Pompeii - How to Save Time and Money

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Pompeii is one of the many tourist attractions with an invented history.

I will give the answer right away: just do not go there, but spend time and money with much greater benefit in neighboring Naples. For the same pizza, if you want to know what a real Italian pizza is. You can also climb to the top of Capodimonte to admire the palace and its collection of classical Italian painting and sculpture. In any case, you will get an order of magnitude more benefit and pleasure than walking through boring ruins for a guide rattling once and for all memorized history.

It was a saying.

Because you hardly believe me and, most likely, decide that being close to Naples and not visiting the famous Pompeii is simply a sin. If so, take five minutes of your time and read the following …

Before our flight from Naples airport, we ran through the local duty-free, and I bought a harmless box of chocolates with the famous views of Italy, made in the form of engravings of past centuries. My attention was attracted, of course, by Naples, the background of which was the two-headed Vesuvius. Not surprising, except that in the engraving the volcano had too peaked peaks. The day before, I had taken it off and was quite sure that its slopes were flat, and the tops were more like ice cream that had melted into a glass very much. But if an artist from the recent past saw Vesuvius just like that, then it turns out …

I remembered my sincere amazement, which I experienced in 1995, when I was wandering around the ruins of Pompeii, dropped something, bent over and saw at the level of the cobblestone pavement a broken part of the wall of a house, which at that time should have been about 2,000 years old. A part of a pipe walled up in the wall, probably a water supply system, looked at me through the hole. The pipe was funny, similar in texture and color to clay tiles, and completely new. Since then, the thought of another worldwide tourist fraud like Stonehenge, Jerusalem, the Wall of China, the Terracotta Army, Shaolin, etc. have never left me. (see my travel notes on Britannia).

As you can imagine, I was far from the first to question the antiquity attributed to the Pompeii. It's just a shame that numerous tourists are too lazy to make inquiries and think with their own heads, but prefer to be told and shown. And after all, the question here is not only in the savings that I brought out in the title. Judge for yourself…

The fact that Pompeii died on August 24, 79 A. D. we all know from a letter from Pliny the Younger to Tacitus, in which he describes the death of his uncle, Pliny the Elder, during the eruption of Vesuvius. At the same time, he does not write about Pompeii or Herculaneum (the second of the excavated cities), as about those flooded with lava or covered with ash. The year of the events described is not indicated either. Historians have restored it already in our time, comparing the dates of the lives of the characters mentioned in the letter.

On December 16, 1631, the eruption was repeated (once again). According to some estimates, the death toll in this disaster ranges from 4,000 to 18,000. In memory of this event, 15 kilometers from Naples, on the road to the Torah of Annunziata, today anyone can see a stone epitaph on the facade of the Villa Pharaone Mennela with a text in Latin. Do not be surprised, but among the list of cities buried under lava, you can easily find the names: Pompeii and Herculaneum. But wait, they had been buried underground for almost 1,500 years by that time!

If the name of Raphael is not an empty phrase for you, you probably know his famous painting "The Three Graces", painted in 1504. The National Archaeological Museum of Naples displays a fresco brought there from the Pompeian excavations. One to one "Three Graces". Down to the smallest details of the composition. This coincidence can only be explained by two reasons: either Leonardo da Vinci invented and presented Raphael a time machine, or the owner of a villa in medieval Pompeii saw Raphael's Three Graces and said to the Moldovans who were doing repairs at his place: “I want the same one”. For some reason, the second option seems more plausible to me.

Three Three Graces. Raphael, 1504

Three Graces. Pompeian fresco. National Archaeological Museum of Naples.

In the same National Archaeological Museum of Naples, medical instruments found in Pompeii are presented. Indistinguishable from modern ones, perhaps made of bronze. By the way, bronze ones were also widely used in medicine until the twentieth century. But this is not as significant as the fact that some of the Pompeian instruments (which are 2,000 years old) show modern carvings. Although it is known that the first project of a machine for the production of screws appeared only in 1569, and in practice it was implemented only in 1741.

In Herculaneum, nearly perfect glass panes have been found in standard sizes. How they were produced at that time, and from where glass-rolled products appeared 2,000 years ago, of course, is unknown. In the rest of Europe (including Italy), the first opaque glass panes for church windows began to be produced in 1330, and the first paneled glass was produced by the rolling method in 1688. It is noteworthy that the eyewitnesses of the excavations write that the glasses were in wooden frames. Wooden ?! Is this 2,000 years after the eruption? Do not make me laugh.

Window glass from Herculaneum. National Archaeological Museum of Naples.

Even if there were none of the above points, the “antiquity” of Pompeyus cancels out (literally and figuratively) the water supply system, carried out by the famous architect Domenico Fontana (who, by the way, installed an obelisk on the square in front of Peter's Cathedral in the Vatican, and the cathedral itself was completing it is he). He led him through the city from the Sarno River to Torre Annunziato. It is Fontana who is mentioned in the Brockhaus and Efron dictionary as the unwitting discoverer of Pompey. True, it says that in 1592 he "came across the ruins of Pompeii, but no attention was paid to them." It's funny. Because one and a half kilometers of aqueduct runs through Pompeii today. And do you know why they were not destroyed by subsequent archaeological work? Because the pipe lies exactly under the Pompeian paths and foundations of houses. That is, like the current researchers of the terracotta army, partially still standing in the thickness of the earth (as they say), Fontana had to have high-precision equipment and, following the data of medieval radars, lay a pipe (about a meter in diameter) evenly under the cobblestones, so that God forbid not to spoil the streets and houses that will be excavated only after his death. The water supply pipe is still visible, and next to it there are several wells. Moreover, not 10-15 meters high, in order to reach the surface above the Pompeian burial ground, but in human height and even lower (which is especially clearly visible in the paintings of the excavation times). Thus, it becomes quite obvious that in 1592 the pipe was laid in a city that was still alive.

If you want to get acquainted with more detailed information on this issue, I recommend reading this article.

Not the last day of Pompeii

As a result of many years of research, the author came to the sensational conclusion that Pompeii disappeared from the face of the earth not in the 1st century AD, but as a result of the powerful eruption of Vesuvius on December 16, 1631. This fact alone puts a bold cross on the entire traditional chronology.

As for me, I didn't buy a box of Italian chocolates for the sake of Vesuvius. So I'll go, with your permission, I'll have some tea …