Blog #5

Pompeii. Where to even begin here. I am going to talk about two things that I thought were really cool when we visited here. But first, for those of you who are like me, I'll give you a quick little background on Pompeii in case you don't know much about it!

Pompeii is a city that was preserved in it's ancient form from a volcanic eruption in 79 A.D.
Mt. Vesuvius erupted and covered the land with ash and pyroclastic flows. The cool thing about having a city completely covered in volcanic matter, is that it allowed it to be nearly completely preserved. So thanks Mt. Vesuvius for that!

View of Mt. Vesuvius and some of the city

I had a lot of favorite things from Pompeii but my favorite things were the baths. These pictures below are all from the Forum Baths. 

These baths below were build after 80 A.D. These baths were divided into men's and women's sections. First we walked into the Caladarium or the "hot room".  This is where people would start their bath. They would sit in the hot water and then move their way though the other parts of the bath. The water was usually heated from and underfloor heating system, probably from fire or the hot air from outside.

Hot room, kind of like a modern day hot tub

Tempidarium bath item holding spots

 Next, bathers would walk to the tempidarium. This was known as the "warm room". In here it was like a modern day locker type of things. The box looking things to the right are where people would keep their bath items and unguents. The tempidarium is decorated with geometric partitions and mythological figures, as you can see below.

Mythological figures in the tepidarium

Interesting fact: bath time was usually in the early afternoons and public baths were every inexpensive and used nearly everyday! 

The last part of the baths is the frigidarium or cold room. Depicted below: 

This is an example of a smaller type of cold bath but some of them were as big as a swimming pool! The first two spots, caladarium and tepidarium were used to open up the pores and clean them out. But this part of the bath was used to close the pores back up. Not sure if I would like to end my bath day in a really cold pool but I guess if it was 95 degrees outside, it might feel great!