame, because the part that has been excavated is in much better shape than most of Pompeii. There are several good reasons for this. First, Pompeii was excavated well before Herculaneum, and they didn't do as good of a job in stabilizing and preserving it 100-something years ago as they did with Herculaneum. Second, Pompeii gets shitloads more tourists, and we as a group tend to ruin shit. Third, and most important, is what actually happened to the two towns on August 24, 79. When Vesuvius erupted, the wind was blowing towards Pompeii. Any material not flung into the stratosphere rained down on Pompeii for hours, covering the place in 10 feet of hot volcanic ash. This collapsed roofs, started damaging fires all over the place, and made Jon Snow get all shirtless and glistening. But the worst was yet to come. The next morning, pyroclastic flows of fast moving super hot ash, gas, and rock swept into Pompeii, and obliterated most of the second stories of all of the buildings. By contrast, Herculaneum was actually doing all right until the evening of the 24th. That's when all the volcanic material that was flung skyward remembered there was a thing called gravity, and it had to stop believing it could fly. In about 5 minutes, Herculaneum went from okay to under 10 meters of ash. This tends to smash roofs in, but it smothers fires, and doesn't wreck walls and mosaics and frescoes near as much. I spent about an hour and a half wandering the ruins of Herculaneum, examining the mosaics in the baths (which for some reason included a penis motif), fresco remnants in houses, and generally much more complete structures.
After lunch, it was on to Pompeii. Due to it being right in the crosshairs of the eruption, it's not as well preserved as Herculaneum. There's a lot fewer mosaics and frescoes, you can't go into most of the houses, and a lot of what's left looks a bit like somebody bombed a pueblo. There's a bunch of half collapsed walls made of pumice like stone held together by mortar. However, what really makes Pompeii unique is that unlike anywhere else in the world, it shows the layout of a real Roman town as it was back then (Rome has a few historical things, but that is the Vatican's town, and make no mistake about it says Giovanni). The Forum, while shattered, is a forum, with temples, government buildings, and a bath house. There's two theaters next to each other, one small, one large. There's a gladiator training complex, a gymnasium, an amphitheater, baths for other neighborhoods not near the forum, and Roman streets. These are all cobbled, and sunk half a foot below the sidewalks, with deep ruts for carts. At regular intervals, raised stones are placed in the road for pedestrian crossings. This is because the toilets flowed into the street, where excess water from the public fountains would wash the sewage away (the fountains were designed to constantly overflow to maintain good water pressure and to try and have some cleanliness. Since nobody wants to walk in that in sandals, we see the raised stones. Pompeii is a huge complex, easily 1km by 2km, and it took about 3 hours to see everything they've unearthed that is accessible.
After that, I spent an hour waiting for a train, and came back and had another delicious and cheap pizza. I'll do a second post with all the pictures from today. Pompeii will be obvious because there will be a few pictures of a town that looks much more ruined than the previous ones.
Also, the house of Lucius Caecilius Iucundus really does exist! You can't go in it of course, and he wasn't as wealthy as the Vetii, or the guys who owned the House of the Faun or the House of the Mysteries, but he wasn't exactly broke.
Tomorrow I go to Rome.
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