Pompeii

Walking through Pompeii is like wandering through an great building. You keep seeing things from a different perspective and then you see those things again from still different perspectives a moment later.  You really can't get a handle on the place.  Everybody walks around constantly amazed. 

There are some signs that explain what you are looking at. But they are incomplete, especially for non Italians. One might come away with the impression that those who show the exhibit expected only Italians to come here. And there are not nearly enough signs.  Audio guides help, but it is still hard to find out where you are and where your audio guide is.  One of our two didn't work well, then it later changed itself from English to German.  We kept finding out that we were listening to one description while we were actually someplace else.

The reconstruction does provide an insight to the people who lived here. You can see that it was a large growing city with a bright future. It had already come through a lot, a previous eruption  or two and at least one tsunami.  There are views into the lives some of the people lived here. You can find homes or perhaps businesses that had two, three or more rooms.    

Even here the rudeness of those child-things which otherwise appear to be humanoid teen-agers continues unabated.  One collision with two "boys" forced me through a barrier into one of the "rooms".  And the beehives of tour groups which move slowly across the ruins constantly obstruct your way and even force you off the common path. One tour group will often follow another so closely they both appear to be combined.

Still, there are impressions of what took place here.    Deep ruts cut into the stones which form streets attest to the fact that this city had been a going concern for over 600 years when IT happened. In American terms of today it would have been a city founded before Christopher Columbus’ parents were born, and have been in constant operation since!  The ruts in the large stones in the streets also attest to the observation that Pompei was a noisy city.

The eruption covered Pompeii in thirty feet of ash, totally obscuring it.  And it was some 1500 years before the city was "discovered".  Almost all of the interesting and beautiful items in Pompeii were moved to the city of Naples.  But they couldn't take away the feeling.




There is a Presence that remains here.  There is a Silence that commands your attention.  It has the feel of a graveyard.  People died here.  A city died here.  And more than that, it was abandoned, and then it was forgotten.  Fifteen hundred years is a long time by anybody's measure.  City-states and nations came and went.  The Christian and Muslim religions emerged and grew.  And Pompeii lay buried and forgotten.  And Vesuvius - who did the deed - stood, as it does today, looking over the old city, still keeping an eye on it.