OMG Pompeii. It is no secret that I am a big fat nerd. Lizzie and I were in our nerdish glory today on our visit to Pompeii, and the only thing that could've made it better would have been if the grounds had been closed off to other tourists, who were in the way of us getting our nerd on. We got to Pompeii early in the morning, with Vesuvius looming over us with a psuedo innocent expression on (I'm just a mountain, la la la BOOM SUPRISE VOLCANO!) The eruption that destroyed Pompeii happened in 79AD, when Pompeii was a bustling Roman city of about 18,000 (it had originally been settled by the Greeks, but was conquered by the Romans eventually, as all things are.) The city was supposedly under the watchful eye of Venus, but she was busy washing her hair during the four-day event that choked the city with poisonous gasses before dumping 20-40 feet of ash on it. There were some survivors, who lived to tell the story, but they considered the city to be ill favored by the gods, and eventually it was forgotten until mid 16th century.

The ruins are amazingly preserved, ash being good for that. The roads are in pristine condition (including with the over-the-shit stepping stones), and it's easy to tell which rooms were used for what--bakery, private villas, food markets, etc. (apparently the citizens of Pompeii were famous for a disgusting oil that they squeezed out of fish, let rot in the sun for 10 days, and combined with some herbs--sounds like Vesuvius was sort of doing them a favor). We saw an old laundry, slave quarters, two theaters, and the amazing forum and market place. The most crowded room (no surprise) was the brothel, which had detailed frescoes of people in various stages and forms of coitus, as a menu of sorts. (Yeaaaah, I'll take a number 7...no, make that a number 5, and Super size that, please.) The rooms had super hard rock slabs to serve as beds, which meant you got some free exfoliation at the same time as your STD.

In the big open forum, they kept the plaster casts they'd made of bodies they'd found. When excavating, if they hit something that sounded hollow, they'd make a small hole and fill it with plaster, leaving an amazing likeness of the poor person or animal that had been suffocated. There was one plaster cast of a boy crouching and holding a hankie over his face, and a woman they call the "pregnant lady," 'cause she's got a round little belly. Sheesh. What if you were having a fat day and that's when Vesuvius blew? For all eternity (or as long as your plaster holds up) you're going to be the pregnant lady, even if you're not. People say that Pompeii is haunted, and if I were that lady I'd be like "oooOooOoOOOh I just had too big a serving of fish oil that day and am retaining water....NOT PREGNANT...OoooOoohhhh!" Apparently the archeaologists are now doing plaster casts of the root systems of plants, so they can see what the vegetation was like. Awesome!

After Pompeii we went to Naples (through the slums) to a vineyard at the base of Vesuvius, and then back to our hotel. Lizzie and I explored the little town by our hotel, and it's sort of amazing how the North End of Boston really resembles it. They're famous for their cermaic up here, but (time to be an ugly American) most of it looks like something (as Lizzie noted) that you can find at Ocean State Job Lot.

Tomorrow we're heading back to Rome, where, you know, all roads lead...