Day 12 – Coffee and Chocolate

On Wednesday we went to Pompeii. There were lots of tourists, lots of sunburns, and very few fountains. There was also some city there or something. Pompeii was really interesting because it is really easy to take it for granted. It seems like it should be a complete city. Aaron, one of the teachers, said that a third of the city was not because the site did not have enough money to maintain the portion that WAS excavated. We may explore that in a later post. Today is a play-by-play day.

Holy Cow, It’s Early

We got on the metro at 7, and took an hour and a half long train ride from there to Naples. I slept, as did a bunch of other people in our group. Sleeping was made slightly more difficult for me because I had gotten an espresso at the train station, but that is the Italian lifestyle, I am pretty sure. I was awake as we neared Naples and got our first good view of Mt. Vesuvius though. That thing was majestic. There was a cloud above it that made it look like it was smoking even! Exciting!

Pictured: false alarm.

After a while though, riding trains was getting wearing. I began to question whether I even wanted to be at Pompeii. Aaron was really good at keeping us all together and excited to get there though. I could already tell that it was going to be a long day though. At one point, a band came on the train from Naples to Pompeii. I gave the guy coming around with a hat a euro.

Sometimes the excitement just didn’t show.

Finally Pompeii

We had to wait a little bit for Aaron to get the tickets, but finally we got into the site itself. There was a huge line just to get in. There were all kinds of people there—Italians, tourists, school children, elderly German tour groups, everything. My post from Wednesday mentioned that I don’t get the Italian insistence on wearing hot-looking clothes? As we walked in, there was a guy in a full suit coming out of the gate! He wore a suit to ruins! The nicest thing I was wearing was my gladiator sandals, and that was because I was sick of wearing sneakers.

We got to the Forum and Aaron gave us a little bit of a talk about Pompeii. I was pretty familiar with it because we learned all about it in my freshman Latin class, but it was interesting the get a different perspective. Pompeii was a city that had been covered by pyroclastic rock, like pumice, and ash, and then was preserved until the early 1900s, when it was almost completely excavated. When he asked for questions, Ellie asked whether the volcano was completely dormant. Aaron’s response was “Eeh, not quite,” and a lecture about tectonic activity in Europe.

The trip was supposed to be a free-for-all thing, where we wandered off to have a look around without guidance, but we all agreed to follow Aaron around anyway. It turns out, he had a list of places that he wanted to visit, so we were going to get a pretty good tour. We started by walking down the main street to check out some of the shops that were built along it. That was when we encountered our first locked gate.

With a locked gate behind it, no less.

Aaron looked a little disappointed to see that. He noted that when he had been to Pompeii before, there were lots of places that he was able to get into that we might not be able to get into now, for whatever reason. Sev said that she wanted a magic key. Adam pointed out that jumping over the gate would be just as good as getting a key.

For some reason, Suzy decided not to try to jump over the gate for the picture.

We went to the infamous brothel of Pompeii, which was a lot smaller than I had imagined, frankly. In spite of that, there was still an incredibly long line to get in. All to see some two thousand year old dirty pictures.

Ninety percent of these people are going to be very disappointed once they get inside.

There was some evidence of restoration efforts going on around the site. We passed some people wearing all white painstakingly putting pieces of tile back into a mosaic on the floor. The tiles were tiny, and the task looked like it was going to take a long time. They must have felt like the tiles were worth preserving, though. They might have been a good example of the style common for 79 AD.

Alternatively, they could have been a good example of poor Roman housekeeping. Look how dirty that is!

In one of the villas in Pompeii, there was a wall that was partially covered in paper. I noticed that a common thing for places under construction in Rome was a picture of the final product covering the work, so I am guessing that is what was going on with the villa as well.  The other walls in the villa had some frescoes on them. The frescoes were incredibly detailed and still smooth after thousands of years!

Heaven forbid we miss out on the Doric columns and shrubbery.

We stopped for lunch at the cafeteria. Suzy and I got gelato, naturally. It was really expensive though—3.50 euros for a cup! It was fine gelato, but the flavor selection was pretty boring. Suzy got cherry and pistachio, and I got chocolate and coffee. I suppose they had to keep it someone tame for the tourists, but still.

Those are the faces of people used to paying 2 euros for gelato.

After lunch, we went to the lodging of the gladiators. There was a central grassy area with a colonnade around the perimeter and rooms under the colonnade. Many of the rooms were still intact, with modern doors on them, and it looked like some of them were even in use. A couple had been adapted into bathrooms, and one was labeled “office.” Some of the doors were unlabeled, but I looked into the peephole of one and saw what looked like music equipment in there. So maybe storage?

Storage: an unexciting legacy for a place that once housed gladiators.

We passed by one of the towers around the wall of Pompeii. I was surprised that it was still nearly completely standing, because most of the buildings that once had multiple levels were reduced to a single level by the pressure of the volcanic material that buried the city. Naturally, they did not want us going up the tower, because no one lets us have any fun.

