Pompeii
March 11, 1787...Everyone is surprised at how small and compact
Pompeii is. The streets are paved and straight, but they
are narrow; the houses are small, with no windows—the
only light that comes in is from the entrances and open
porticoes. The public buildings, even the bench tomb at
the town gate, a nearby temple and villa look rather
like architectural models or doll-houses than real
buildings. The chambers, passage-ways and arcades are
brightly painted. There are rich frescoes on the smooth
walls, but most of them have faded by now. The frescoes
are surrounded by delightful and tasteful ornamental
designs: children, nymphs, wild or tame animals emerging
out of luxuriant floral wreaths. The city is now totally
destroyed, buried beneath ash and stones, and then
looted; yet, it still shows the people's feel for —and
love of— art, which even the most fervent lover of art
today does not understand or even wish to have.
Pompeii and Vesuvius are separated by some distance; the city cannot have been buried by debris driven by the force of the eruption or by a strong wind. I think that stone and ash must have stayed suspended in the air for a time, like clouds, before falling on the doomed city. To get a better picture of what must have happened, think of a mountain village buried by an avalanche of snow. The buildings were all crushed, and even the spaces between the buildings were filled in by the debris such that nothing remained on the surface except perhaps an occasional wall sticking up. People came along and then planted vineyards and gardens on it. It was probably farmers working their plots of land who discovered the first significant treasures…
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