There are lots of fantastic treasures in Italy, but I have to confess I never really wanted to visit Pompeii. I’d seen all the pictures in National Geographics when I was a child, the ones of people encased in what appeared to be solidified lava, and it just seemed wrong somehow to want to go and gaze at their despair.
Here were people who had died in the most excruciating agony, their pain forever captured in what must surely have been the very thing that killed them. Pompeii should be a cemetery, I thought, not a place where millions of tourists come to gawk.
And yet my wife and I had decided to travel a bit further south in the country, and the train went right by Pompeii Scavi (“Excavation”) station. As well, our time in Rome, and a previous side-trip in Morocco to an ancient outpost called Volubilis, had made us a lot more curious about the Roman Empire. So, despite my misgivings we decided to go have a look.
To deal with the ghoulish side of things first, I’m happy to report that we didn’t find the ruins of Pompeii scattered with lava-encased human remains.
As it turns out, the “sort-of-mummies” that have become so associated with the place are actually plaster casts developed by Giuseppe Fiorelli in the 1860s, the first person to study Pompeii in a truly systematic way. He injected the plaster into voids he found during excavations, since the bones present inside suggested the vacant spaces were what remained of decomposed bodies.
And the people of Pompeii weren’t in fact killed and covered directly by lava. They died instead from temperatures of about 250°C (480°F), when an ash and pumice cloud descended on the town the first day of the Mt. Vesuvius eruption. Twelve different layers of the material (called tephra) then covered the area to a depth of about 4m.
To be fair, there are a few plaster casts tucked away discreetly in a couple of exhibit areas, as well as a small group of human bones, but nothing compared to the sorts of things you often see “on display” as religious relics in many European cathedrals.
No, instead of something that could pass as a set of a horror film, Pompeii is actually one of the best-preserved examples in the world of what life was actually like in ancient times.
The cloud of ash from the initial eruption collapsed many of the roofs of houses, and with it their second stories, but many other things remained intact. And because the tephra was relatively shallow, it was fairly easy for archaeologists to excavate.
As a result, you can actually walk the narrow streets cobbled with those giant stones the Romans seemed to prefer (and what a bone-jarring experience they must have been for anyone riding in a chariot!).
You learn that a local election campaign was being held at the time of the eruption, and you can still look at political slogans on the walls, including this possibly prophetic message:
“If upright living is considered any recommendation, Lucretius Fronto is well worthy of office”.
The tradition still continues in Italy, by the way, and not just at election time. Municipalities actually provide official billboard space (Pubbliche Affissioni) for political parties to paste broadsheets whenever supporters decide the time is right (a recent favourite: “I will re-double my efforts, signed Silvio Berlusconi”).
In Pompeii you also find graffiti, both from the years preceding 79AD, and (sadly) in a couple of isolated places from today. Believe me, it isn’t a coincidence that “graffiti” is an Italian word (you only need to ride the trains in Naples to realise that). It’s just that at Pompeii it becomes obvious that it has an exceptionally long-established pedigree.
In fact, so far archaeologists have discovered 15,000 scribblings of the ancient variety throughout the 40 excavated hectares of the town.
Like graffiti of today, they range from declarations of love:
“If anyone does not believe in Venus, they should gaze at my girlfriend”;
to the downright scatological:
“To the one defecating here, beware of the curse. If you look down at this curse, you have an angry Jupiter for an enemy”.
Much of it was the sort of thing you might find in modern times on lavatory walls. But some was sheer poetry –
“Lovers are like bees, they lead a honeyed life.”
And just like today, the best was also filled with humour, such as this gem found in a tavern:
“I am amazed, oh wall, that you have not collapsed and fallen, since you must bear the tedious stupidities of so many scrawlers”.
We tend to think of ancient ruins as being only of the monumental variety, but in Pompeii you’ll also find plenty from the workaday world. For instance, there’s a wholesale bakery, with a giant oven that contained 81 loaves at the time of the eruption, as well as mills for grinding wheat.
And in the garment factory you learn that human urine was treated as a precious industrial chemical in the ancient world. It was collected right throughout the town, and used in the cleaning processes of cloth and wool.
