Sorrento, Naples and the Amalfi Coast - Part One, Pompeii

Plaster cast of donkey driver, originally uploaded by Racmol.

This photo illustrates the reason why I wanted to go to Pompeii and I wasn't disappointed. I told myself on the way in that even though I had a vague recollection of reading somewhere years ago about bodies preserved in lava, the Lonely Planet didn't mention them so I shouldn't expect to see any.

In fact, like all the bodies at Pompeii, this is not actually a body but a plaster cast. What happened was - when the site was being excavated in the 19th century, someone found an interestingly shaped cavity, and the lead archaeologist decided to pour plaster into it and see what it was. In this way, they discovered bodies of people and animals and also the shape of household furniture and roots of trees and all sorts of things. Essentially the lava formed a hard coating over the body and then when the body decayed, a body-shaped cavity was left.

It's quite something to see - and very moving because you see the posture of the person when they died, which makes them seem more human, more like us. You can also see the shape of their clothing on some of them.

We spent about five or six hours wandering around Pompeii. I knew the figures - 20,000 people lived there and around 2,000 died - but I wasn't expecting the site to be so huge. Usually when you go to see ruins they are just that - ruins. At Pompeii you get a real sense of individual houses, complete with fountains and murals and mosaics. And they haven't finished excavating it yet. It made me feel like signing up to do an archaeology degree at Birkbeck - we got a flyer through our door that said that Birkbeck undergraduates do digs at x, y and Pompeii. The moment passed, which was a relief.

I failed to see a cave canem mosaic although I later discovered there was one in the House of the Tragic Poet, which we somehow managed to miss. Miss Scott would have been disappointed in us!

Will write more later and upload some more photos when I get my own ones back on Tuesday - all the current ones are Jules's. I'm getting them burnt to CD for ease of storage.

In other news, I went for my first RunLondon training run in Regent's Park today. I was almost the last one home - the people who go on these training runs are clearly far too fit. Anyway I think it took me about 32/33 minutes for the 5.1 km but will find out tomorrow when the official time recorded from my digital chip (attached to shoe not surgically inserted!) appears online. You get your own page of the website where your times are all logged. The idea is that you go once a week and improve your time - but the chances of that seem small as the only other two 5km timed runs I've done (in 1999 & 2004) took 32 or 33 minutes each as well. I only have one speed and it is not very quick!