Pompeii

I seem to like to post about things starting with the letter "p" these days.

I became inspired to post a blog about Pompeii last night while watching the Doctor Who episode "Fires of Pompeii." Yeah, I'm a Doctor Who fan, don't laugh. Anyway, it reminded me of the time long long ago when I was in the third grade and had some sort of weird obsession with Pompeii. Random huh? I also had an obsession with Rocks and the Titanic. It was an interesting year.

More seriously though, I felt really bad for the people of Pompeii. Wouldn't you have noticed something strange happening to that big old "mountain" in your back yard a few days prior to the eruption? If so, wouldn't you want to urm...get away? I sure would. However, they probably thought that one of the gods was angry. At least, that's what happened on Doctor Who anyway. :P

I used to love checking out random Pompeii books from the library and looking at all the lost artifacts that were found in the ruins. Paintings, pottery, bones, you name it, I deemed it interesting.


Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, causing ash and pumice to literally bury the city alive. The eruption lasted for two days. Many people tried to run and hide, and i'm guessing it was mass chaos. People hid in their houses, thinking that the ash would not get to them. While that might have been true, for a while at least, the poisonous gasses got to them, and then the ash itself. The city of Pompeii was lost for nearly 1700 years, and then was accidentally discovered by the Spanish military engineer, Rocque Joaquin de Alcubierre in 1748.

Since then, Pompeii has been excavated, and it's findings preserved. What always fascinated me was when you look at the pictures of the people, and they look like REAL people. After all those years, their bodies had been preserved, amazingly.

This photo is called 'The Garden of Fugitives."

We can learn so much from Pompeii. If you want to know what life was like in the first century of Rome, all you need to do is study the ancient artifacts, the art, the pottery, etc. Looking through all these pictures that I found on the internet, it gets to be very interesting. I highly recommend a google image search of Pompeii.

Today, the city of Pompeii is a huge tourist attraction, you can walk the streets and see many of the recovered buildings and artifacts. I hope one day I can travel to Italy and get to see Pompeii for real.