Pompeii, Italy - Sept 17, 2009

No visit to Naples is complete without a day trip to Pompeii. I'm sure you have heard of it at some point. It is the ancient Roman city that was completely buried (and preserved) when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD.

A huge portion of the archeological site is completely open to the public. You can walk through the streets, houses, shops and baths.

It was pretty incredible to walk around trying to picture what life must have been like in those times.





If we hadn't read about it, I would have thought it was a joke, but the city viewed the penis as a sign of good luck and fertility, and actually had them everywhere! Shops and houses had penises in the brick above the doors, street intersections had penises on the walls, the potery and statues also glorified penises.

Most of the artifacts recovered from the site are now back in the National Museum in Naples. A lot of this art depicts people have sex, with men, women, goats, horses, swans, you name it. Yes Ryan, even dragons.

The city itself was pretty advanced for their time. They had baths with hot and cold running water. They made ice out of snow carried from the top of the mountains close to the town and had kind of side walks for the streets.

They were a pretty advanced civilization but also lived with a lot of excesses. One of the bigest attractions is one of the burlesque houses, where they had slaves to "work". The fee for someone to spend some time with one of the slaves was about the price of a bottle of wine. From this behavior started the comparison of this city with Sodom and Gomorrah. They were burned as a punishment for the excesses that they had and Pompeii seemed to had the same living conditions when they were buried by the ashes of the Vesuvius.

They found quite a few bodies preserved in the ash:



There are free informational books at the entrance to Pompeii, but it would really be worth it to pay for a guided tour. We missed out on a lot by trying to do it all ourselves. We often followed along behind various groups throughout the day trying to hear some the explanations.

Carolina found huge lemons (limones para los mexicanos) that blew her mind, she was in heaven just for seconds!

Here are some more of our favorite pictures:











Excellent day trip!