endlessrarities | Pompeii, Or Bust...

We did Pompeii the hard way.

We opted out of the guided tour, and decided to do it ourselves. "You'll need at least a day," my colleague The Classicist had warned. "Probably more."

Ah, what it is to be graced with the gift of prophecy...

I bought a map of the excavations and the Site Guide. Unfortunately, when I ripped off the cellophane, I discovered I'd bought the site guide rather than the site guide (read the first with a french accent), which made life a bit difficult.

Pompeii is rather helpfully labelled with on-site locational details which allow visitors to navigate with relative ease. Here's an example:-

Despite the helpful street signs, it's difficult to find your way around. This is partly why we quartered the site so methodically. I wanted to know exactly where I was, and how everything fitted together. Which was quite difficult, when the houses looked so similar, and every street tended to look the same:-

We started our initial navigation by finding one of the Most Obvious buildings, the Basilica. But, since my french is not very accomplished, all the site guide succeeded in telling me was that the building was dated to somewhere in the 2nd century BC, and that it formed the adminsitrative core of the city. Which is better than nothing, I suppose.

I of course was already going into overdrive because of the very elegant pillars:-

Though I must admit that I was already feeling a little cheated by the fact that this important building was all show and no substance - the pillars are brick, rather than costly marble, with painted plaster or perhaps even concrete over the top to give the fluted Doric/Ionian/Corinthian look.

Ah, well. It reminds me of the 19th century Glasgow warehouses - robust carved sandstone facades tacked onto cheap brick structures. I'm not the only one who's noticed this - check out kheimtran's recent LJ entry (sorry, can't get LJ to recognise the user info - humph!) for their observations on this detail. I'd have expected it on the houses, but it hadn't occurred to me that the public municipal buildings (which you'd expect to be very grand and high-brow) would employ exactly the same technique.

But then that's Romans for you, isn't it? All style and no substance...

Anyway. My colleague The Classicist was quite right. We were there six hours, and in that time we managed to cover most of the site. Except the brothel. And I think we missed out one of the bath-houses, too. So we decided to come back again to finish everything of, because of course you don't visit Pompeii everyday, and we ended up spending another third of a day topping and tailing the site.

Verdict: unless you're a nutter for the Romans or an archaological obsessive (like me), just go for the guided tour. It's easier that way. And it does help you cherrypick the best bits without keeling over from exhaustion at the end of it.

Oh, and in case you're wondering, the awfully nice lady in the bookshop exchanged my site guide for a site guide without hesitation. So all's well that ends well. And tomorrow I'm going to go all religious and give you some nice pictures of some temples.