Up and out by 8am. We are going to Pompeii! We drive to the Sant’Agnello stazione, where a tram takes us to the main scavi. I remember as a kid, Skyview Elementary in Dallas, Texas, we watched an educational film about Pompeii. They showed a painting of Vesuvius exploding and a crowd of people in Roman outfits cowering in terror. We saw photos of the concrete corpses molded from cavities in the ash. Ever since, I’ve wanted to visit this place.
The coolest part, as with Morgantina, is being able to walk through the ancient spaces. You can stand on the stage of the theatre, traverse the grounds of the grand palestra and the arena, stroll along the “main drag” where all the lunch places were located, wander through the rooms and gardens of the villas. You can set your proportions against the ancient scale, realize that a town from 2000+ years in the past is so like a town of today. In fact, the winding, narrow, convoluted lanes and alleys of Venice are farther from my own sense of how a town would normally lay.
We admire the wall treatments, the polished plaster finish, shiny and in rich tones of red, the freschi which covered every available surface, the stately rows of columns. The lunch places are cool. They had stone countertops with holes for jars of food or drink. Hollow spaces beneath the countertop allowed for cooling or heating, just like a salad bar or a hot table. Ah, the catering continuum.
Because the disaster of Pompeii was so sudden, swift, and thorough, life here was arrested in full swing. You sense the echo of an abrupt suspension, a friction in the ether which centuries and thousands of babbling tourists do nothing to dispel. There are ghosts here for sure. At every corner, I am aware of their restless passage.
In the distance, beyond the grassy rectangle of the Pompeii forum, Vesuvius sits humpbacked, blue green and docile, though L. tells me the volcano is still active. Imagine the supernatural terror these people must have felt, as nature rose in violent display, as the sun was blocked out and flames consumed the timbers. L. note: coincidentally, the date of the eruption was the festival of the Roman god of fire, according to Wikipedia]. We read in the guidebook that Venus was the protectress of Pompeii. Did the people feel betrayed by their goddess? Was there an unfaithful spouse or an unconfessed killer, a naughty child or an errant priest who felt in those final moments that surely they had angered the goddess personally, so much as to bring on her divine wrath? This area was full of seismic activity. A big earthquake damaged much of Pompeii some years before Vesuvius erupted so the inhabitants were used to divine chastisement. This last rebuke, however, was comprehensive. There is a current town of Pompeii, a real dump from what we could see driving through that first day of our trip. It’s basically a ghetto orbiting Naples. The tourists travel directly to the scavi on a tram or in buses; it’s dangerous to walk around with a fanny pack and a digital camera. Can’t help but wonder what Venus thinks of the current situation and if she has any further plans to clear the slate.
We bid farewell to Luigi, the artista matta and his cool family. Mary stayed in our room all day and was a perfect angel. We shall return to Casa Mazzola. The drive back is brutal. There is some traffic disaster in the tunnel going down the mountain and we are stuck in second gear for nearly two hours. The road from Firenze to Bologna is a killer as well, winding and mountainous plus it’s late night and all the trucks are out. We are back on Bixio around 3am. The chestnut trees have dropped a fine coating of sap on the street and sidewalk. We have to clean the leaves and grass off Mary’s paws before we can finally go to sleep. Must get up early tomorrow to clean and return the car.
