Nadine's Letters from Rome : Pompeii

All things come to he who waits.

Ever since 1965 when my mother returned from a holiday in Italy and thrilled me with stories of Pompeii, I have wanted to go there. I was fascinated by her stories of the ancient city frozen in time, uncovered from beneath layers of ash spewed out by Vesuvius, which had captured the metropolis like an archaeological snapshot at the moment of its death. She described wonderful villas, paintings and courtyards, told how the bodies of the citizens had been preserved in the positions of their death for all time and even described one of a little dog caught for all eternity on its back with its legs in the air. Her eyes welled as she told me, and mine followed suit.
“There was a house too, that only the men were allowed to go into.”
“What was in there?”
“I don’t know. They wouldn’t tell the women, and your father wouldn’t tell me when he got out either” her voice was tinged with pique.
We laughed as she told me of the graffiti of a school pupil depicting “primo magister” (headmaster) and other things that so caught my imagination, I couldn’t wait to grow up and go there too. When Vito and I first moved to Rome, I remember thinking finally I would get to Pompeii. After all it’s only a couple of hours drive away. However it seems to be a pattern, in that I only get to see the places I want to see in Italy if a friend from abroad goes on holiday to that same place. I only got to see Florence because a Swiss friend of mine was working there and we went to visit her. So it proved with Pompeii. My wonderful American cousins came over this summer to stay in Positano, and we spent a few lovely days with them.

The Amalfi coastline

Top of our joint lists of “places to see” was Pompeii. It had only taken 49 years, but at long last I was going to see it. Early one Monday morning we picked up my cousins from their hotel in Positano and took the scenic route of breathtaking beauty along the Amalfi coastline to Pompeii.

The scenic route

Once there we parked the car and made our way through the throngs of tourists, souvenir stalls, pay desks and turnstiles, and finally we were inside the archaeological park and just outside the old wall to the ancient city.

My cousin turned to me, “we need a guide. All my friends have told me there’s no point in going in without one as we won’t know what we are looking at”.
We made out way towards a hut with “guides” written on the door, when a small rotund woman with short blonde hair came strutting through the crowds towards us like a frantic chicken, waving her hands and calling “no, no, you don’t go there, what you want? You want a guide? Yes? I’m a guide, my name is Gina”.

First view inside Pompeii

It turned out she already had five people “waiting to go” and if we wanted to join the group making the number up to nine, we could split the cost of 110 Euro for two hours between us. This didn’t seem unreasonable and we agreed. It wasn’t long thought before I began to feel a sense of disquiet over our choice of guide. She was, without doubt, one of the rudest people I have ever met.
“Oh! Oh, please you not talk when I talking. How you hear me when you speaking too? Eh, so no, you no talk, ok”, followed by a saccharine smile which I’m sure probably saved her from getting smacked more than a few times. Her group after all, was made up of well-mannered (and incredulous) Brits and Americans. In the end we all sort of developed a “her and us” mind set which all added to the fun of the day. However to give Gina her due, she certainly knew her stuff and she was an encyclopaedia of information. First stop was the smaller theatre,

The music theatre

which apparently was wonderful for acoustics and used for musical concerts. Leading us on to show us another part, one of our group bravely dared to raise her hand and point in the direction of a small building housing some public toilets as we passed by.

“What you want to go? What now?”

Sighing in an exaggerated manner, Gina held up her wrist to her face and flicked a loose metal watchstrap so she could see the face. She grimaced. “Well, ok, we stop for a few minutes, just a few minutes, ok so we wait”. I suspect with the queue there was for the facilities the poor lady didn’t get so far as getting her knickers down before Gina called out over our heads to the woman’s husband standing guard by the entrance to the loos “ok, we go now. You tell your wife we go now, not far, jus’ around the corner, ok, come on everyone, this way. Don’ worry for the others, they come on, we not go far”. She stalked off, while I stopped to take a photo.

“Quick, quick” Vito said to me, “she’ll give us what for if we’re late”.

“May I remind you we are paying her and not the other way round?” I hissed back.

One of the biggest surprises for me of the place was its vastness. I don’t know why I assumed it would be smaller, no reason really, but the city really spread out for miles. Gina took us along roads and pointed out the large slabs

Stepping stones across the road.

that crossed the streets so that pedestrians could walk on these stepping-stones and avoid walking through the rubbish and sewage that ran along the lower part. She went on to explain how it was fashionable to gorge on food in ancient Pompeii and then vomit it out to make room for more, making the streets even more revolting! It appeared the people of Pompeii went in for excess. Sex was also an obsession,

Sex was also an obsession

and we were shown more than a few examples of an erect penis carved onto buildings or on paving stones. Women also apparently wore them as pendants around their neck as they were considered good luck! Our guide also showed us a bar, like the one in Ostia Antica, bearing similarities to those of today.

The bar with sink and shelves.

Then clucking at us to hurry we were rounded up at the entrance of what we came to realise was a magnificent villa

The inner courtyard of the villa (front door at back of photo)

that had belonged to a very wealthy family. Gina pointed out the little shrine the family had in the corner of the hall,

Family shrine

the colourful friezes

Colourful friezes

on the walls and told us what they depicted, the corner where little statues of departed relatives were kept (bit like in the film The Gladiator Maximus carries the little figurines of his late wife and son),

Shrine to dead family members

and to a place where a part of the ceiling had been reconstructed so we could see how it would have been in those long gone days. They had sliding doors to all the rooms, and Gina drew out attention to the remains of one that perished in the fires of Vesuvius’ pitiless onslaught. We were even introduced to the seven members of the family, still in residence,

The family still in residence

but probably in a way they’d never imagined they would be. I asked her about the house my father had been allowed to go into and my mother not, although I found out many years later the house had been a brothel with some rather lurid frescoes on the walls.

Brothel cubicle

Times have changed and the prudishness of half a century before, long forgotten. Now everyone is allowed inside the tiny house. Gina showed us the rooms, cubicles really, with a cement bed in each, and on the walls above the doors in the hall, rather graphic portraits. Our guide explained that due to the different languages of all the people there in the city, these pictures represented a kind of menu.

Part of the "menu"

The men would come in and point out to what “service” they would like from the prostitutes who worked in the house if they couldn’t explain in words! These women were, so we were also told, happy to be paid with cheap wine. She also took us to just one of the many baths there. It was here that we came across the first of the “bodies”.

A man as he died

She described how earlier archaeologists at Pompeii had come across skeletons surrounded by pockets of air. They realised that the ash had fallen on the people as they desperately tried to escape, encasing their bodies as they fell.

Exactly as he'd fallen

In time the bodies had disintegrated leaving the skeleton in an air pocket surrounded by ash. So when the archaeologists found an air pocket they filled the space with a type of liquid cement essentially using the case as a “plaster cast”. They were then able to pull out an exact replica of the person as they had fallen. It was quite a poignant experience looking at the faces of people who had died in such agonising circumstances so many centuries ago. Gina left after the allotted two hours carrying a hefty tip from most of us, and we were free to explore the vast city forum, which stretched out before us with Vesuvius glowering menacingly in the distance.

The forum

At one end of this area we found a storage area where row upon row of urns and pots were stacked on shelves, and a few more cases containing unfortunate individuals who had died when Vesuvius erupted. Here too I found the body of the little dog my mother had told me about, exactly as she described, and another, that of a person that had been stacked and gave a whole new (I thought rather sad) meaning to the expression “being left on the shelf”.