One Day In Pompeii: An Unwilling Tourist

-Essay- When traveling, one generally strives to avoid looking like a tourist. As I made my way through Italy, I failed miserably at this. Decked out in ugly, practical walking shoes, a messenger bag bulging with various maps, funny little earpieces with a big black receiver that hung around my neck to hear our tour guide with, and my camera always held at the ready and clutched protectively in my hand, I looked like the epitome of a tourist. If my attire did not make it obvious that I was no local, the expression of wide-eyed awe with which I drank in everything from ancient monuments to sewer caps certainly gave me away. When I reached Pompeii, the situation was somewhat different. There were no locals to snicker at my tourist garb or my constant mispronunciation of Italian words; there had not been any locals there at all for over 2000 years. If you looked straight ahead down the perfectly cobbled streets and ignored the caved in tops of the buildings, it really did look as though the place was abandoned yesterday. Or maybe it was more that it felt that way, to me. Perhaps it is cliché to say, but I felt those people, felt them in the food bars and water fountains and flour mills. The locals still inhabited the place, in spirit if not in person. It felt as though if I stayed too long in one house, the owner might come home and ask me what I was doing there. In a way it felt like trespassing. What right had I to gawk at the life these Pompeiians had left so brutally and unwillingly? As I made my way through the streets, I realized that Pompeii was not a tourist attraction, but a place where one must show respect. I found myself constantly marveling at perhaps the least remarkable facet of Pompeii: the deep ruts in the flagstone-paved streets left from hundreds of years of wagon traffic. They were cut deeper on the main roads, and became less so further out on the side streets. I was fascinated by these ruts because they were evidence of absolutely ordinary life. Rome was not just generals and emperors; it was full of average people driving their wagons up and down the street every day. The sides of the water fountains were worn down too, from thousands of Romans leaning on them to get a drink. I ran my hand over the indentation over and over again, putting my hands where Romans had put theirs. The long walk to the Villa of the Mysteries was made longer by frequent photo opportunities, but eventually we arrived. It was a vast, beautiful villa, so named because of the mysterious ritual depicted in fresco on the walls of one of its rooms. The opulence of the home was still quite evident. The paint on the walls, though cracked and faded, showed evidence of a home filled with color and elaborate design. The house was wrapped around a central courtyard, and supported by columns. The mysterious room itself was certainly worth the walk. The paint here was a vivid, blood red. The women on the walls stared out at me, as they had been staring out at droves of other tourists for hundreds of years, and I wondered what they would say if walls could talk. We left the Villa after about twenty minutes, as our bus would be leaving soon and we still had to get back to the forum. I walked along the sidewalks, pretending to belong there, pretending to be a local. When we reached the forum, we made one final stop to gaze inside a gated off area where the casts of victims' bodies were kept. It seemed to me an odd place to keep something like that. The bodies, contorted into frightening positions, were kept in glass cases amongst the hundreds of pieces of pottery stacked in shelves behind them. One such cast was not even in a case, but was lying on a shelf with some pottery, his hands permanently frozen over his face. While I lost myself in the daily lives of the Pompeiians, I had forgotten about Vesuvius, forgotten exactly why this place was still here for me to explore in the first place. Here was my heartrending reminder. It wouldn't be until later that our Sicilian tour guide Giuseppe would inform us, "You are not tourists. You are travelers." Traveler certainly had less of a stigma attached to it than tourist, so I felt a bit better carting around my big bag and wearing my ear piece. The local Pompeiians probably would have thought I looked just as ridiculous as the native Italians did, but it did not matter. I was not just a traveler but a time traveler, and I can only thank them for letting me into their lives, even for so short time.