Day 48 - Pompei Ruins

[00:00:00]Well, we've stopped at um well, Conad.

[00:00:04]We're on firstname terms of the people who own Conad. They're a big supermarket chain, you know, like Woolly's or Coohl's. And that there you're looking at. That is the reason we're in Pompei.

[00:00:16]That is Mount Vuvius, Sue. And we're going to go. We're going to go. We're going. You don't say going to go. You just say we're going to Pompei. Let me read you about Pompei.

[00:00:31]That thing there that you just looked at, show again, Sue, please.

[00:00:39]That thing there erupted in 79 AD. 79 just after Christ, >> not before Christ.

[00:00:48]>> Oh dear.

[00:00:49]>> What's happened?

[00:00:50]>> Somehow it's gone.

[00:00:53]>> Hey, >> there we go. Zoomed in. Sorry about that. No, that's the beauty of it. 79 AD just you know Christ was just with us for 79 years and then that blew its top and that blue I I'll blue um 30 miles or kilometers into the air and it buried the whole of Pompei which had about 60,000 people in it. It was quite an upmarket city. It was quite a uh wellto-do place.

[00:01:26]Uh and then um in 1599 it was discovered in 1600 it was discovered that it was buried and they've been excavating it ever since. In 1748 they started to reclaim the city and they're still chipping away at it. There's people there just uh scraping fossils and crap off it. So we'll show you I hope a bit of what goes on at Pompei. Um but uh listen to this. 82 years ago, >> 81 years ago, >> it puffed again. Smoke and stuff belched out the top of it. 82 years ago after after 79 AD, uh in 1944, it started to puff again.

[00:02:16]And we're going tomorrow, we're going up to the summit and walk around the crater. You can drive, I think, or get a bus up and then it's a kilometer to walk around >> mountain that we just spoke about. Um, it buried this under, hard to believe, under eight or nine m of ash. Um, and they're gradually excavating it. We'll have a look over the back here at uh some of the houses and rooms that were completely engulfed. And hopefully uh not hopefully but I think they found air pockets where people had been uh burnt to death or suffocated and they put plaster of paras and made moles of the people who died.

[00:03:00]>> Really?

[00:03:01]>> I I think from memory um that they uh they have those examples of the devastation of this will we've told you all about Mount Fuvius but this is just >> this is the burial of how one of the one of the little amphitheaters >> similar to the cor coliseum.

[00:03:21]>> Similar but on a much smaller scale but there was apparently a very big coliseum not not as big as a very big amphitheater. Not as big as the coliseum but we'll button off and come over here and we'll find this over here.

[00:03:34]>> The explorer here at Pompei is walking up and on the right are the various dwellings that were devastated.

[00:03:47]by the ash cloud.

[00:03:49]>> Uh, all residences and restaurants and places of interest on the right, completely buried. Hard to believe. And they're gradually excavating them. I've lost her now. The crowd have gotten her away, but she's up there somewhere. Let me get up high and see if I can spot her from a distance. Put your hand in the air. Wave to us.

[00:04:13]There she is. Extraordinary history >> when you think about all the facts we told you about Mount Vuvius. Well, there's into the distance a whole city that was uh completely buried by the ash from the mountain.

[00:04:31]It's hard to believe.

[00:04:33]In fact, I'm not sure that we believe all of it.

[00:04:38]Uh it's a hell of a lot of excavation to expose these, but that's the legend. and we're going to take it as fact. We're on the way to the amphitheater at Pompei.

[00:04:49]And this is one of the petrified uh images or petrified um >> cast >> casts uh that they put um a mold into cuz they found them in an air pocket when they excavated it. And uh they figured that uh the cast that came out of plaster of Paris that was a um image of someone who had been overcome by the heat or the ash here from Mount Suvius.

[00:05:16]Uh this is one of several casts that they've uncovered. This is a selection of the uh retrieved busts of people who've been trapped either through inhalation or uh uh heat or ash overcome by ash. And they were found >> they were found to be um in pockets of air. They're trapped between the ash and the skoria, the red hot bl.

[00:05:49]And uh they managed as I said to fill them up with the pasture of Paris or some agent and then they got the mold and they've reproduced them. So quite extraordinary quite quite emotional really to think that these people were living a normal life until until that thing blew its head off.

[00:06:10]Well, this is a simulation of the great explosion of 70 >> 9 75 AD lasted for two days. They say covered the entire Pompei village with >> 79 AD. Sorry, don't know what I said.

[00:06:38]That cloud of dust went 30 kilometers into the air. 30 km.

[00:06:52]And over here is the amount of skoria and ash uh from the uh first eruption and then from the continuing eruption up until It ceased >> up the top there of uh that would be uh seven or 8 m and that's all skoria and ash that came out of Mount Vuvius.