Tag Archives: italy

Pompeii the Buried City

Pompeii by Mary Beard (amazon .uk  .com)

I’m not going to write a long review but just a brief overview of this book with a few online references for following up by myself and anyone else interested.

Pompeii starts with the falling  pumice stone on the city of Pompeii on the 25th August 79CE. What book on Pompeii could start in any other way than to take you via the people trapped,  and forced to witness forever to us this human tragedy 2000 years ago? Their frozen bodies at once connect us to this city in a way the buried city buildings never will.  But after the introduction Mary Beard  leaves the statues of the dead respectfully behind to give anyone interested a run down on the city, and what it can and can’t tell us.

Miss Beard has a good way of writing, she can summarise complicated points well and make them easily digestible, and she tries not to get too carried away, but let the actual evidence contain her assumptions.

It’s wonderful to follow the speculation forinstance about the possible one way road system or try to imagine the stench of the street / open sewer system of the town. How many people could read? How many citizens and slaves? How did the local elections work? The architecture, paintings, everything is gone over in the search for information about Pompeii and the Roman world, and through it I found myself building up a much more detailed picture than I previously had before.

The sections on making a visit and further reading make this book more than a vivid capturing of the city into the first book you should read if you are going to visit the city.

Mary Beard since writing this has produced with the BBC quite a few films including one on Pompeii, it’s below with a few other links.

The City of Falling Angels

city of fallen angels

The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt takes place in Venice, Berendt arriving just after the fire in the Fenice Opera House. The story of the burning down of the Fenice provides the backbone of the book, but other stories are intertwined, and much like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is part travelogue, part gossip, part history, with a bit of intrigue mixed in. I really liked this book not least because Berendt is a gifted writer, hard researched details and insights are included without distracting from the flow of the book. He dishes the dirt no doubt deservedly on a few people, and he gives a good feeling for the city at least for the casual visitor. How this book will stack up against the other ‘Venice books’ is hard to say is there a more romantic literary city both in spirit or actual fact than Venice? So this book might just fade under the weight of comparison against previous and future tales of Venice. Especially as the Fenice fire is essentially an unfinished outcome, there is plenty of smoke but the real fire behind still remains hidden.