It is difficult to find anyone who has never heard of the infamous ancient Roman city frozen in ashes - Pompeii. The city of Pompeii was the trading center of Roman Italy, home to almost 20 thousand people. However, the sudden eruption of Vesuvius turned the once developed and lively city into a dead desert in less than a day.
Below you will find some amazing facts about Pompeii that you are unlikely to have known before:
1. Founded around the 7th century BC, Pompeii was a growing and prosperous city before the disaster. It was considered something of a popular resort for wealthy Romans who went there on holidays.
2. Supposedly one of the most famous Roman emperors, Nero, owned a villa in Pompeii, and his second wife, Poppaea Sabina, was a native of this city.
3. Mount Vesuvius, an active volcano located 9 kilometers east of modern Naples, was only a few kilometers from Pompeii, but local residents did not even imagine that they lived next door to a fire-breathing mountain. Its last eruption had been nearly two thousand years earlier, in 1800 B.C., at which time it had destroyed several Bronze Age settlements.
4. The eruption of Vesuvius began in the year 79 A.D., on the morning of August 24 — just a day after Vulcanalia, a Roman festival in honor of the god Vulcan.
5. The eruption lasted about 24 hours, but a layer of ash, lava and pieces of pumice continued to cover the city for two more days, burying it at a depth of up to 6 meters and destroying not only Pompeii, but also several nearby towns and villages.
6. Before the tragedy in 79 AD, even the word “volcano” did not exist in Ancient Rome; it was invented later. The word "volcano" comes from the name of the ancient Roman god of fire, Vulcan.
7. There is a detailed description of the disaster, which was witnessed by Pliny the Younger, an ancient Roman politician and poet, who observed the eruption of Vesuvius from a considerable distance. His letters, compiled on the basis of eyewitness accounts of the eruption, were discovered only in the 16th century.
8. For 1,500 years, the city of Pompeii remained buried underground, until in 1599, during the construction of an underground canal from the Sarno River, part of the ancient city wall was discovered.
9. Architect Domenico Fontana discovered a number of frescoes, statues and other objects with overly erotic and even obscene content, which he chose to rebury.
10. Then the city had to wait another 150 years, until its excavations resumed in 1748 under the leadership of the Spanish military engineer Roque Joaquin de Alcubierre. This time, not only well-preserved household items were found (which was facilitated by the lack of air and moisture underground), but also entire buildings.
11. During the excavations, gypsum was used to fill the voids between the layers of ash, which made it possible to reconstruct the dying poses of the victims of the eruption. In total, more than a thousand casts were made of the bodies found in Pompeii, including entire families, groups of friends and couples who died in each other's arms.
12. Covering a total area of more than 65 hectares, the city of Pompeii is currently the world's largest archaeological park and architectural monument, and has been one of the most popular tourist destinations for 250 years. The city buried alive was included in the UNESCO World Heritage List. Every year it is visited by 2.5 million tourists.
13. When in 1819, King Francis I visited an exhibition in Pompeii with his wife and daughter, he was so embarrassed and outraged by works of art of a sexual nature that he demanded these seditious exhibits be taken to the capital and locked in a Secret Cabinet, to which access was open exclusively to “persons of mature age and impeccable reputation.” Such art reflected the very free, licentious morals of the ancient Romans and even depicted sculptural scenes of sodomy and bestiality.
14. Vesuvius remains the only active volcano on the European mainland. Scientists estimate that the volcano erupted about 100 times in total, but only a few eruptions exceeded the eruption of 79 in scale. The thermal energy released by Vesuvius during the eruption was 100 thousand times more than the energy from the bomb dropped on Hiroshima!
15. More than 3 million people currently live in close proximity to Vesuvius. Its last eruption occurred in 1944, Since then, fortunately, the volcano has been dormant...
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