Pompeiian streets, engineered for both wains and water, buried under 30 feet of ash and pyroclastic mud for nearly 2,000 years, here and now in the clear light of morning. Pompeii’s central forum, center of political, social, and business life. And then not. Colors amazingly vibrant after all this time. The only bodies at Pompeii left to lay exactly where they fell. Men, women, children. The amphitheater at Pompeii is the oldest remaining Roman amphitheater, predating the Colosseum by some 100 years. It seated upward of 20,000 people. Pompeii was no small town. A Pompeiian commercial bakery, with its five donkey-driven mills and a central oven. The Hurculaneum docks. Once the shore, now landlocked.Casts of the skeletons of victims who died sheltering in Herculaneum’s portside warehouses. A restaurant, one of many that line the streets of Herculaneum and Pompeii. Poignantly prosaic. A smaller excavation than Pompeii, buried as it is under city rather than farmland, Herculaneum was also buried deeper, so organics were preserved, wood and foodstuffs.
