Pompeii

On our recent cruise one of the ports we visited was Naples. We have both always wanted to visit Pompeii so booked the excursion with the cruise company. 

It's a huge place, far bigger than I expected and I definitely needed my walking stick as the paths and roads are made of huge stone blocks that are uneven and quite high to step up to. 

The roads were more like waterways with all the inhabitants waste running down. The pavements were built high on both sides with stepping stones to cross. The gaps in the stepping stones were for the cart wheels to get through and the whole city had one way streets, so ingenious. 

I still don't fully understand everything, there's so much to learn about Pompeii, the devastating event, their life before and how it was discovered. 

Here's a quick overview from Google:

Pompeii is a famously preserved ancient Roman city near Naples, Italy, that was catastrophically buried under 4 to 6 meters of volcanic ash and pumice when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD. Its quick burial left the city frozen in time, providing an unparalleled archaeological record of daily Roman life.

We took so many photos, I'll add a caption to some but my blog would be huge if I wrote about everything.

 

There were quite a few houses with wall paintings

Their building style and construction was amazing

This was a hot food shop as they didn't have fires in their homes
The food was served from the huge pots ... ancient McDonald's 

Plaster casts were taken of some of the people found,
quite moving to see, an unimaginable disaster

This is the famous brothel with paintings showing what was on
offer as many couldn't read and Pompeii had many visiting foreign sailors

It was fascinating, so much to see and understand in our short visit. It's certainly a place we'd like to revisit and have longer to explore. 

Until our visit I hadn't realised that the 'two' mountains that we see today were actually both Vesuvius. The middle gap is the vast amount of the volcano that erupted into the air and covered Pompeii and Herculaneum. 

All the yellow area erupted and covered everywhere 

We had a superb time visiting this amazing place that thanks to such a devastating event at the time has actually preserved Roman history. Our organised excursion was a good way to visit for the first time but Pompeii is certainly a place I'd like to visit again.