Italy: Salerno Day 2

We left Salerno this morning and headed north for a stop at Pompeii and after a few hours went further north to Herculaneum. Both of these are ancient towns that are very well preserved due to Mt Vesuvius erupting and covering them in a layer of ash. Little did we know that since it was the first Sunday of the month, these sites were free for everyone (we get in free anyway due to our affiliation with the archaeology school). Because of this, the sites were packed! We didn't get to see everything, but we saw enough. At Pompeii they stopped letting people in and said there wouldn't be anymore admissions for two hours.

Pompeii:

Palestra Grande

Outside of the Anfiteatro

Inside the Anfiteatro

Houses along the street.

Inside a house.

A big theater.

Palestra

Forum

Outside the museum they have a lot of cases with what we think are carbonized bodies or something like that.

Preserved wood. We haven't seen this before.

Mosaic

When we arrived in Ercolano, this was the view.

The Herculaneum site is smaller than Pompeii, but I liked it better. I felt like there was more variety in what you saw there. I also liked that you could take shots of most of the site as you'll see from my first few pictures below.

Here is a shot of the Herculaneum site with the modern town behind it and Mt. Vesuvius behind that. However, the clouds cover much of the Mountain.

This was a shrine in one of the houses.

A pool/water collector.

The color is preserved very well on many of the walls.

Parts of pots still holding shape.

Preserved window bars.

In the crypts there was this pool/tub.

and the stairs to get in it.

The wall of the crypt/baths area.

A washing basin?

Another pool/tub.

A much larger pool/tub.

The stairs to get in.

The ceiling in the pool room.

There were six or so of these little alcoves that were just filled with preserved dead bodies.

I only took pictures of two of them. We aren't sure why they are here. We speculated maybe hiding from the eruption similar to a bomb shelter, but since we didn't buy the audioguide, we may never know. I could probs also just Google it.