Naples, Campania, Italy
Monday, October 13, 2008
We had booked ourselves on a tour, called "The Ruins of Pompeii". Pompeii is an ancient Roman City, which was destroyed by a volcano explosion in 79 AD, they have managed to excavate large portions of the city, which was completely covered and destroyed by the explosion of Mount Vesuvius. The explosion lasted two days, and covered Pompeii in volcanic ash and pumice.The city was lost for almost 1700 years before it was accidentally rediscovered in 1748. Since then, its excavation has provided an extraordinarily detailed insight into the life of a city at the height of the Roman Empire. Today, it is both one of the most popular tourist attractions of Italy, with 2,571,725 visitors in 2007 alone.The town was founded around the 7th-6th century BC by the Osci or Oscans, a people of central Italy, on what was an important crossroad between Cumae,
Nola and Stabiae.The city was incredibly fascinating, and the Roman engineers where incredible. This town had running water, sewage (septic tanks) and garden sprinklers. There where 24 bakeries, and some 30 odd restaurants in this town. They had a gym, with full baths, steam rooms, and even lockers for them to leave there belongings, this is all incredibly well preserved and restored.One of the memorable sites in Pompeii, is the cast of a dog that died during the explosion. You can see the place, where the collar used to be. They estimate that around 20,000 people where killed during the explosion of Mount Vesuvius.Mount Vesuvius is still active to this day, and could erupt once more, this would cause chaos in
Naples, as there are many residential areas built in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius.Naples is also the home of the Pizza (Yay!). The pizza was invented by the Italian city in the 1830's, as they needed to design something, for the queen of England at that time, who was coming to visit
Naples. They decided to cook something, which included all the colours of the Italian flag, this being Tomato (Red), Mozzarella (white) and Basil (Green), and this was the invention of the pizza as we known it today!Naples, actually known as Napoli, was founded by the ancient Greeks, Napoli translating to "New City". It is the 3rd most populated after Rome and Milan. It was then conquered by Rome, and became part of the Roman Empire.
The web's original travel blog
76,334 travel experiences shared this week!
