I could not believe walking into Pompeii, the massive size of the city. I was under the impression that the famous city buried completely in Volcanic ash was a small area that had been already dug out for a while. The truth is that Pompeii is far from being fully excavated and is a couple of miles long, a real city! The city itself was impressive by how culturally advanced it was. They had streets and sidewalks where chariots rode. They had aqueducts, drains and actual water towers. Even more amazing then that, their class system (the rich and the poor) affected where and what type of housing they had and whether they had expensive materials like marble or wooden doors. Some of the people even went to sauna’s where they had 3 types of rooms, a cold, warm and hot ones. By viewing the hot sauna room archeologists even realized that they had invented a type of central heating where they had two walls where warm air circulated.
The most interesting part for me of the city was to see the people perfectly preserved by the volcanic ash that smothered and kept them for so many years. Their bones, which would probably have been mostly destroyed or crushed if they had been exposed to years of weather, were compounded nicely with the volcanic rock and well preserved. Some of the bodies were in the position of terror, shown how they were situated as the town was instantly blasted with ash and frozen in time. It was like a single picture from history preserved thousands of years later.
We only got to stay in Pompeii for about 2 or 3 hours, because the tour was again on a traveling day, but I could easily have spent a day or two just exploring the ruins, that’s how much there was to see. But we could not stay there any longer, as the schedule dictated, and after Pompeii we headed to our hotel in Sorrento. We explored the city for a while, but eventually just turned in early. Sorrento seems like it is going to be really relaxing, and I look forward to swimming in the hotel pool.
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