A Broad, in Pompeii and Herculaneum!
Hello readers! Yes, this is my 3rd post tonight. I’m in a blogging mood, I guess (and I owed you a few weeks of posts). This weekend I went on a day trip to Pompeii and Herculaneum with a few new friends from SLU, Xavier, Fordham, and Loyola (well I guess that one doesn’t really count as a “new friend” since we go to the same school!) We left campus at 7am to catch an 8:30 train to Napoli (Naples). After a three hour train ride we were ready to hit the train and head to Herculaneum.
After a few travel errors on the metro (three of us accidentally stayed on the metro when we got to our stop and we got separated from the group!) we finally made it to Herculaneum.
Herculaneum was amazing. Not only was it beautiful and fantastically preserved, we were also about to walk through essentially every part of it. It felt more like a playground than a historical sight. We could walk down the roads, through the houses, and touch the walls and counters that the citizens of Herculaneum had touched. That was the most exciting part for me. Knowing that I was walking through houses that are almost 2000 years old, standing where people stood as Mount Vesuvius erupted….incredible. Overwhelming.
After Herculaneum we hopped back on the metro and headed to Pompeii. Pompeii, in contrast to Herculaneum, is huge, and expands across a giant park. As you’re walking through you can almost get a “big city” feel. We saw a stadium (stadio, it Italian), a theater, houses, stores, basilicas, every part of normal day life. For someone like me, Pompeii was almost too much to comprehend. For years I’ve been watching History Channel specials, reading books, and studying every part of Pompeii and its tragedy. To suddenly be there, in the space, walking through streets that until fairly recently were completely covered to the world….words can’t describe. I eventually stopped taking pictures and just let myself soak it all in. This is where people lived and worked and grew and one day in 79 AD their world just stopped, perfectly preserved in time. You can still see the frescoes on the walls, the marble on the counters, the tiles on the floor. It’s as if the citizens one day just stood up and walked away. Watching it on TV and reading about it doesn’t do it justice. It’s absolutely something that you need to experience in person.
Although a long day (We got back on campus as 12:30 at night!) it was absolutely worth the trip. To anyone thinking of studying abroad in Italy make sure to put this on the top of your list, because it will truly touch you in ways you never imagined. 