I don't know why Pompeii intrigues me so much. Maybe it's just the freakish nature of a city stopped in its tracks 2,000 years ago and now on view as it was then. More likely, though, it is the macabre idea of all these bodies dying suddenly from the poisonous gas of Vesuvius and then preserved in their awful last moment by the ash that rained down on them and crusted their bodies. It would be nice to say the historic interest outweighs the morbid curiosity, but I suspect horror films will always do better at the box office than documentaries.
Motives aside, Pompeii lived up to its promise and was as interesting as I had hoped it would be. The special effects team cooked up a grand day for us. Vesuvius loomed over the city with clouds lingering at the top looking suspiciously like smoke. Thunder boomed not too far away, and it didn't take too much imagination to think the mountain was getting bored being dormant.
This was the Denny, Denny and Donny Daytrip I wrote about earlier, and we had driven up Vesuvius to check out the crater and get a view of the Bay of Naples below us. Being cold, rainy and misty, what we got was a view of the mist below us while those with sharp eyes insisted they could make out the outline of the Bay. Our driver took us as far as we were allowed to go by car, and then it was a 40-minute walk to the top. That was 40 minutes in dry weather by people who didn't limp and drag their legs. Also, most of us hadn't bothered to consider that it's lots colder at the top of a mountain than down in the valley so we were standing around with goosebumps about the size of the local lemons.
In other words, we got back in the car and went to Pompeii without staring down into caldera of the mountain.
Once at the ruins of Pompeii we chipped in 10 euros each and went with a tour guide who pretty much told us everything we had read in our guidebook on the way over. The big difference was that he made us walk around in the mud before he would go on to the next paragraph.
After seeing so many old buildings and ruins in other cities, it was always going to take a lot for Pompeii to really impress me. It did. Because of the preserving effect of volcanic ash, we could still see murals painted two millennia ago. It also became obvious that somewhere between 79AD and the 15th century someone taught Italian artists how to draw.
And of course the ash-coated corpses were there. They were fascinating yet grotesque. We were looking at real bodies yet somehow enough time had had passed to make it OK to gawk at them. I mean, people would think you were sick if you walked to the site of a natural disaster today and just wandered around taking pictures of the bodies there. But let 2,000 years pass and there we all were clicking away.
I must say there was one point when that emotional distance broke down and I became strongly aware that these weren't just statues of people who had died in a tragedy, but it was really their bodies trapped in the ash. That happened when a few toe bones showed through a break in the ash of one woman. And walking around to the other end of the display box, half her skull was showing and the grimace on her face was truly horrible.
It drove home what it must have been like to have suffered through this awful catastrophe. So of course, I took lots and lots of pictures of this poor woman. You can check them and other Pompeii shots here.
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