The school of the death of Pompeii has a separate history lesson, so everyone knows about the tragedy of this Roman city. More precisely, the majority is familiar only with well-known facts, in dry language set forth in state textbooks. This is what the eruption of Vesuvius actually led to.
Lupanaria
In the center of Pompeii alone, archaeologists have unearthed as many as 27 Lupanaria. In slang, "magnifying glass", that is, "she-wolf", the Romans called prostitutes. According to the surviving evidence, the pleasure was worth the same as three glasses of cheap wine.
Ancient nuclear bomb
An incandescent cloud of smoke and ash rose in a column from the mouth of the volcano, reaching almost forty kilometers in height. Modern experts believe that the eruption was energetically comparable to the explosion of five atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima at once.
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Lazy townspeople
During the excavations, archaeologists found out that most of the city's inhabitants managed to escape. It seems that people guessed about the impending eruption in a few hours: the most intelligent abandoned their belongings and hurried away from the dangerous mountain further away. About two and a half thousand people apparently hoped to the last that they would.
Capital of debauchery
In the Roman Empire, Pompeii was something of an expensive resort. And as in any other resort, the cult of debauchery and pleasure reigned here. The frescoes that have survived to our times depict scenes of orgies, sculptures often depicted sodomy and bestiality. The real biblical Gomorrah!
Greek polis
The Romans were not the first founders of the city. The ruins of Doric temples discovered during excavations date back to the 6th century BC, which means that the Greeks can be considered the masters of the area.
Roman graffiti
The tradition of writing and painting on walls was widespread throughout the Roman Empire. But if in the capital people more often disfigured buildings with political appeals to the people, then on the periphery the walls were full of advertisements, curses to debtors and openly false inscriptions like "Caesar is a thief." Everything is like ours!
Plaster Horror
You have probably seen earlier photographs where bodies allegedly covered with a layer of ash lie right on the streets of a city excavated by archaeologists. In fact, these are just plaster casts. In 1863, Giuseppe Fiorelli realized that most of the voids in the excavation were shaped like a human body. The Italian came up with the idea of pouring gypsum into the voids and really got casts of the bodies of dead people.
