All You Need Is Morbid

City in Amber

One Pompeiian tomb along the road to ancient Noceria that really struck me was a large drum-shaped building with a modern marble plaque that remembered Veia Barchilla and her husband. Parts of its stonework had been replaced with anachronistic stone and cement, but most of it appeared to have survived the millennia quite handily. Although weeds sprouted from its roof, the mausoleum was magnificent in its solemn stolidity.

Several nearby tombs took the form of small temples with round or square pillars holding up their roofs. In the sheltered areas lurked several shadowy figures, larger-than-life portrait sculptures of the people whose ashes had reposed below. The statues huddled up over my head and the afternoon light was wrong, so they were impossible to make out very well. I could see only the shapely curve of a bare masculine shin or the fluid drapery of a matron’s gown. It felt strange to be regarded by the semblances of people so long dead. Unlike the Renaissance sculptures of saints guarding their tombs in Rome, these statues might have actually been carved from life.

I didn’t know how to make an offering to the Roman dead. I don’t know enough of their customs. Though all stood open, I only stepped into one of the looted tombs. It felt too disrespectful to walk inside. These people had lost their families, their city, their tomb decorations, and their ashes. At least I could leave them their peace.

The sky was flawlessly blue beneath the hot, bright sun. The day was windy enough to stir the trees, but not so windy as to silence the birdsong. It seemed odd that the birds could be so cheerful at the site of such destruction.

Mason and I climbed up the earthen wall that ringed Pompeii and looked back down over the street lined with tombs. The green grass that flowed around the graves and the cypress trees that stood between them must have been modern additions to the site, planted after the 20 feet of volcanic ash and debris had been cleared away. I wondered who’d thought to beautify the site around the ancient tombs.

It was also strange to see the modern city rising just beyond the fence surrounding the archaeological site. What would it be like to live as neighbors to the ghost town for which your city was named? It must be like living in Hiroshima, I realized. Did the ghosts keep to their own streets, conducting their business has they had for centuries, or did they explore what the new millennium offered just beyond their boundaries?

*

By coming over the ramparts where we did, we entered the city by the back way. Mason and I paused to look out over the maze of buildings before us. Dead Pompeii was enormous. Some villas had red tile roofs: modern restoration work. Most were mere walls. In the background stood the murderer, Vesuvius, a little more than six miles away. Its silhouette loomed black against the cerulean sky, ominous and intimidating.

Pompeii had been a market town, home to 20,000. In 62 AD, a small earthquake caused damage to the city still being repaired 17 years later, but the mountain had seemed to go back to sleep. What the Pompeiians didn’t know was that the quake hadn’t eased the volcano’s internal pressure. Instead, gasses built up until they blew off the mountain’s crown. Rocks flew miles from the volcano, raining down to crush the city. Constant tremors flung down roofs and walls on people who’d just sat down to lunch. Most survivors grabbed what they could and fled

Others, who remembered the previous earthquake, gathered provisions and hunkered down in their wine cellars to wait out the eruption. Some, like the priests of the Temple of Isis, spent too long collecting up their treasures. Everyone who did not flee died in the city. More than 2000 bodies have been found and others are still being discovered. Twenty percent of Pompeii has yet to be excavated.

Mason and I wandered into a villa that was all ruins, partial brick walls open to the sky. A sign directed us toward the Garden of the Fugitives, but I hadn’t finished reading the guidebook and didn’t know what that meant. We passed greening vines, where they were attempting to recreate the ancient methods of viticulture. “So they can sell Pompeiian wine to the tourists,” I groused.