On the Streets of Pompeii

On our last day here before flying home tomorrow we visited Pompeii and the Naples Archeological Museum where a lot of the artefacts found at Pompeii and Herculaneum are stored and displayed.

We hadn't realised that Pompeii is so huge! In 2 hours with a guide we were only able to visit a fraction of it. It's quite different from Herculaneum (which we visited on Sunday). This is because Herculaneum was engulfed in molten lava, whereas Pompeii was deluged with fragments of hot lava rock and volcanic dust.

The main blip shows a typical street. They were well paved as you can see. Why the stepping stones? Well they just used to throw their sewage onto the street, so they had stepping stones to keep their shoes clean as they crossed! Carts of course had to have the correct track dimensions to straddle the stepping stones, and had to follow a pretty precise course between them - hence the grooves created in the stone paving between the stepping stones by the metal rims of the cartwheels. (Who thought "sleeping policemen" were a new invention...?!) Sorry that there were so many tourists that I couldn't get a photo without them.

The first extra shows the main square which is big! The second shows a mosaic from Pompeii in the museum; it originally had 1.5 million pieces! The reason it's incomplete isn't because of its age, it's because it dropped off the cart twice while being moved from Pompeii to the museum, I think in the 19th century. Whoops!