Pompeii was magnificent!!!

One of the temples in Pompeii. Some of the pillars in the foreground show bricks used as the core and then plastered over. Apparently not all majestic pillars of the ancient world were made of solid stone or marble.
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Pompeii is a ruined Roman city near modern Naples in the Italian region of Campania. Napoli, as the Italians call it did not endear itself to us. Our main purpose of this southbound trip was to experience the dug out remains of the once great city of Pompeii.  We stayed in a hotel close to the train station which so far in Italy translates to a less desirable location. The whole area around was littered in boxes, wrapping bubble and all sorts of remnants of sales activities. Lots of beggars around and even people who on first appearance don't fit the bill on spotting a foreigner will ask for change. Once again the Europe under construction phenomena held tight.

Another temple I think.
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Pompeii was buried by an eruption from Mount Vesuvius in 79AD.  The speed with which the event occurred left much of the lower part of the city intact preserved in ash, while the top was knocked over, buried, or eroded to the point that the city was essentially "lost" for 1600 years.  We had a bit of camera trouble so didn´t get as many pictures as we would have liked but will upload what we have here.  Something that pictures can´t convey is how large the site is.  It really was the entire city!  The whole thing...  houses, restaurants, the equivalent of fast food joints, baths, brothels, temples, all of it...  human beings really haven´t changed much!

Blent and kneaded with the half-burning ashes, the streams fell like seething mud over the streets in frequent intervals

A large square with a view of Vesuvius in the background.
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Here is an excerpt from the book 'The Last days of Pompeii' by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

".....Amidst the other horrors, the mighty mountain now cast up columns of boiling water. Blent and kneaded with the half-burning ashes, the streams fell like seething mud over the streets in frequent intervals. And full, where the

priests of Isis had now cowered around the altars, on which they had vainly

sought to kindle fires and pour incense, one of the fiercest of those deadly

During early excavations of the site, occasional voids in the ash layer were found that contained human remains. Giuseppe Fiorelli had the idea of filling the empty spaces with plaster. What resulted were highly accurate and eerie forms of the doomed Pompeiani who failed to escape, in their last moment of life. The voids were of course the space their flesh had occupied. This person looks like they were crying or praying.
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torrents, mingled with immense fragments of scoria, had poured its rage.

Over the bended forms of the priests it dashed: that cry had been of

death--that silence had been of eternity! The ashes--the pitchy

streams--sprinkled the altars, covered the pavement, and half concealed the

This person was clearly trying to breathe and avoid the ash and gases from the eruption.
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quivering corpses of the priests!..."