Pompeii and the Capitoline museum

Hi everyone!

Last weekend we had a class trip to southern Italy and we saw the museum in Naples as part of our art class on the way to Pompeii for another class on the art and architecture preserved there. The museum was pretty cool, but Pompeii was by far the best part of the trip. It is amazing how much of it is preserved. Practically the whole first story of the city is intact, with some taller buildings scattered around too. Apparently about 90% of the population of Pompeii was able to escape before the volcano erupted by recognizing warning signs such as earthquakes, and so it was only those who chose to stay until it was too late that didn't make it out. I got to see some really neat plaster casts of the bodies of people that had died. It sounds like the main reason they couldn't get out near the end was that there were a lot of fumes in the air and so people passed out while fleeing and were covered by the ash, which was falling at a rate of 6 inches per hour. Here is one of those casts:

One of the reasons Pompeii was really neat is that you can just walk the streets and not much is roped off. The streets are all paved with closely fitting stones and in some areas there are "crosswalks." These crosswalks are basically large, flat stones in a row crossing the street and you can hop from one to the other. This was done, apparently, because the actual street is at a lower level than the sidewalks and they were used for draining all sorts of unpleasant things, so if you didn't want to step in the muck, you could just hop across the raised cross walks. Just imagine all those Roman citizens in their togas hopping about!

Another thing that struck me about Pompeii was how much like a modern city it was in many ways. There was a problem with graffiti, some talking about the big sporting events (gladiator games) and since Pompeii was destroyed during election season, there were also many political slogans on the walls of buildings. Some houses had mosaics in the doorway warning intruders of their guard dog:

The walls of many houses still had their original paint on them and it was really surprising to see that these walls were not painted white but rather were covered with pictures.

On Wednesday we had another class trip, this time to the Capitoline Museum in Rome. I have never seen such amazing art before! The museum had sculptures like "The Dying Gaul," which I have seen pictures of before and seeing the real thing was really cool. Another neat thing is that for some of the busts of people the head of the person would be regular white marble, but the clothes would be made out of brightly colored marble done in such a way as to make it look like real cloth (see picture)! It was amazing!


Well, I have to go to bed since I'm getting up at 5:00 tomorrow to get to Rome early, but here is one more picture that I think is kind of funny: Me, Lori and Jon surfing the metro...no hands!