All You Need Is Morbid

City in Amber

Mason and I came south from Rome, stopping off in Pompeii overnight before traveling north to Florence. The goal of Rome had been to visit the Chiesa di Santa Maria della Concezione, where the Capuchins arranged the bones of their dead. While in Rome, we’d discovered the Tomb of Augustus and explored the Protestant Cemetery — paying our respects before the graves of Shelley and Keats — but the catacombs of St. Peter’s weren’t open the rainy day we visited, so I missed the tomb of St. Peter himself. We spent our final day riding the Archaeobus to the Christian catacombs, bereft of their dead after centuries of believers stole the bones as saints’ relics to sanctify their churches. Italy, for me, was crowded with graves, peopled by shadows of the dead. I looked forward to a weekday spent in Pompeii, largest surviving burial ground of the ancient world. I had only the vaguest idea what to expect.

Once we’d passed the vendors with their risqué postcards and blue rhinestone religious statues, one “official” bookstore stood outside the archaeological site’s gate. They sold the same book we’d bought in San Francisco, the Art Guide Itinerary to Pompeii (which I’d left in our hotel), so we skipped that and paid the bored woman at the ticket window. A second woman led us to a turnstile. She fed the ticket through for us and waved us toward the gate in the ancient walls.

A man in a blue suit coat with a badge approached us, but I shook my head. Our friend Jeff said that they’d hired a guide who hadn’t spoken much English, but who had unlocked many of the houses for them so they could see things regular tourists didn’t. Then again, Jeff and Dean stayed in Naples and made Pompeii a day trip. They were more goal-oriented than we.

The ancient stadium rose on our right. Since we’d just seen the Roman Coliseum, Pompeii’s little 25,000-seater didn’t entice us. Inside the barracks, 18 skeletons had been uncovered, including an elegantly dressed woman sprawled beside the gladiators she’d been visiting. As far as I knew, the casts of the bodies were all kept on display in the museum in Naples. We didn’t check.

It was already mid-afternoon when we entered the ruins. The trip from Rome to our modern Pompeiian hotel took longer than intended, but tomorrow was a national holiday and we weren’t sure the ruins would be open. We had to explore all 160 acres in one day. Knowing that, I looked longingly down the ditch surrounding the ancient walls. It was lined, as Roman roads always were, with tombs. The Law of the Twelve Tables forbade burial or cremation inside Roman towns and, without embalming, bodies needed to be taken care of quickly. The notable or wealthy were granted space to built their tombs right outside the city. The poorer or less important you were, the farther your family had to carry your body to dispose of it. That was why the Christian catacombs were built miles beyond the heart of Rome.

“Let’s go look at the graveyard,” I begged Mason. “I’ll take some quick pictures and we won’t stay long.”

The mausoleums were square or rectangular boxes, built of simple bricks or volcanic stone, some faced in remnants of marble. Michael Grant’s Cities of Vesuvius reports, “The interiors of the tombs [had been] magnificently painted; and one of these edifices, closed by a single pivoted slab of marble made to present the illusion of a double door, contained extensive funeral furniture, including several urns and lamps, a gold seal ring, a miniature terracotta altar, two wine jars, and bottles of scent.”

Of course the tombs had been long since looted of their expensive contents, which I hoped were on display in the Naples Archaeological Museum, which we hadn’t scheduled time to explore. Now I crouched through the doorway of one mausoleum to find it inhabited only by spiders. It was lined with alcoves where squat urns might have sat, or marble busts of the family.

The discovery of the first tombs outside of Pompeii in 1748 changed grave ornamentation throughout the Western world. After urns were excavated in the mausoleums (where they’d been used to hold sacramental water used to wash the corpses or ashes from cremations), stone carvers began to engrave urns on headstones that can still be found throughout Europe and the United States.