How did the ancient city of Pompeii in Italy disappear?

Ancient Roman city. Located near Naples in southern Italy. It was built in the 6th century BC and was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Pompeii was a small and medium-sized town at the time, but due to being buried by volcanic ash, the streets and houses were relatively well preserved. Archaeological excavations have continued since 1748, providing important information for understanding the social life, culture and art of ancient Rome.

The ancient city is slightly rectangular, surrounded by city walls, with gates on all sides. The streets in the city are crisscrossed, and the neighborhoods are laid out like a chessboard. Important buildings surround the Municipal Square, including the Temple of Jupiter, the Temple of Apollo, the Great Hall, baths, shopping malls, etc., as well as theaters, stadiums, Colosseums, aqueducts and other necessary facilities for Roman municipal buildings. There are many workshops and shops, all set up in neighborhoods according to industry, and together with a large number of residential buildings, they constitute an important object for studying Roman civil architecture. Wealthy homes generally have gardens. The main house has halls and living rooms arranged around a central patio. There are classical colonnades and marble statues in the gardens. There are many murals on the corridors of the halls (see Pompeii murals), which are important remains of classical murals. These murals are of a high level, and after their discovery, they had a great influence on European neoclassical art.

After passing through southern Italy, I finally stood on top of the ruined city of Pompeii and looked around. I was speechless for a moment. I am amazed at the creativity of the ancient Roman ancestors, and I also lament that the Italian government is fully committed to protecting this thousand-year cultural heritage.

The thousand-year-old city disappeared overnight

As early as the 8th century BC, Pompeii, a small fishing village relying on a natural harbor in the Mediterranean, gradually developed into a city. Hundreds of years later, it gathered merchants and became the second largest city after ancient Rome in Italy. It is 300 kilometers away from Rome in the north, the famous Sicily Islands in the west, and Greece and North Africa in the south. The magical Temple of the Sun, the huge Colosseum, the magnificent theater, the efficacious wizard hall, the novel steam baths and numerous shops and entertainment venues in Pompeii attracted many wealthy businessmen and merchants from the countries (city-states) around the Mediterranean. noble. In addition, the strange magma soil, volcanic rocks and geothermal hot springs brought by the multiple eruptions of Mount Vesuvius in the north of the city for hundreds of millions of years have made Pompeii even more famous: the large area of ??fertile magma soil with a slightly burnt smell makes Pompeii even more famous. The grapes produced in Pompeii are large and sweet, making excellent wine, and have become the top products purchased by nobles from all over the world. The geothermal hot springs that last day and night are not only tempting to bathe in, but also attract many nobles and wealthy businessmen to come to Pompeii to build gardens and Villas were built and entertainment venues were developed contiguously, making Pompeii soon a prosperous place. Especially the volcanic stone, which is black and bright red, has magical effects on relieving pain, calming the nerves and stopping bleeding, and everyone is rushing to own it. However, who could have expected that the volcano next to Pompeii, which had been sleeping for thousands of years, would suddenly wake up one day, open its bloody mouth and swallow the famous Pompeii city in an instant!

That was On the first Sunday of August 79 AD, the wife of a great wine merchant in ancient Rome was praying when she suddenly felt severe pain in her chest and coughed up blood. Her daughter Sophia was so anxious that she cried. At this time, Carlo, his unmarried son-in-law, came after hearing the news. He volunteered to ride a fast horse to his hometown in Pompeii to get the hemostatic stone. The journey from Rome to Pompeii is more than 300 kilometers, with dense trees, rugged mountain roads, infested by bandits, and full of dangers. This makes the passionate Sofia have a dilemma. Carlo understood his fiancée Sofia's worries. He said: "I have been riding for more than ten years, and I am a strong warrior. I am familiar with the road. I will be back in two days and nights!" Before Sofia could agree to the promise, Carlo, dressed in military uniform, He left with a few assistants!

My mother had been coughing up blood for two days, and Sofia stayed awake for two nights, thinking about Carlo's return. From the second day onwards, she kept leaning against the door and looking into the distance, expecting the familiar sound of horse hooves to ring in her ears, but for some reason her fiancé still did not appear in front of her until the fourth, fifth, and sixth days. It wasn't until after Christmas that she faintly heard a piece of bad news: One night in August, Mount Vesuvius opened its mouth of fire and erupted into the sky with blood-red magma, and a radius of hundreds of miles suddenly became a sea of ????fire!...

The thousand-year-old city of Pompeii disappeared overnight! It took a long time for the volcano to cool down after the eruption.

After the catastrophe, the herdsmen discovered that the hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest farms and pastures that they were very familiar with in the past, as well as the prosperous Pompeii city bordering the forest lands, were gone. There were only long scorched earth strips like rivers left after the cooling of volcanic magma, and there was deathly silence all around. , the silence is so worrying!