Don’t tell me climbing up to that tower would not make you feel like Indiana Jones.

We stopped for a photo-op with a clear view of Mt. Vesuvius, and I captured this beauty:

By the end of the day, we were pretty sick of locked gates. They usually were cutting off access to the things that were marked on the map, like specific buildings and temples that Aaron was interested in. The fact that we could see the stuff on the other side of the gate made it, if anything, much worse. We KNEW there was cool stuff on the other side of the gate! We just couldn’t get to it.

Pretty sure Steven nearly climbed over the gate here.

We visited the amphitheater. There was a wooden pyramid there that I am guessing was not an original feature of the place. An exhibit was set up showing the excavation of Pompeii, including plaster casts of the impressions people made when they were covered by ash and killed. All of the poses indicated that being in Pompeii at the time would have been horrible to be in Pompeii.

They were all kind of contorted like this.

Aaron told us that there had not been a lot of jewelry or valuables found in the private residences in Pompeii, which suggested that the people who had the resources to left and took their valuables with them before they got turned into future plaster molds. There was some stuff found in shops that sold things like bronze, though. The shopkeepers were not able to take all of their stuff with them.

After the amphitheater, we visited the Villa of the Mysteries. Suzy complained about her feet being tired. I agreed. Suzy then pointed out the strange smell of the place, which was probably caused by the vast amount of flowers that lined the path to the villa. She said that it smelled like mustard, but I thought it smelled more like smoke. At the villa, I did not hear a word that Aaron was saying about the place. There was a dog, just lying in the middle of the floor in one of the more important rooms!

What ancient rites? I’m going to name him Marcus Aurelius!

The dog must have heard me cooing over it, because he looked straight at me before getting up and leaving the room. He ducked under one of the ropes and came RIGHT UP TO ME. Normally, when I see stray dogs, I worry about rabies and fleas and stuff, but this time he looked so friendly I plum forgot. He allowed me to pat him for a second, then barked and started walking through the villa. The rest of the class finally got distracted from Aaron’s lecture and realized that there was a dog. We were all very excited. Suzy claimed that she wished it was a cat, but I know the truth. We followed the dog through the villa until we were stymied by a rope. A stupid rope.

Dogs are lucky. They do not have to respect stupid rope.

The dog noticed that we had stopped following him, so he turned and looked at us meaningfully. Finally, I snapped. I think it was all the locked doors from earlier. I ducked under the rope, and the rest of the class followed, expressing awe at my bravery and relief that they get to see more of Pompeii. We walked into a room, and then into a tunnel. The dog led the way confidently for a stray.

Like an especially fun game of Follow the Leader.

Finally, we came out of the tunnel into a giant room. It was lined by a colonnade and dominated in the center by a giant marble throne. Aaron whispered that this was a temple that was not supposed to exist, a fairytale amongst classicists. It was the Lost Temple of Augustus Iupiter Colossus Maximus. Apparently, there was supposed to be a statue of Augustus as Jupiter on that throne. Aaron wondered aloud where it was. We did not have to wait long to find out.

A voice rang out from the shadows. “It was in my way!” A man revealed himself. He was dressed like a cross between a bad imitation of Indiana Jones and an old-timey archaeologist complete with monocle. He smirked and polished his monocle. “I wanted a throne and there was one right here. Just had to get that statue out of the way.”

He nodded toward a pile of rubble. Both Steve and Aaron looked like they were going to cry. Aaron asked how he had managed to destroy something so big. The man laughed maniacally.

“The same way Vesuvius is going to erupt today!” Ellie pointed out that the volcano was not due to erupt for a long time. Hannah agreed, citing tectonic plates. The man agreed with them, but then pulled back a sheet on a machine that looked like a collection of concert equipment. He explained that a concert was scheduled at Pompeii, which is where he got the parts for the machine. It was a laser that would cause Vesuvius to erupt once more, and encase the whole city in ash once more.

“Why?” Alexis asked. She was giving a signal to Jonah and Steve while the guy was distracted. She probably knew the number one rule of dealing with doomsday machines: distract their controller. The man explained that his grandfather had actually discovered Pompeii, but got none of the credit for it.

“I am going to rediscover this place and get all of the accolades my grandfather deserved!” he claimed.

There was a popping noise and a shower of sparks from the doomsday machine. The dog barked loudly and wagged its tail, and the man sank back in despair.

Steve and Jonah had successfully sabotaged the laser!

Someone managed to get cell phone reception enough to call the cops. It turns out, we had been underneath the amphitheater the entire time. The dog left us as the madman was hauled away in hand cuffs. It looked like he was rejoining his owner. Aaron promised us all As for participation for the day.

All of these people are lucky to be alive.

Conclusion

I liked Ostia much better.