Day 8 Pompeii

Jacob: This morning Pietro & Marina picked us up early and we drove all the way to Naples and Pompeii. They have huge lemons and really good oranges in Naples and we drank fresh lemonade and orange juice. (Molly: Pietro & Marina own our apartment, and are both artists and tour guides.)

Jacob: Pompeii is a whole city that got buried in volanic ash when Mt. Vesuvian erupted almost 2,000 years ago. They dug out the city and you can walk all around the temples, stores, streets and houses.

Some of the really wealthy people had running water in their houses! There was also a really cool ancient laundromat, where people could take their clothes to be washed, dyed, dried and ironed. The old pipes were made of lead.

When they dug out the city they found spaces in the ash where people died. They filled the spaces with plaster and they have molds of their bodies. Most people had their hands covering their faces because the ash would have been in their eyes.

There were ancient baths where the people would go to bathe and relax. There were tubs for cold water and hot water, and their was a steam room. The walls were hollow, and the people would burn wood under the bath to make it hot then the smoke would fill the walls to make the room warm.

The rich people had mosaics on their floors. Mosaics are patterns or pictures made from tiny tiles. One of the mosaics was a picture of Alexander the Great fighting in a battle. Most of the walls had paintings and designs. One of the designs was of animals getting hunted. One house even had a huge fish tank where they could keep fresh fish to cook.

We went out for a big meal where they served us prawns, octupus and whole fishes. There were even fried seaweed cakes. When we got back into Rome, Pietro took us to the oldest Gelateria in Rome called Giovanni Fassi.