Rome via Brooklyn

785 words, 4 minutes read time.

Pompeii and Herculaneum, despite being so insanely hot, made Friday one of my favorite days of the trip. I always love getting to walk on the same floors, through the same streets, and under the same roofs as those who lived centuries before me. There’s a certain acknowledgment of the past that you are forcefully confronted with; there were intricate and complex lives that existed well before yours, and ones that will exist after yours. We are such a small blip in the history of the world and humanity, and walking through the ruins of ancient cities does a wonderful job in making that clear to me.

It’s always hard imagining what my life would look like however many years in the past, especially because I love air conditioning and IPhone. However, actually standing in the houses of the people who lived in Herculaneum, in combination with the other ruins we visited in Ostia, it’s making it just a bit easier to begin to comprehend a life here. One thing that did shock me was how empty the houses were. Only the “bare bones” remained, but the missing piece of life was definitely found when we visited the museums. Furniture, statues, jewelry, shrines, vases, and more filled the walls and display cases. Some of the jewelry looked so well-kept, modern, and like pieces I have found and could find (and would buy in a second) in jewelry stores today. One of the coolest things in the museum was the baby carriage. It’s insane how similar it looked and functioned to something my mother most likely had for my siblings and I when we were babies. I think it’s really cool, like Professor Yarrow had said, how we find things that work and stick to them for basically all of time. It serves as another form of connection across the centuries.

We also got to see the cutest orange cats both before we entered Herculaneum and in the gift shop after, which absolutely made an already interesting trip all the more worth it :))

After Herculaneum and the great pizza lunch, Tina, Isabel, and I decided to explore Pompeii. It was a pretty grueling task, but one I have absolutely no regrets of. We walked through the amphitheater, and saw some cool clips and videos of the performance Pink Floyd had done there. I can’t imagine how life-changing it must be to get to see a concert in an amphitheater like this one, and my pretty unrealistic hope is that it will one day happen to me.

We walked through this wonderful villa, which surprised me by how well-intact it was. The back courtyard/garden space was gorgeous, and I unfortunately got very few videos and pictures because I thought it would be much more productive to do a bad MTV Cribs skit with Isabel and Tina as we walked through it. We also ended up visiting the brothel, which I had no idea existed (thank you Tina for this knowledge 🙏). It was a small room, and the first time we visited, there was a tour group that forced us to move through it faster than I wanted. The main attraction were the well preserved frescoes on the walls, which reminded me a lot of some of the art we saw in the Secret Cabinet.

Since there were no other specific landmarks we wanted to visit, we decided to head towards an exit when we ran into a very cute cat! We ended up seeing this cute black cat (which I named Salem since I am painfully unoriginal) another time after going up a random staircase and walking over some ruins. I’d like to think she was watching over us, despite seeming pretty obviously annoyed by our antics.

After seeing Salem the first time, we ended up running into Dante and Joseph, who we joined to see the brothel again, and we got to spend some more time in the small room. Outside the brothel we saw another lounging cat, which we mostly left alone. Walking through the incredibly hot city was such an amazing experience, and I am so glad I had went despite my fatigue from the heat and the busy day. It made me simultaneously feel bad for playing but also want to play a board game we played during one of our Lego and Games event for BC Classical Society, where you had to get as many family members out of Pompeii when Mount Vesuvius erupted.

(Come to BC Classical Society events!!!!! We have free food and a Lego Colosseum!!!!!)

Khadija Fall ❤