..In this page, our suggestion for an excursion: Pompei.

One quick glance at the lay-out of the city and a fundamental fact immediately catches one's eye: Pompeii, unlike Herculaneum and ancient Naples, is not the fruit of an organic design of city planners. In the regular town design two atypical nuclei stand out: one, roughly quadrilateral, around the "civil forum" and the other around the tiny "triangular forum" next to the theatres district. To those nuclei is linked the rest of the city which by contrast looks "new": all this enclosed  within solid city walls. This observation reveals the secret of the origins and development of Pompeii: its port on the mouth of the river Sarno is evidence of its Mediterranean vocation - from the earliest history - with respect to its vast hinterland which in time came to include Acerra, Nola, Nuceria, as the ancient historian Strabo attests. On a bed of prehistoric lava, Pompeii is founded in the second half of the VIIth century B.C. with an organization effort that presupposes objectives of lookout and defence connected to the nature of the relations between the Greeks and the natives.
The natives, peaceful when first colonized, later matured notions of armed action when the Chalcidenses, who held defensive posts along the sea-coast, threatened to cut off for ever the peoples of Campania from access to the sea. Despite the documented existence of a Doric temple dating from the second half of the VIth century B.C. on the terrace of the triangular forum, and other indications that were held valid until only a few years ago, Pompeii was not a Greek city, even though it had been influenced by Greek culture ever since the most archaic epoch. In the light of the results obtained from the stratigraphic researches carried out in these last years, it appears that Pompeii, at the time of its foundation and its first development, was much more conditioned, politically, by the Etruscans than by the Greeks. There is also evidence that it was connected to an "Etruscan territory" centred on Capua (Santa Maria Capua Vetere), which comprised large portions of inland Campania and, through the Sarno valley, the Sorrento peninsula. Disconcerting evidence of this has been found at Vico Equense. Pompeii's commercial vocation upsets completely the former architectural and decorative order, transforms the habits of its inhabitants, generates self-made entrepreneurs and exploiters. A "vertical section" of the city in the last decades of its life before the 79 A.D. eruption of Vesuvius, would offer a picture - in contrast with the calm of former times - of roads, inns, taverns bustling with people, brothels in full activity, stall keepers in the forum, the amphiteatre cram-full of people, slaves of an irrational passion for sport, always ready for a brawl, walls covered with election slogans in favour of this or that candidate, graffiti with names, quips, love messages everywhere. House building in the meanwhile was capriciously spreading beyond the walls, it consolidated westwards in dismal phalansteries.  Painting lost its capacity of perspective. The former articulation which can be seen in the vast cycles of paintings of the "Villa of the Mysteries" (Villa dei Misteri), is often reduced to nothing but commonplace and poor quality decoration.

Full description of Pompei on page: http://www.hotelolimpico.it/pompei.htm 

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