|
|
 |
|
Pompeii and Porn, September 16, 2003 |
|
written
by Sadie Dobrozsi / 07.12.2004 |
|
|
| |
Itinerary |
| |
Today we all met the bus at the Ponte Sisto bridge and left for Pompeii. Everyone was tired and we all slept at least part of the way. It took about three hours to get there. Once we got to Pompeii, Carlo let us off the bus and we walked around as a group.
The excavated site at Pompeii is enormous and was extremely crowded with tour groups. We unfortunately didn't have time to see everything, but Shawn led us past the highlights. We breezed past the Temple of Apollo and stopped in the Macellum (2nd century BC), the building that had been the city's main market. I found it really hard to visualize what it was supposed to look like, but apparently it used to be divided into a bunch of different rooms that sold different products (meat room, fish room, vegetable room, etc). From there we walked to the Stabian Baths, the oldest building on the site dating from 4th-3rd century BC. There were separate rooms for men and women, each equipped with cold and warm baths and a swimming pool. The ceilings in this building were beautiful, ornate geometrical patterns with vibrant colors. There were also two plaster casts of bodies that had been discovered there, both in the positions that they had been found.
After the baths Shawn and Whitney somehow managed to get our group in front of three other groups to get into the Lupanare, Pompeii's best organized brothel. There were five bedrooms with stone beds that at one time had mattresses covering them. The walls were covered with frescoes that advertised the specialties of the women who worked there, much like a McDonalds menu (according to Shawn). The women who worked there were slaves and lived in isolation from the rest of Pompeii.
After the brothel, we walked along the ancient cobblestone streets that had pedestrian walkways, huge tall stones that let the pedestrian cross over the road without having to get dirty and were spaced so that wagons could pass around them easily. We ended up at the Villa of Mysteries, a gigantic house that was on the outskirs of the town, built on a slope that faced the sea. The walls had beautifully preserved frescoes and intricate mosaics that miraculously have survived the last two thousand years.
After our quick tour of Pompeii we split up and ate lunch around the area, then met Carlo and drove into Naples to visit the Archaeological Museum. The museum was full of things that had been found during the excavations of Pompeii and other nearby towns that were also buried in the eruption. There were ancient cakemolds, bowls, vases, glassware, and pottery. Seeing all of the artifacts gave the excavations we had seen earlier an entirely new life and gave me a much better understanding of what it would have been like to have lived in Pompeii before Mt. Vesuvius erupted. The museum also housed a large collection of mosaics and frescoes that had been brillantly preserved by the ash. Unfortunately, nobody knows exactly where they all came from because their excavations were completed in the 18th century when documenting the artifacts was not considered important. My favorite thing at the museum was a gigantic model of the ruins at Pompeii, complete with paintings of the remaining frescoes.
There was a special Pompeii Porn exhibit at the museum that was displaying all of the erotic material discovered.
Everyone who was spending their free days in the South left for the ferry while the rest of us boarded the bus and headed back to Rome. When we got back Shawn took us out to dinner at L'Insalata Ricca.
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
Highlights |
| |
The Pompeii Porn exhibit was definately the most unique thing we saw all day. There is apparently a large stigma attached to Pompeii and it is widely thought that Pompeii was full of erotica but in reality the erotic materials recovered were only from small private collections. Most of the pieces were statues of extremely enlarged male genitalia, thought to be symbols that were able to ward off evil and bring good luck. There was one particularly disturbing statue of a half man/half goat copulating with a female goat, the explanation of the piece was unfortunately only in Italian.
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
Images |
| |
| |
|
|
| Mosaic from Pompeii |
|
| |
|
This is a mosaic tile floor that was recovered from a room in a house in Pompeii. The central figure is a Medussa and is very colorful, the rest of the piece is black and white. The face is a good example of the intricacies that were in all of the mosaics at the museum. It is amazing how much detail was done with tiny pieces of colored stone and how well preserved they all are.
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
|
|
