This blog post is about Pompeii. Have any of you ever been there? It’s a really cool place. When Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D., it covered the sky in ash for 18 hours! The ash covered the city in a blanket that preserved it for a little less than two thousand years. This city is like a time capsule, all the back from August 24, 79 A.D.
One of the many things I liked seeing at Pompeii were the restaurants. They have cool marble counters, which had holes to keep the soup warm. They were really popular in the Roman times because nobody ever had a kitchen in their house. That means that Romans had to go out to eat a lot.
Aside from the fast food places, I also liked the baths. They were cool because there were three different kinds of baths. There were ice baths, steam baths, and hot baths. The ice baths were baths that had ice in them, good if you had just done a sport. A hot bath is what you can imagine. A hot bath! You would use it for when your muscles were sore, or hurting. A steam bath was just for fun, but I thought it was the most interesting kind because a fountain overflowed with cold water on to the hot floor so it steamed. Also, the bath was warm. The steam bath was a lot like a sauna today. Here is a picture of one of the baths, and also an ancient “locker” where bathers put their things.
Another cool building I saw at Pompeii was the house of the faun. This house was the largest house in Pompeii! It was (and still is) 25,000 square feet! It is named the house of the faun for the small faun statue in a fountain posing at the middle of the courtyard. Another amazing feature of this house is the mosaic in the study. It depicts Alexander the great fighting the great Persian king, Darius, and his Persian troops. In the end of that war, Alexander conquered the Persian empire, and a whole lot more. But I won’t talk about that today.
Something else I liked were the roads. There were circular stepping stones in the middle of the street. The stones were there so that, when city officials flooded the streets in order to clean them, people could walk across the streets without getting their sandals wet.
Also, there were stones to stop chariots from going on pedestrian streets, nicknamed “beaver teeth”.
Pompeii is one of the coolest things I have seen yet. Unlike Rome, it isn’t all ruins. Most of it is still very intact. On a one to ten scale for greatness, I give it a definite ten. It is really a peek into what life was like 2,000 years ago.
Fanatical Sabbatical 