Got up fairly early and took the Metro to Piazzo Popolo to meet our Pompeii tour. We booked it through Viatour and it was run by Dark Rome Tours. Since then, we have used Viatour a lot and have found them to be very convenient and usually very good tours. Dark Rome did great job with the Pompeii tour and I would recommend it. The tour started at the Pompeii Museum with artifacts from the city. It was very modern looking stuff- utensils, serving dishes and medical tools. They had Frescoes and Mosaics that utilized depth and perspective.
What is so interesting about depth and perspective in art from around 100 AD? Look at art from the 1100s, a thousand years later, and you will find almost entirely flat looking art. It just amazed me (from the very beginning of the trip) how much human knowledge was lost with the fall of Rome. This Atlas was created around 100 AD and is a copy of a statue originally created in 200 BC. In 200 BC they knew the earth was round!
As we toured Pompeii, we saw a lot of very interesting places. This theatre had great acoustic properties. You could stand at center stage and speak normally and be heard in almost the entire space.
A gladiator school:
A fast food restaurant, villa, and plumbing!
They had a brothel with a ‘menu’ board describing what you could buy. Plaster casts of people that were found. The only dog they found in Pompeii had been chained in his back yard (he would have vacated the premises otherwise)
You can see Vesuvius in the distance.
After we got back to Rome we went for a stroll and took bad pictures of Trevi Fountain and Piazza Barbarini.
After some delicious Gelato, we headed back to the hotel to crash.