Pompeii is in surprisingly good condition overall. Okay the roofs are missing maybe, but the streets are slightly better than the ones in Naples. Would have been better to take a color film – the best parts are actually the surviving frescos everywhere. The ones out in the open are apparently rapidly deteriorating now, or already destroyed by 100 years of weather and allied bombing. But there are some houses where they put roofs back on, and these are really quite impressive. Impressive mostly because it just looks *nice*. Especially the “third style” (archeologists are not great at naming things it appears) is just really cool – big panels of solid color with neat and often kinda funny little details.
Overall just neat how much this still looks like a city. Also kind of neat and/or terrifying is how exposed this all is to visitors. You can literally walk on 2000 year old lead water pipes, or touch the frescos. You shouldn’t, probably, but you could. It seems like it can’t possibly survive like this for another 2000 years, but it made it all a bit more …immersive? Idk. I liked Pompeii much more than I thought I would, and I already thought I would like it a lot.
Photos all on Foma 200, with a 1930s Welta Perfekta, about which someone asked me if it was a real camera. So this is proof it was a real camera 🙂
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