Pompeii, Italy

So Eric and I left Napoli, a short train ride to head out to Pompei... He was really excited about it, and I was really ignorant, but it sounded fabulous, so I was game!

Basically, the history is, (from Wiki): Pompeii is a ruined and partially buried Roman town-city near modern Naples in the Italian region of Campania, in the territory of the comune of Pompei. Along with Herculaneum, its sister city, Pompeii was destroyed, and completely buried, during a long catastrophic eruption of the volcano Mount Vesuvius spanning two days in AD 79.

It's hard to include a large scale picture of Pompei... It's so much more about the details... They came across it by accident around the 1700's I think...

Pompeii is the only place where we took a guided tour because we wanted to know what we were looking at.

For example, this hole on the side of the road is for people to tie up their horses, carriages, or dogs, if they were dog lovers... (btw, there were many homeless dogs living in the ruins... and they guard their territories!)

This groove in the ground is called a vomitorium. When you had guests over or a feast, you would binge eat... and drink... And then you'd come in this room with the vomitorium, obviously with the intent to vomit, and then keep eating!!!

I didn't see a drain in there... Pretty disgusting!!!

Here's an idea of what the city looks like... it's full of what used to be homes, shops, bakeries... you name it. Archeological students still work on bringing about the details of the structures to find out more and more about each building, about the people of the times, the botanical history of the time... In some gardens, they've grown the exact plants that used to exist back before the earthquake... It's actually quite huge! We probably spent about 3 hours there, and did not cover the whole area.

They've recovered bodies... You may be able to tell, there are women, men, children... There was no escape! I can't even imagine what that was like to be covered with lava and to have died this way.

As there must be in every city, there was a bordello in Pompeii as well. I'm not showing it here, but each room has a different picture on top of the door, depending on on what kind of service you'd like to receive, you pick that room.

This is our tour guide, Mario... Offering me a cigarette after we exited the bordello...

We found out, it's tradition for all the tour guides to light up after leaving the bordello... At least the one in Pompeii... :)

I believe this was a bakery, with these brick ovens where they made the breads...

I really feel bummed right now because I feel like my words are just not enough to describe how amazed I was to be walking thru the ruins of Pompeii... My pictures don't really tell the wonderousness of the story and I must apologize for it. You really must see it on your own one day. It was so unbelievable!!!

If I can think of more creative details, I'll have to update later.