Not to much to say that you don’t already know. It was a big and bustling port city. It was entirely taken out in one day.
What I did not expect before walking the streets of this long-dead city was that I could feel how alive it once was. The evidence of the everyday is everywhere. The small shops, the street vendors, the noble houses, the town square, the bath houses, the brothels, the theatres. The street itself, with its pedestrian crosswalks and wheel ruts worn into the paving stones. There was so much human life here, and in the centuries since nothing and no one else has moved in to overwrite the city that once was. It just stopped.
I have a memory from when I was young: my friend Lesah - whose father is Italian and made the best pesto in existence - told me about visiting Pompeii. When she said she went to a place that was destroyed by a huge volcano I could not BELIEVE she would be brave enough to go anywhere near there. She said it hadn’t erupted in ages, and to me that just meant it was closer than ever to going off again. To my little kid brain, her dismissal of the obvious danger in favour of seeing an incredible ancient city ruin just did not compute. Lol, right?
Turns out I was kinda right. They actually don’t know when Vesuvius will erupt again, but they do know that when it does it will be huge and cataclysmic in scale, much the same as when it destroyed Pompeii. Seems fine, yes? Let’s go check it out.