Calculating the time when the disaster happened, it was the night when Carlo rushed to Pompeii to get the hemostatic stone. The fiancé never returned, and from then on the folk song "Heartbroken Sophia" rang out all over the Mediterranean...

A hoe unearthed an eternal wonder

As the years go by, Pompeii The ancient city gradually faded out of the world. Later, immigrants who came south from Rome and north from Greece and Sicily discovered that the foothills of the volcano were already covered with dense forests. When people cut down the trees, they exposed the oily black land, so people started to develop and plant grapes on it.

In the spring of 1748 AD, a farmer named Andre was digging deep into his vineyard. He raised his hoe and made a "clang" sound, as if he had dug a huge stone, but he could not pull out the hoe no matter how hard he tried. . He quickly called his brother and sister-in-law for help. Everyone dug up the soil and stones and found that a hoe had penetrated a metal cabinet. So everyone dug out the cabinet and opened it. Inside, there was a large pile of molten or semi-melted gold and silver jewelry and ancient coins. As the news spread, the farmers who planted grapes on this land suddenly remembered the legend passed down from their ancestors about the disappearance of Pompeii, so treasure thieves swarmed in and later attracted a group of historians and archaeological experts to come here for archaeology. Later, based on the recommendations of experts, the Italian government began to organize scientists to conduct orderly excavations of Pompeii in 1876. After more than a hundred years of continuous work by seven or eight generations of experts and the diligent maintenance of thousands of staff, this thrilling scene of Pompeii has finally been truly reproduced in front of the world. Vanio, a historian who participated in the excavation of Pompeii, said: "What a horrifying sight it was! Many people died in their sleep, and some died in front of their homes. They raised their arms and opened their mouths to gasp for air; many people still had bread in their houses. On the oven, the dog is still tied to the chain by the door; the slaves still carry ropes; there are scrolls made of papyrus on the library shelves, and election slogans are posted on the walls, with love words scrawled on them..." These scenes fully demonstrate how the tens of thousands of living beings in the ancient city at that time were suddenly torn apart from the chain of life! When I saw the corpses of various forms of men, women, old and young (most of them adults) on display in Pompeii, they were displayed in sealed glass. Fossils), I felt frightened for a while. In the face of the eternal universe and nature, people must first respect nature, protect the ecology, and compete with nature. How small and powerless people seem!

The ruins of the ancient city are amazing

Today The ancient city of Pompeii has been designated as a world cultural and natural heritage by UNESCO. Tourists call it a "natural history museum". It attracts tens of thousands of tourists from all over the world to visit here every day. I walked through the streets and alleys of the ruins of the ancient city, entering and exiting half-ruined houses, villas, trading markets, shops, bakeries, hot spring bathhouses, warehouses, theaters, Colosseums, and sports grounds.

Although only one third of Pompeii is open to tourists, the rest is still buried underground. But from the 1.8 square kilometers of land, I saw dozens of streets and alleys paved with white and blue boulders. The streets and alleys are square and neat, the small ones are about two meters wide, and the large ones are four or five meters wide, just like Chang'an City in the Tang Dynasty of my country. I found that every sidewalk here is ten or twenty centimeters higher than the road. After careful inspection, I found that the ancient Roman carriages were very developed, and the pavement in the middle left deep ruts, which were worn down an inch or two. It seems that at that time, the large carriages of warriors and nobles were always speeding in the middle of the road, while the slaves and humble citizens with bowed eyebrows could only walk on both sides. Unexpectedly, at all intersections, like today's zebra crossings, there are raised "vehicle barriers" about 30 cm high at each intersection. When a speeding carriage approaches the intersection, you will see "separators". "Car rocks", the speed naturally slows down, and the vehicle can only drive slowly through the gaps between the huge rocks.

So at this moment, I suddenly thought: The zebra crossings on our roads today were invented by the ancient Romans, right?!

At many street intersections and intersections, I also saw large stone troughs with relief carvings. . The reliefs on the stone trough are either divine faces, animal heads, or fish mouths, with bronze pipes connected behind them and twisting faucets. As soon as it swirls, a gurgling mountain spring flows out for pedestrians to drink or wash. Nowadays, in many developed countries, stations, docks, airports, parks, sports fields and streets and alleys are equipped with taps for direct drinking. At this time, I thought: whether this kind of setup in many big cities today is also the same as that of more than 2,000 years ago. What inspiration did ancient Pompeii inspire them?

In addition to the various murals and exquisite mosaics left in the houses, shops, and villas of Pompeii, the various pottery and glassware with strange shapes make people intoxicated and dreamy. In addition, the marble amphitheater with 5,000 seats, the Colosseum with 3,000 seats and the large stadium with 40,000 seats surprised me, and I felt a sense of admiration: the ancient Romans His humanistic qualities and social development vision are still admirable even today, 2000 years ago...