Rome via Brooklyn

477 words, 3 minutes read time.

Today we went to Herculaneum and after I also checked out Pompeii. The museum from Herculaneum added a lot of more details about how daily life is living in ancient cities like Herculaneum or Pompeii or Ostia. The picture below came from the Herculaneum museum and it features a drawer with a lot of materials like coins, a box (could be a snuff box), and an ink pot. Also, next to this drawer also had a baby cradle. I noticed how the cradle and even some other objects like the box and ink pot were so ancient but the form and use is still the same. Specifically, the baby cradle since there are thousands of years between us, but people still needed a functional baby crib to help soothe their crying children. I also attached a 2,000 year old rope, which is still made the same way even to this day.

Even though some items are still similar to modern times a lot of things, specifically the infrastructure and architectural styles are very different. For one, a lot of houses had an atrium, an entering space like a courtyard, with a impluvium which was a shallow pool used to collect rainwater. I wouldn’t say we have this type of infrastructure here. A lot of structures like the impluvium are used to be more resourceful, for example collecting rain water. In addition, while walking there would be structures where the shaded areas can channel air flow making the place nice and cool. In addition, inside the houses, like in the living room area, there were also fountains. These water features made a cool aesthetic, but it also provided a functional use, which is keeping the house cool. In addition, another thing I noticed is that they liked to reuse their materials as well as columns. There was an atrium being held up by columns that were used for something else, for example. In addition, there were pieces of various scraps of marble and material in the floors. And also I saw a food storage bin that you can tell was previously cracked, but they used metal ribbons to patch up the cracks. And I saw the gutter system and water system and it’s the same we still us to this day, ours is probably more efficient though. However, I’m very glad the public toilet system is a thing in the past, I think it’s much too casual to be talking to people while we are all pooping. Pompeii had very similar structures, but it was also a lot more gruesome because they showed plasters of people who were in the midst of running away from the ashes of the volcano and the pyroclastic flow.