Goldfarbs Across the Water: It's like the Italian Greenfield Village

I don't think anything can prepare you for Pompeii. We had been to Caesarea, which was a Roman ruin, and we had been to Masada, which was half a Roman ruin and half a Jewish shrine, both from the same general era, but there is nothing like Pompeii. For that matter, we'd been to many, many places that tried to recreate life in a particular era, whether it be Early America or the Viking invasion, and still there is nothing like Pompeii.

Three things make Pompeii stand out: first, it is vast; second, the Italians give you almost unbelievable access to visit everything; but third is most important--Pompeii is not a ruin in the conventional sense. It wasn't a place abandoned, it wasn't a place destroyed in a war, it wasn't a place that fell into decline, and it certainly isn't a reconstruction or artist's conception. It just stopped one morning, and froze in place, like Brigadoon.

Herculaneum, Margot our guide explaineda (oddly, she can say "Herculaneum" without adding a syllable on the end), had been buried by lava. Its excavation was difficult and it stopped at some point. Pompeii, on the other hand, was buried under a thick layer of ash. While everything there died, and while all organic material decomposed after a time--meaning all the wood, for instance--the inorganic material was simply put into one of the best means of preserving it on earth. The ash was light, so it didn't crush things. It was inert. In essence, it was benign. And it hid the ruins until the eighteenth century, when the Enlightenment meant that the world was ready to treat Pompeii archaeologically, not using it for scrap (see the Roman Forum) or bulldozing it into a new development (see George W. Bush's America). Pompeii has been excavated for most of the last 270 years, longer than the United States has been in existence, and they're still working on it. Unless Vesuvius erupts again and they have to start over.

Perhaps in the next Enlightenment.

What I want to convey is that Pompeii lets you see it as it was one fine day when people's world suddenly ended, not at the end of a long era of prosperity and declination. Moreover--and this was one of the things Margot conveyed that was really enlightening (word used intentionally) even to Marjorie--because Pompeii had recently suffered a severe earthquake (the harbinger of the eruption, though the Romans didn't know it), the city was in the process of a major rebuilding project, including the transformation of a number of columns into brick, which was considered more likely to survive the next earthquake. Talk about fighting the last war. The result is that a lot of Pompeii wasn't just in use at the time of the eruption, it was brand-spanking new, the finest example of the state of the art of Roman construction in 79 AD. And the Romans may not have exceeded the Greeks in art or in the arts, but they exceeded everyone ever (in many ways, including to this day) in terms of their ability to construct stuff. If you don't believe me, compare the leaky New York City water system to the still active Roman aqueducts.

Before we get to Pompeii, we stop for a bathroom break at a cameo factory. We have to listen to a lecture about cameos for three minutes as the price of free bathrooms. Men's rooms in public places in Italy often don't have seats on the toilets. Oh, joy, oh, laughter.

Speaking of joy and laughter, there was one guy on the bus who was like the really obnoxious character Rick Moranis sometimes plays, the one who doesn't quite know how to behave in public places. He talked too loud, he talked about inappropriate things to his female companion, he asked obnoxious questions that the guide had answered two minutes beforehand if he hadn't been so self-absorbed he wasn't listening to her.

And just to make it more fun, he smoked during all our breaks. Needless to say, he came from New York.

Well, no matter where Marjorie and I went, he seemed to be there. We stopped for lunch just outside the entrance to Pompeii, and he and his lady friend were in front of us to order pizza. He kept asking questions of his friend that the counterlady could have answered, and it took him about five minutes to order and pay because of it, and he still hadn't used his drink coupon to get a bottle of water. Our transaction took fifteen seconds, even though we ordered the same thing, and our pizzas came at the same time. Naples pizza isn't as good as the pizza we had in Rome. But what pizza is?

Another disappointment is that Marjorie left her camera in the bus, and the bus was off in a car park far from the site. She had been worried about getting the Whisper (a neat one-way radio that allowed Margot to whisper into a mic and be heard by all of us) straightened out, and hadn't realized it was in her coat pocket, which she left in the bus, and not in her purse. I promised to take all the pictures she would take, and I think she ended up being relaxed not having camera duty.

Finally, we got into the park, which you enter through the Carbinieri station, which is so typical of Italy.

I have over 200 shots of Pompeii, and I may even stick them all up on the web, but for the moment, here is a sampler.

This is the Forum, the center of town. Those double-sized columns were how Pompeii was found, they were sticking up in a field. To give you a sense of the magnitude of the eruption, Pompeii is now 17 miles inland. In 79 AD it was a seaport.

Here are some of the brick columns.

One of the great things about the preservation of Pompeii by the ash is the incredible detail that some of the items possess. Note the condition of these marble carvings, but remember, they were probably brand new.

This sign wasn't finished before the eruption. I wonder if the contractor ever got paid. Of course, unless he lived elsewhere, he wouldn't have had much of a chance to spend it.

Frescos survived nearly intact, with the colors as vivid as can be.

These were from the market.

Because pumice stone is impermeable to water, and all the roads of Pompeii were made of it, the streets were essentially open sewers. As a result, in order to cross them, stones were placed in the middle of the street as crosswalks. The funny thing is that before Margot explained this, I had already labeled them "zebra crossings."

The street above has three stones, which indicated it was a two-way street (they could have up to four). A one-way street had one or two stones.

How did you know which way? Remember, Pompeii was a busy port, and many of the people who would be arriving in the port would not speak Latin. So they had signs.

Just go the way the people are heading.

We went into the incredibly preserved baths. These are lockers.

The grooves in the ceiling channeled the condensed steam away from the patrons and onto the floor.

Because Pompeii was mainly concerned with commerce, it was filled with stores. Stores all had sliding doors, and many had marble countertops that survived in incredible condition.

The groove in the marble at the bottom is where the sliding door, made out of wood (which therefore wouldn't have survived) would be found.

You can see the grooves made my chariots in the streets.

And to finish the groovy discussion, in Roman houses, they used grooved brick to keep their footing on the ground where the well and rain catch basin were.

Here is a Pompeiian bakery, whose oven looks no different from a good pizza over in Rome.

Wells had various icons on them. This one we dubbed "Toro Piscine."

Once Britannia was conquered, Rome had sources of lead. The groove in the prior picture is one use: holding together a water basin. Lead pipes also survived intact.

We were shown the brothel district. All prostitutes were slaves, all prostitutes were taxed, and both female and male prostitutes were available. Here is one of the advertisements for the wares offered in the house. This is the least raunchy one.

And the beds? Sleep Country Roman Empire!

But let's say you were a sailor from Africa, and after a long voyage you were in Pompeii for the first time, and wanted to find the brothel? How would you do so if you couldn't read, let alone read Latin?

Follow the red light road!

Marjorie kept saying to me that the place had exceeded her expectations. She was certainly looking happy.

I think I was too.

I suppose I have to show the victims in cast. Some of the bodies were buried by substances that survived to form a cast around them, and archaeologists--really morbid ones--made casts of the spaces left behind and filled them in. You've probably seen them, and they're often wrongly referred to as fossilized or mummified people, but they're really just casts of the people-shaped holes left in the ash. I thought they were really weird to look at, kind of scary and certainly not fun, but here is one.