Like modern-day towns there was also a brothel (shock, horror!), with frescoes “appropriate” to the clientèle. Controversy surrounds these, and many other “lewd” decorations (including especially graffiti) found by archaeologists throughout Pompeii, since they show that the Romans had a very different outlook on sexual matters, at least compared to society in the late 1800s when major excavations began to take place.
Many objects and wall decorations were in fact removed as they were unearthed, and a secret collection hidden away by authorities who determined them to be pornography. In a classic case of cultural prejudice trumping human knowledge, much of the material was only made available for public study a mere decade ago.
Pompeii also had its municipal amphitheatre, with the same sorts of spectacles to entertain the masses, such as gladiatorial battles, that were common throughout the Empire. This one wasn’t a full-blown Colosseum, though.
It could only hold 20,000 people (about the population of the town at the time of the eruption). But also unlike the Colosseum it is virtually intact, making it the best preserved arena of its kind from ancient times.
The amphitheatre is famous for being the scene of a riot between local townspeople and spectators from nearby Nuceria, in 59AD, perhaps the first incidence in recorded history of what would much later become known as “football hooliganism”. The authorities dealt with it by banning games in Pompeii for the next ten years.
Most fascinating for us were the houses. When we walked into the first one we immediately realised we’d seen something similar before – accommodation we’d rented in Morocco!
The design of a grand house in that country is two stories (or more), with a large entrance area, and an outdoor courtyard in the centre. Around the courtyard are the living areas (on the first floor), and the sleeping areas up above.
In a smaller house the design is similar, but there’s no big entry, and the courtyard is replaced with a tiled central area that is open to the sky.
This layout was precisely what we found in Pompeii. The pillars and frescoes, and Roman baths (in the grand houses only; everyone else used the public facilities), on the other hand, were much different, and completely fascinating, despite the effects of a volcanic eruption and two millennia of wear and tear.
But the concept was very much the same. In fact, some of the mosaics in the impluvium (the area below the open part of the roof) were so similar you could transfer them into a Moroccan riad and no one would bat an eye.
ooOOoo
We also visited Herculaneum, an ancient Roman city right on the coast that if anything is even better preserved. Unlike Pompeii, it didn’t get a load of ash in the first eruption, and as a result many of its structures remained at their full height.
It suffered its fate the day after the eruption when great pyroclastic flows began sweeping through at speeds up to 160kmph, filling the structures from the bottom up, and eventually covering the entire town in over 25m of silt.
There are no plaster casts in Herculaneum, since Vesuvius didn’t catch local people in their homes. While they no doubt saw, heard and felt the eruption, the cloud of ash didn’t descend initially on the town. So everyone went to the nearby seashore in hopes of rescue from ships along the coast.
Unfortunately, however, anyone remaining there the next day died instantly when the flows brought with it the same scorching temperatures that killed everyone in Pompeii. The remains of the people from Herculaneum were only discovered buried in silt in the 1980s, the first good examples in modern times of complete Roman skeletons (since the Romans always cremated their dead).
Herculaneum was so well covered in silt that it was only re-discovered in the 1700s when workmen were digging a well. A portion of the town has now been painstakingly excavated, and we were quite amazed at the “modern” look of the curved roofs over the boat sheds, as well as the flat roofs of the multi-storey homes.
Another wonder, I’d have to say, in both sites, is how “up close and personal” we were allowed to get with many of the things on show. You can actually walk on painstakingly executed mosaic floors, and touch two-thousand-year-old frescoes that while understandably a bit worse for wear, nevertheless show what an amazingly resilient technique this wall decoration-cum-art really is.
But while all that is truly extraordinary, I couldn’t help but also feel a bit like a modern-day Barbarian, one of countless others from all around the world who have “trodden on” things here so precious and rare, with little or no understanding of who made them, how they were constructed, or what symbolic meanings they might contain.
The Italians have done what they can to look after Pompeii and Herculaneum, given their resources, and the number of other amazing treasures in their country they have to protect and conserve.
But honestly you can’t help but feel that the whole world should contribute more to these two truly unique places, so that well-meaning visitors don’t manage to finally destroy what a major eruption of the earth’s crust and the ravages of time could not.
~originally composed in November, 2011~