Pompeii, Italy

In which I wander through the streets where archeology was invented, and think about souls past and present.

In Campania some frightening and astonishing events occurred. A great fire suddenly flared up at the very end of summer. Mount Vesuvius, which stands near the sea below Naples, has in it inexhaustible fountains of fire…

-Cassius Dio, The History of Rome

{Pompeii, Italy}

It is getting to be late fall, and the air is chilly when I visit the ruins of Pompeii. As I walk along the grid of streets the skies turn alternately blue and then grey - as skies do in fall - and clouds form and slowly disappear. Later in the afternoon, just as the impending sunset adds a hint of yellow to the horizon I stand in the heart of the city, in the remains of the Pompeiian Forum, and look towards Mount Vesuvius. A series of clouds gather right at the crest. They look for all of the world like smoke and ash.

Of course I know that there will be no eruption today - we have advance warning of these things now, and it is obvious that these are just clouds. But still, I wonder, is this how it looked in 79 AD? Or was it more dramatic?

Reports suggest that it is likely that this is what Pompeiians may have seen in the days and hours before Vesuvius erupted, burying their city not in a flow of lava, but in a shower of ash and small volcanic rocks called lapilli. The shower was light enough at first, it seems…people simply brushed the dust off of their shoulders. Slowly, the debris shower worsened and some residents fled, either to the south - away from the volcano - or to the Mediterranean to the west. Many others decided to shelter in place, to remain in their homes in the hopes that they would escape injury. Some Pompeiians were killed when the increasingly intense volcanic shower caused buildings and roofs to collapse…but many more perished in the wake of “pyroclastic” flows of heat, ash and toxic gas that streamed down Vesuvius next, killing people in nearby Herculaneum instantly, while slowly suffocating the citizens of Pompeii before burying their city in meters of ash. Less than 48 hours later the sky cleared, and the sun shone on a barren landscape. Pompeii and Herculaneum were no longer there.

The archeological site at Pompeii is enormous: over 100 acres in full, with another 50 acres of the city awaiting excavation. Excavations have been ongoing here since 1748, the year of the official discovery of its ruins. Pompeii had been buried for almost 1700 years when Spanish engineer Rocco Gioacchino de Alcubiere arrived in Capagnia by order of the King of Spain, to search for ancient artifacts to decorate Spanish royal palaces.

(Actually, there was one little incident before that…In 1599, an Italian architect named Domenico Fontana was supervising the construction of an underground tunnel near the buried ruins and uncovered a wall painting. Intrigued, he kept digging and uncovered several more frescos. Unknowingly he had stumbled upon the NSFW frescos of the lupanar - the town’s brothel, located right off of the main street. Shocked, he ordered the frescos covered up again. The official discovery of Pompeii would have to wait for another 150 years.)

Excavations officially began at Pompeii in 1748, although they didn’t have a name for the city until 1763, when a stone inscribed “Rei publicae Pompeianorum” was uncovered.

As I enter Pompeii through the Marina gate, the first thing I see is a cluster of public sites: temples to Venus, Apollo and Jupiter, the Basilica (a municipal building, not a church), and the Forum. Past that, however, are the neighborhoods: a sprawling grid of intersecting streets. The stone streets are patterned with deep ruts, created by decades of regular chariot traffic. As I stand and look at a particularly deep rut, something occurs to me that should have been obvious: this was a city. Not a town or a village, but a city of approximately 12,000 residents. A city that had been there for at least 500 years before the event that made it famous. Walking down the streets, I try to imagine the city before the eruption.

A main street - the Via dell’Abbondonza - runs through town, and it is lined with businesses: public baths, bakeries and food vendors, a brothel. There are two open-air theaters on one edge of town and an arena at the far end. Homes were built close to one another, with very little space in between. Along the main streets, many homes were built with businesses or storefronts on the first level, with residences above. The city lacked an effective sewage system and so waste ran freely through the streets, washed away by water from nearby aqueducts. Large stepping stones strategically placed throughout the city allowed Pompeiians to cross the street without dirtying their feet in streams of waste.

As I wander, writing on the wall catches my eye. Shocks me, for some inexplicable reason. It is a reminder of the bustling, everyday life of the city, and the people who live here. It is a billboard, and I assume at first that it is an advertisement (Burgers and Fries! I imagine it says) - but I find out later that it is an election sign, imploring Pompeiians to vote for a particular candidate.

It turns out there is writing all over Pompeii: more signs, but also lots and lots of graffiti. I learn that some of the graffiti is friendly - it was not uncommon to visit a friend’s house and leave a few lines of poetry on a wall in his foyer, for example. Still, it is the bathroom-and-bedroom graffiti that gets the bulk of the attention. Pompeiians: they were just like us! we think. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Nowhere does the daily life of Pompeiians come to life more vividly than in the houses and villas that line the side streets. Some of them have evocative names, like The House of the Faun - named for a small bronze sculpture of a faun found in its foyer, and The House of the Tragic Poet. It is the wall paintings that are the most striking, of course - even if several of the houses with the most well-preserved frescos are closed on the day that I visit.

They are closed for conservation. Excavation work has been paused at Pompeii for the past several decades, while urgent conservation projects are carried out. The sites of Herculaneum and Pompeii are considered the longest active archeological projects in the world - the two sites, in fact, are considered the birthplace of modern archeology. But, the science of archeology was not always what it is today, and some early excavations were undertaken haphazardly.

However, when reading about the conservation work, I learn something even more shocking: that the ruins of Pompeii were the target of Allied bombs during World War II. It was (falsely) believed that the German army was hiding ammunition and sheltering troops at the site, and so in August and September of 1943, Allied bombers carried out a series of attacks that caused extensive destruction and damage. Over 100 buildings at the site were hit.

So much was lost, that Italian officials were anxious to rebuild what they could - to salvage some of Pompeii’s buildings from the extensive damage. The reconstruction was rushed, and improper materials and methods were sometimes used. Sadly, this only contributed to the instability of the ancient site. The collapse of several buildings has led to The Great Pompeii Project, an initiative undertaken by the Italian government to conserve and preserve the site, and to prevent more destruction.

I walk along the main street toward the far end of the site, where the arena sits. The people of Pompeii are becoming more and more alive to me. I imagine them sitting in a bar, drinking wine (and writing on the walls). I imagine them hopping across stones. I imagine them filling the streets, streaming towards gladiatorial games or executions at the arena like Americans heading to a college football game on Saturday afternoon.

I circle around the arena, and walk along the edge of the city, near the remnants of Pompeii’s city walls.

And that’s where I find the casts.

We’ve all seen them, I don’t need to take a picture. I don’t want to take a picture. It feels somehow like an invasion of privacy. Struggle, contortion, agony. Bodies desperate for air. Bodies forever frozen in the worst moments of their lives.

They are not bodies at all of course, but casts made of plaster. Plaster that was poured into the ash, to fill a void where a human body was.

The void of a single human body. The void of a single human life. The loss of a single human life.

For the second week in a row, I find myself contemplating loss in these letters.

It is December when I am writing this, and it’s likely that most of us are feeling the loss of a single life, or indeed multiple lives, more intensely at this time of year. Family, friends, loved ones, pets.

This will be my first Christmas without my mother, and what a void she leaves. A void of beauty at Christmas time, of hard work, of cookies and of love.

I think about the void left by the bodies in Pompeii, and I know in my heart that it’s not the void that matters. The plaster casts are just bodies. What fills the void, that’s what matters. That’s what we remember…and always will.