Pompeii

Pompeii was a seaport before the eruption. Now, it's about two miles inland. The eruption destroyed the top of the town - all of the second stories of its houses - but preserved the rest under its layers of ash. This is what it looks like now:



Some structures and columns are still standing, although a fair number had to be put together from chunks that were found strewn around.


A typical Pompeii street, straight as a razor, and fully sided with houses. There were no trees or parks inside the main town. The raised stones in the middle of the street were used by people to get across when the street was flooded (which was often after rains, as the town was downslope from a big mountain.)


This is something that all tour guides are insistent on pointing out: the pavement still contains indentations left by countless ancient wheels passing between the stepping stones. This is the fourth 2000-year-old pavement that I've been lucky enough to step onto this year (the first three being Old Jerusalem, Petra, and Roman Forum).


Another typical Pompeii street, more of an alley actually.


Ruins of a bakery. The arch is above the bread oven. The found 81 loaves of bread still in it ("slightly overdone" as the tour guides say).


The baths are one of the few buildings that survived with their second stories intact. This was mostly due to the arched supports. The arches were constructed on top of scaffolding until the final keystones were put on the top. I couldn't guess which row of stones were the keystones - can you?


In other places of the baths, the ceiling still holds its ornamental plastering:


The close-ups of the plastering show how crisp the details are. And these were not machined - all of the lines and pictures were laid out manually!




Many of the public places and big houses were richly decorated. None of the interior decorations have survived, but many frescoes did. These were much brighter right after they were first excavated, but even now they still amaze.









Nameplate for the owner of the house, apparently a big politician in his time.


Graffiti scratches near the entrance to the site re-enforces the concept that Pompeii was a port town.


During restorations, pieces of the original masonry were placed into their original places in the restored columns and walls.




An ominous-in-hindsight view out of the Pompeian forum: the volcano that made it famous. Vesuvius was twice as tall before the eruption. It is still active; the latest eruption was in 1944. However, explosive pyroclastic eruptions such as the one that obliterated Pompeii do not occur that often. They happen only about once every two thousand years.

Ancient Rome

There are few places in the world where such well-known ancient history is so visible and so accessible.

Colosseum is by far the most amazing sight, still awe-inspiring by its size:

Colosseum didn't earn its name by itself. As strange as it sounds, there stood a more colossal thing next to it, something that was more amazing to the ancient Romans than the arena itself. It was a statue of Nero, gold plated, and more than 100 feet tall. (Only a few feet shorter than the Statue of Liberty!) The overize Nero was referred to as the Colossus, and the arena inherited the name.


Do you see the "pockmarks" in the side of the openings? They mark the spots where iron and lead clamps held the stone blocks together. These were pulled out more than a thousand years ago for their metal. It didn't seem to hurt some sections, while the others just fell apart after that.


The underneath of the arena had two stories of secret rooms and corridors that led to hidden doors in the arena floor.


The exposed stones on the top is what Colosseum is actually made of. It is Travertine marble, of such a poor quality that it's little more than sandstone. There is no mortar holding it together, only gravity.


This flew over the Colosseum while we were in it. It's the double-decker A380, the largest passenger plane in the world. How appropriate.


The Arch of Titus in the Roman Forum, built around the same time as the Colosseum.

The arch commemorates a victory that is no longer relevant to the winners, but is still mourned by the losers. The event is the sack of Jerusalem in 70 CE, which left only one wall of Herod's Temple standing - the Wailing Wall:


Indeed, on the side of the Arch of Titus, there is a relief of Roman soldiers carrying out the temple's menorah. (It felt a little unreal to have experienced both of these sites, almost two thousand years old each, echoing to each other across my trips just three months apart.)


Roman Forum, Via Sacra. On the left, the pavement is 2000+ years old. On the right, it's just... a few hundred.


Moving on to the next ancient Roman wonder, this is the always-recognizable Pantheon:


The Pantheon doesn't have windows. The entire basilica is lighted through a single oculus in the middle of the dome.


The dome itself is still unsurpassed as the largest concrete dome in the world. To this day no one knows how it was constructed. One educated guess holds that the Pantheon was first filled with a mound of sand and the dome was poured into a mold that rested on top of it. The dome is four times thicker on the bottom than on the top.


Arch of Constantine, the largest of the ancient Roman's arches. It dates from 315 CE.


Finally, browsing through various churches in Rome, we came across the Basilica of San Clemente. The current structure dates from 12th century and it was built on top of an earlier 4th century's basilica (which in turn was built on top of 1st century's Roman house). In the excavations of the earlier basilica, they discovered the tombs of Cyril and Methodius, two 9th century's monk brothers who gave the Eastern Europeans their alphabet - Cyrillics. Now it is a shrine with plaques of gratitude from various Cyrillic-using peoples.

Mushroom stories

This year's crop: