Pompeii
Monday, November 10, 2025
I had always wanted to go, and I didn’t know what to expect. Would Pompeii be as astounding as the National Geographic photos that fascinated me as a child? Would I be able to envision Pliny trying to come here on the night of the eruption in 79 AD; would I feel any of the horror and tragedy of those doomed people, so long ago? Or would it be a Disney-esque reconstruction that didn’t feel real?
We arrived on the Circumvesuviana train, about an hour’s ride from Naples, and entered the site. At first it seemed like a maze of streets, with the stone walls of former buildings towering much higher than I had expected. After wandering down a couple of those and arriving nowhere, we sat down and consulted our map and made a plan. The city was far larger than I had thought. Some areas (many, we would find out) were still being excavated by archaeological teams, and no wonder — the site is vast and even several centuries of excavation have not been able to complete the task. We walked uphill toward the Forum and found a wide open space that we could easily imagine teeming with people.
In the background, the mountain below which the city had been built: the deliberate focal point, we would discover, not only for its Forum but for many of the streets and public buildings.
Via della Scuole, looking toward the Forum. 5” x 12” in sketchbook
From there we went on to explore the city for the rest of the afternoon, moving into residential areas of large villas with magnificent mosaics and wall paintings.
I was surprised how much of this sort of decoration remained on-site, although there were some replicas. The biggest surprise here, as in Herculaneum, was how much of the original structures had been preserved by being buried in the volcanic eruption. Unlike other sites from the same period, where time and the elements have worn down the walls and toppled the columns, much of Pompeii was practically intact.
Imagine being the archaeologists who, while excavating a Pompeiian villa called the House of the Faun in 1831, found this floor mosaic which depicts Alexander the Great in battle with the Persian king, Darius II. It’s thought to be a copy, in mosaic, of a Greek painting and contains millions of tesserae, the tiny ceramic tiles that were used to create the complex picture. The mosaic is approximately 9 feet high by 16.5 feet long.
detail of head and torso of Alexander in the original mosaic
The original was removed to the Archaeological Museum of Naples and is currently undergoing conservation in an adjacent room to the gallery where it is usually displayed on the wall; we were only able to see the conservators working on a small piece of it. In the early 2000s, a careful copy was made and installed in the House of the Faun in 2005 – that’s what you see in the top picture.
We walked, and walked. Other areas contained temples, shops, tavernas where the residents would have taken their lunch, a huge public bath complex, and many more modest houses, some as small as one room. On the far end of the city, past gardens, orchards, and vineyards, we came to the stadium/amphitheater.
I sat down in the distant dark area of this picture, and drew the trees, looking in the opposite direction.
In addition to this stadium, which would have hosted gladiatorial contests, there is also a large theater in the Greek style.
When patrons exited the theater, they would have seen this framed view of Vesuvius, the omnipresent companion of the city of Pompeii.
We stayed until the sun was setting, and loudspeaker announcements told us the site would be closing soon. What did I feel? I felt that I had visited a city that had clearly been beautiful, carefully designed, and eminently livable for those of sufficient means; life had been good here until it came to an abrupt, terrible end. As in Herculaneum, perhaps even more so, it was sobering and emotional to be there; I was moved.
Ironically the eruption preserved for us, as in no other place, the ability to step back into a Roman city and learn a great deal about how the people actually lived.
Leaving Pompeii. A larger watercolor, 10” x 14”, on Arches cold press.
I have thought more about Pompeii, and already made more drawings and watercolors of it, than any other site we visited in Italy. There is much more work I want to do as I try to unpack the impression it made upon me: both the actuality of what remains, and what the place and its history represent in the human psyche.