Plowing Pompeii

I must first start by saying, “studies” have never been so fantastic! We learn about a monument, important city, important artist, etc. etc. on a Monday and Wednesday, and the following Tuesday and Thursday we travel to said historic importance. Learning has never felt so real or so alive. Every landscape I see, ruins that stand confidently in their deterioration, church that towers to the heavens with ornate walls and openings, I am find myself dumb-founded and consistently amazed.  I am developing a new, or rather, deeper love for art and the restoration of what was.  The focus of Italy is beauty. And to revive beauty into life again, reviving a legend, an artist, a life which once breathed onto the canvas or touched the marble rock in order to create the masterpieces that now serve as the cornerstones of cultural studies, that is incredible. As put by John Keats (a little something I learned in lecture today) “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” This is what the history and ruins and art and artists and people of Italy have taught me.

Week 3 we journeyed (as a class on program-sponsored field trips) to the cities of Ostia Antica, Pompeii, and Montecassino. It was almost surreal being able to walk in a place that was once teaming with life, and is now so historic and mummified. Once standing on the over-sized cobble stones, still grooved with the deep tracks from the busy wagon wheels and cart bulls pulling rich supplies, it was hard not to envision the lives that originally hurried along the streets. 

Our group of 20 girls was greated by a very lucky, very suave Italian tour guide, Stefano. I don’t think he was objecting too much to the uneven male-female ratio. He firstly introduced our tour by saying we would be moving by Italian-time, “piano piano”, or “slow slow”. Take your time. Enjoy. Absorb. Ok, I can so those things—check, check, and check. But, when one enters the first archway of Pompeii one will typically desire to move ahead quickly, as the introducing structures are more of a should-height cluster of stone squares, attached to eachother and all missing roofs, and all looking very much the same. One will typically be in search of the “meaty” stuff of Pompeii, as we see in history books (or as my Dad’s chosen source of knowledge, the History Channel).

Stefano led us through at a perfectly “piano piano” pace, explaining the meaning and importance behind some of the tiniest details. So here goes some factoids I found incredible about Pompeii:

-          It was not destroyed by the lava of the eruption…lava never came close to Pompeii. The city was destroyed completely by the heavy volcanic ash, hardened molten rocks which fell from the sky like tennis-sized hail, and carbon monoxide poisoning. It’s actually because of the ash that the city was so well preserved. Without it, we would hardly even know about Pompeii.

-          It was more of a resort town/getaway for the upper class Romans. So it had a total population of about 20,000. However, the time of the erruption was off-season for most vacationers, so only 2,000 were present in the city at the time it saw its last hours on earth. Another possible cause for the smaller number is a result of many actually fleeing the city out of fear.

-          There is no word in the Latin dictionary for “erruption”…so no one had a clue as to what was going on. The volcanoe actually pulsed for a full two days before it spewed its guts. It more so shook the earth than just boil over the whole time. There are written records of people praying to the gods for forgiveness, thinking the earth was just temporarily shaking due to their sins or lack of sacrifices. To them, it was an act of the gods, and nothing more.

-          Everyone had ample time to flee the city before the volcanoe errupted.

-          The famous casts of people “frozen” in time as the ash burned their lungs, are actually molded casts where archeologists would pour a liquid mold into the holes in the ash where body formations were when the ash fell, but disintigrated over time. So the casts were made by us, and didn’t actually exist before as if they were molten solid and then chiseled out (as I had originally thought).   

-          They found the bones of a pregnant woman, and the subsequent infant bones resting in the area of her stomach…both shocking and overwhelming to visualize when I saw the cast.

-          Pompeii was covered with ash, and then over time, due to the fertile organic material filled with organisms, lush green pastures grew on top. Over more time, a town was built on top. It was discovered when men were digging an irrigation system, but instead found perfectly perpendicular remnants of buildings and shops. The excavations began

-          Only 2/3 of the actual remains have been uncovered. The remainder is intentionally being left covered.

It was incredible. And shockingly enough, our first day without rain, so all in all, the experience was nearly perfect.  

To give a quick summary, and only just that, of the remainder of the trip, Ostia Antica and Montecassino were also cool…more ruins, a lot of graves, and cool above-ground burial huts which attach to the ground and continue as a rut in the ground in Ostia Antica, and a beautiful abbey in Montecassino which overlooked the Tuscan hills.  Everything back then was a massive undertaking, but inncredible to witness.