Many tourists catch a train to the Roman ruins of Pompeii, wander amid them and return to Naples a few hours later. They don't know what they are missing: the many less renowned treasures of the Pompeii area. Villa Poppea,
a short bus ride from Pompeii, has its decorations intact, including intriguing illusionary paintings. Herculaneum, 10km from Pompeii, is distinctive and the museum at Boscoreale reveals the daily routine of Pompeii's estimated 20,000 inhabitants before it was sealed by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius on August 24, AD79.
The broken cone of Vesuvius dominates the narrow plain between the mountain and the Bay of Naples: 600,000 people live on its fertile slopes. It is not dead but dormant, its last eruption having occurred in 1944.
The richest Romans had seaside villas beyond the walled resort town of Pompeii. One such residence, Villa Poppea, in the modern seaport of Torre Annunziata, has been opened up in recent decades. It is in such good condition, visitors can easily imagine a family and household staff moving through the rooms in their togas, bathing in its larger-than-Olympic-standard swimming pool and taking the cool evening air in its garden. And what a family: evidence suggests this was the villa of Poppea, the second wife of Emperor Nero, who died in AD65 after being kicked in the stomach while pregnant by her husband. Although she was notoriously immoral, the sumptuous frescos are not vulgar, like some in Pompeii.
A predominately brown-brick town 25km south of Naples and 4km from the sea, Pompeii covers 160 hectares, with fascinating sites at all points of the compass: the Villa dei Misteri (Villa of the Mysteries), for example, which has enormous frescos of religious initiation rites, and the amphitheatre, which could seat 12,000 spectators.
After visiting Pompeii, which now draws 2.5 million visitors annually, German novelist Johann Goethe observed that 'there have been many disasters in this world, but few which have given so much delight to posterity'. But without imagination and information from a good guide book, Pompeii remains dead.
Victims of the eruption, frozen in mid-flight, hands over their heads or holding their nostrils against insidious gases, constitute the most striking remains. When the volcanic version of a tsunami, which had a force much greater than the Hiroshima atomic bomb, hit Pompeii's pleasure-loving inhabitants, some were poisoned, while others were suffocated by a fall-out of burning ash, pumice and other small rocks. Decomposition of their corpses, and those of animals such as a chained dog, created cavities in the ash. Archaeologists injected liquid plaster into the cavities, which recreated the bodies of the victims. An estimated 3,000 people died in the disaster.
