Tuesday, March 18

9am sharp. We wait for the bus scheduled to take us to Pompeii. The first time everyone is on time, the bus breaks down before it reaches us. Mr. McDougal assures us these things happen sometimes in Italy and you just have to roll with it, so we pick up oranges from the fruit wagon while we wait. At 11, we leave on the three hour drive. Lunch is at some rest stop. For under 6 euros, I score a decent meal complete with cappuccino and dessert, far better than anything you can dream of in the miserable bleakness of an American rest stop. When we reach the remains of ancient Pompeii, once a seaside town of 20,000, an Italian tour guide leads us around. Without a doubt, he is the liveliest, most hilarious tour guide I have ever met. We start with the plaster casts of the cavities left by people trapped in the volcanic ash. Particularly memorable is the silent scream of a slave boy who was about our age when he suffocated in the ashes.

slave boy who suffocated in the ashes of Vesuvius.
Preserved fresco wall paintings visible in the background. 

Next up is the local party place, the balneum (public bath). The colors of the wall frescoes, the details of the floor mosaics, and the sculptures set into the walls are surprisingly well preserved because the covering of volcanic ash had buried the city and protected it from pollution, weather, and invaders. The technology was extremely applicable to the modern world. I was impressed by the calidarium (hot bath) which had warm floors thanks to the slaves constantly feeding fires for the central heating below ground, and the condensation that would have formed on the cool ceiling was not a problem because the ceiling was arched and had smooth grooves running straight across to make sure the water would flow down the walls instead of dripping on people’s heads. We then head to some private homes. The roads we take are amazingly level, with beautiful sidewalks. In comparison, every walk from Groton to CVS is a life-threatening struggle due to the barbarian lack of sidewalks. Our tour guide says repeatedly that in some ways, life might have been better back then. Agreed. The houses of the middle and upper class families turn out to be exactly the same, differing only in size and decoration. Then with a flourish, our guide takes us to the climax of our tour, the lupanare, or the red light district. We enter a building and on the walls to see the “menu,” consisting of illustrative frescoes depicting the options a client could choose from, designed to prevent miscommunication between travelers speaking foreign languages. The Romans really did have a solution for everything.

-Sowon Lee ‘15

Our glorious tour guide demonstrating how the Pompeiians operated their flour mills