This being our last full day in Sorrento, we decided to go back to Pompeii and try to see some of the things we had previously missed. It is such a big site, and even though so much of it is closed, there is still an awful lot to see - and on our previous visit we missed out things we had wanted to see, largely because I got such backache from standing about that we had to stop after four hours. This time, I managed five and a half hours, so we were able to see a bit more.
The first thing we had previously missed was the Temple of Apollo near the Forum, with this beautiful bronze statue of Apollo.
He is drawing his bow - which is currently missing, hence the slightly strange stance. There is also a figure of Diana opposite him, and near him, on top of a pillar, is the bottom half of a broken sundial. This is appropriate for a sun God! The main statue of him, which would have been in the centre of the temple, is missing.
At one edge of the forum were the granaries, which are currently closed with gates and used to house some of the finds from the site. This is the kind of random acculturation of finds in one of the granaries - amphorae, statues, staele, and odd ceramic items.
I loved the detail on the carving on the upper right of a little boy and a dog. There is no information about it, so I have no idea where it came from. And there's a very strangely shaped ceramic thing in the bottom right corner which I'd dearly like to know more about.
All over the town there are still the lead pipes that carried the water round the town. In each street there are public fountains, some of which still work.
This one has been disfigured by the addition of a very ugly modern tap. I don't know if it's drinking water or not, but people were drinking it and filling their water bottles. Paul just used it to wash his hands - we'd been covering ourselves with sun cream because it was really hot and we were getting burned.
Our next destination was the brothel, which was very crowded indeed. This was apparently the best organised brothel of the 25 or so found in Pompeii. Some were just little single rooms with a sign outside to indicate what they were, others were two or three little rooms behind or above taverns.
This one had 10 little rooms, 5 on each of the two floors. The upstairs isn't safe, so you can only go into the downstairs ones. Each little cubicle downstairs contained a sad little stone bed, on which a mattress would have been spread.
Each cubicle downstairs also had an erotic picture above the doorway, suggesting which position might be adopted. I did take photos of these, but obviously I'm not going to post them - though they are quite faint and hard to decipher anyway. There was also a toilet in an even tinier cubicle.
Apparently the rooms upstairs had wooden beds, so possibly those were slightly higher class. It was also suggested that upper class men did not frequent these brothels, they would have used their household slaves for sex or had prostitutes visit them in their houses.
Next we visited another bath house, the Stabian Baths, which were still being re-built after the earlier earthquake. When the eruption started, part of it was still a building site. It was obviously planned to be very smart indeed. There was a large and very elegant palaestra for exercise, and the frigidarium, which was also used as a changing room and had niches for the clothes, was highly decorated with both fresco and stucco. The tepidarium was complete, but the calidarium was still being built and you could see the hypocaust underneath the hot water baths. I won't post any photos though - I seem to have chosen lots of other bath photos in the past.
The next house was rather interesting because it had originally been called the Casa dei Quadretti Teatrali, (House of the Four Theatricals or something similar) because there were four theatrical frescos. Below is one of them.
However, it is now to be called the House of P. Casca Longus, though it wasn't really his house at all. The renaming is because it contains a marble table base with each leg formed as a lion's head descending to a paw. The inscription P Casca Long(us) on each lion head identifies the table as belonging to the Casca who was the first to strike down Julius Caesar in the Senate. After Caesar's death, Casca became Tribune of the People but later was exiled with Brutus to the East where he died at the Battle of Philippi. After his death, all his property was confiscated and sold, so the table was probably just bought by the rich owner of this house. I imagine it would be more logical to call it the House of the Table of P. Casca Longus.
The next building we visited was the laundry - called the Fullonica or Fullers. This was because new cloth was prepared and dyed there, as well as dirty clothes being washed. The laundry had been converted from what was originally a large house. After the earthquake of 63 AD (which preceded the eruption of 79 AD) many wealthy people abandoned their smart houses and left the area, so some houses were converted to a business use, and this seems to have been one of them. In this case, the impluvium was converted into a vat for washing cloth or laundry.
The roof of the house was used for drying the laundry, and at the back of the house are further vats and smaller containers for trampling the clothes in a mixture of water and soda or water and urine.
It is easy to see the original use of this building as a wealthy person's house because of the fine frescos; below is one of them.
It isn't exactly the sort of thing you expect to find in a laundry!
Very close to this is a house which was closed, and there was no information displayed about it on notices or on any map. But we could see through the doorway that there were many fine mosaics on the floor.
At the back, you can see the impluvium, and through the tablinum to the peristyle and a garden. This was one of the very frustrating things about this site. We have two slightly different maps, but neither seems to provide quite the correct information. I imagine this could be because theories about some of the buildings keep changing, and because many of the buildings have to be kept shut to preserve them.
The next building was a Thermopolium, or fast food shop. You can see that it is extremely smart, with an expensive marble counter top and some very fine frescos.
I suppose this could have been another example of a wealthy person's house becoming a business. One of the maps certainly calls it the House and Thermopolium of Vetutius Placidus.
By now my back was giving me a lot of pain, so we started to return to the site entrance and the railway station. On the way, we stopped at the House of the Dancing Faun, and this time, the sun being much lower, I got some decent photos of the faun at last.
The statue of the faun is on a plinth in the centre of the impluvium - but of course, the impluvium was probably no longer being used to collect household water, since piped water from the aqueducts was now available for those wealthy enough to pay for it. The owner of this house was certainly wealthy, the house was enormous.
We still hadn't seen a lot of houses we would have liked to see, but that was mostly because they were shut. We kept planning a route on the map, then not being able to follow it because a street was blocked off. We never managed to get to either the Theatre or the Amphitheatre because of closed areas. And many buildings were just shut, sometimes covered in scaffolding as well. We'll just have to come back in a few year's time!
We were back in our hotel before 6, and had time for a rest before going out to eat. This being our last night, we went to a nice Taverna recommended in the Rough Guide, and sat on the pavement in a tiny alleyway and ate the most delicious Saltimbocca Romana imaginable. It is a very warm night, so no jacket or shawl was necessary. We will certainly miss the warmth when we get back to Britain!
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