Pompei and Herculeneum

Wednesday 2nd April 2025

I have always wanted to go to Pompei and today is the day! First a great breakfast at the hotel with a good view of Vesuvius! Then we need to get to Pompei by train to meet the tour. We walked down to the metro station which is magnificently tiled! Then on to the train for Pompei. We are still slightly confused by the tickets to buy but manage to get on the right train!

Let’s start with the roads! There was no sewage system in Pompei and it also flooded so there are raised pavements and stepping stones across the road so you didn’t get your feet dirty or wet! Carts had metal rims on their wheels (they found some and recreated the cart) and you can clearly see where the rims have worn down the stones. These holes in the side of the pavement are where you tied your horse or donkey!!

Every house had an entrance hall with an opening in the ceiling and a pond to collect water, which drained into a tank underneath. They also kept their door open and put a table by the pond which would have something on it that would tell people passing how important and rich the householder was. This room led into another then onto a garden. If you didn’t have much room for a garden you had a mural like the one above painted on the wall, that looked like a vista!

There are beautiful murals and mosaics everywhere, too many to take in. The smaller the tile the more costly it was and the more important the owner was. I had not realised how huge the site was. It is a whole city unearthed to give us a glimpse of how people lived in 79ad. It’s funny to think that these sort of things were everywhere but over the centuries they were destroyed and built over. This is such a precious historical place.

This is the forum which was a huge space, showing how big the city was. In the background is Vesuvius looking over everything! The pillars here were built of brick then plastered over and painted to look like marble. A good trick to keep the costs down! We also saw the theatre and learned that in their time they had retractable awnings for the summer. It’s very hot here and people would have baked if they had been out in the open. Apparently they had them in the coliseum in Rome as well! We also learnt a lot about brothels and prostitutes!!

Phew, now off to Herculaneum. It is much smalller as most of it is still buried under the town that has been built over it. It I was buried in 90 feet of pyroclastic flow. It was about 500 Celsius so all humans in its way evaporated. Herculaneum was a fancy seaside resort, those openings you can see on the first picture were where they kept the boats on the seashore! They found lots of money, jewels and bones here so think that the people ran down to the shore to try and escape but there was no escape. Again you can see Vesuvius in the background, much closer than it was to Pompei.

Here the houses had the same layout as you can see, but in Herculaneum some of the wood survived so here you can see the original wooden sliding screens that they had in place between the living room and the garden. Amazing! There were quite a few of these takeaway food shops. Again they all have the same format, a tiled top, built in large jars that would have held food that was already cooked, they would have scooped the food into a clay bowl for the buyer.

Beautiful mosaics, painted walls and pillars, some in a better state than Pompei. It was a long day full of lots of information. For instance salt was a very precious commodity to workmen would get paid in salt rather than coins. Hence the word we use now ‘salary’! We were so glad we took a tour, https://askostours.com/ we use these guys but there were plenty around. Pompei was packed with tour groups, I can’t imagine what it will be like later in the year!

Pompeii lived up to my imagination and more, what an amazing day!!