Pompeii, Italy

On August 23, 79 AD, Pompeii looked like any other busy, prosperous city. People were moving about, trading goods, news, and friendly talk.

Three days later, on August 26, all of these sounds had fallen silent, and the place itself had vanished. Almost nothing was seen of Pompeii for more than 1500 years.
Now, more than 1900 years later, we are learning more and more about the last days of Pompeii.

What happened to Pompeii preserved a treasury of information about life in the ancient Roman Empire.

The 79 A.D. eruption of Vesuvius was the first volcanic eruption ever to be described in detail. From 18 miles (30 km) west of the volcano, Pliny the Younger, witnessed the eruption and later recorded his observations in two letters. He described the earthquakes before the eruption, the eruption column, air fall, the effects of the eruption on people, pyroclastic flows, and even tsunami. Volcanologists now use the term "plinian" to refer to sustained explosive eruptions which generate high-altitude eruption columns and blanket large areas with ash. It is estimated that at times during the eruption the column of ash was 20 miles (32 km) tall. About 1 cubic mile (4 cubic kilometers) of ash was erupted in about 19 hours. Volcanoes by Peter Francis contains several direct passages from Pliny the Younger and describes the archeology of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

It is certain that when the eruption of Vesuvius started on the morning of 24 August, AD 79, it caught the local population utterly unprepared. Taken unawares by the eruption, the population of the towns and villas that circled the Bay could only respond with panic.

The eruption lasted for more than 24 hours from its start on the morning of 24 August.Those who fled at once, unburdened by possessions, had a chance of survival, for the rain of ash and pumice, mixed with lithics, that descended for several hours was not necessarily lethal. It is clear that many, like the elder Pliny, thought their best chance was to take shelter and weather the storm.

It was not until around midnight that the first pyroclastic surges and flows occurred, caused by the progressive collapse of the eruptive column, and these meant certain death for the people of the region. (A pyroclastic flow is a ground-hugging avalanche of hot ash, pumice, rock fragments and volcanic gas, which rushes down the side of a volcano as fast as 100 km/hour or more.)

The hundreds of refugees sheltering in the vaulted arcades at the seaside in Herculaneum, clutching their jewellery and money, met their end swiftly - from the intense heat of the first surge that reached the city.

Subsequent waves reached Pompeii, asphyxiating those who had survived the fall of 3m (10ft) of pumice, and were fleeing across the open in the dark, or hiding beneath roofs. The waves that followed smashed flat the upper floors of houses, and left the corpses encased in successive blankets of gaseous surge and pumice fall.

The effect of the eruption was evidently totally traumatic, as is shown by the failure to reoccupy the sites of the cities destroyed.

The ruins of Pompeii were discovered in the late 1600's. The discovery of this ruined city turned out to be an archaeologist's dream come true. Pompeii had been a thriving Roman port town in 79 A.D. when Mt. Vesuvius erupted, covering the the entire town and literally freezing it in time. The discovery of this ancient city has given archaeologists a clue to what everyday life was like in the Roman empire. That was because the eruption preserved the buildings. It preserved the art work. It even preserved some of the people (seven of which can be seen in the court yard of the fools). The discovery of Pompeii was like going back in time to the day the eruption occurred because everything was as it was the day Vesuvius erupted.

Walking the streets is like walking back through time. You walk among the stone buildings. You walk by homes that had huge gardens which stand side by side with little tiny lots where a store stood, or poor person had lived. It is truly amazing to walk along the streets of this town, releasing that you are walking down a street almost 2000 years old, and it hasn't change a bit. You can walk into the house if ill repute and look at pictures of the services which were offered. You can climb to the top of the preserved theater and look over the ancient ruins. You can walk through the ancient Agora (sorry forum) and imagine what it was like when it was a bustling market place. You can look over where the port was said to have stood thinking about what the coast must have looked like before Vesuvius reorganized the coast of Italy.

Pompeii was originally a Greek city, though with the decline of the Greek empire and the rise of the Roman Empire, Pompeii was assimilated by the Romans, adopting many of the customs of the Roman people but at the same time retaining much of its Greek heritage. As mentioned above, Pompeii was an important port, south of Naples it was a major stop on the sea route to Rome from Africa. It most likely connected to a road across the "boot" to modern Brendisi connecting the east and west coasts together. Pompeii was a well to do city. Many of the houses had beautiful mosaics or murals. (Which have been moved to Naples.)

It is a must-see!