“Pizza!” shouted the Flashback Four.
“Can we get some pizza?” asked Julia.
The other three looked at Miss Z with their puppy-dog eyes.
“Well . . . okay.”
“Yay!”
Miss Z bought a margherita pizza (named after Margherita, the queen of Italy) and the kids quickly devoured it. It wasn’t the best pizza in the world, but it was special because it came from the place where pizza was invented.
“This is real Italian pizza,” Luke announced. “From Italy.”
Tickets to enter the ruins cost thirteen euros per person. Miss Z paid with her credit card.
“Be careful,” she advised as she handed a ticket to each of the kids. “Anyplace there are a lot of tourists, there will be pickpockets.”
“What if we get robbed?” asked Isabel.
“We’re not going to get robbed,” David assured her.
“I know karate,” said Luke. “Stick with me.”
“This will be our meeting spot,” Miss Z told the kids. “Let’s stay together as a group. But if we should be separated for any reason, we’ll meet right back here in a little less than one hour, at one o’clock. Got it?”
“One hour, one o’clock,” replied David.
“Now, before we enter the city, turn around and look behind you.”
The Flashback Four turned around. There it was, about ten miles to the north, looming over the city—Vesuvius. It’s a huge blue-gray mountain with two peaks, over four thousand feet high and stretching about eight miles across. If modern Italy is the shape of a boot, Mount Vesuvius is toward the top front edge of the boot.
“Is that Mount Vesuvius?” asked Isabel. Miss Z nodded her head.
“It’s still there!” marveled Julia.
“Well, of course it’s still there,” David said, rolling his eyes. “Where’s it going to go? It’s a mountain.”
“But it was a taller mountain before it blew its top,” said Miss Z. “Almost twice as high.”
“How do we know it won’t erupt again?” asked Isabel, a little nervously.
“We don’t.”
It was the truth. Vesuvius is still an active volcano. It has erupted eighty times since the big one in the year 79. The most recent eruption was in 1944.
The group entered the gate. Luke pushed Miss Z’s wheelchair with David’s assistance, and it wasn’t easy. The street was unpaved. It was made of large, flat stones that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.
The town is surprisingly large, about a mile from end to end. It had been laid out in a grid, like a modern city. The group set off down the main street, which is called Via dell’Abbondanza.
“There was no country named Italy in the year 79,” Miss Z told the kids, like a tour guide. “Pompeii was part of the Roman Empire, which ruled over southern Europe along the Mediterranean Sea for five hundred years.”
Walking through Pompeii felt like going back in time (that is, if you ignored the tour groups and cell phones). Via dell’Abbondanza was lined with stone and brick ruins of houses, shops of all kinds, and even restaurants. The ancient Romans liked going out to eat. There were twenty bakeries in town when the volcano erupted. In one of them, eighty-one loaves of bread were found in an oven.
The kids noticed the sidewalks were higher than the ones back home. This is because the streets were flooded with water every night to flush away dirt and waste. The Romans were masters at moving water from one place to another. They built aqueducts to carry water from rivers and lakes that were miles from the city, using only gravity to do the work.
It’s hard to believe, but houses in Pompeii had running water. Twenty-five fountains were scattered at intersections around the town. There were public baths that had pools of hot, warm, and cold water to soak in. This took amazing technology, considering the fact that they didn’t have pumps, steel, plastics, cranes, bulldozers, electricity, trucks, or computers in the year 79.
Julia noticed that many of the buildings had a jug on the ground outside the doorway. She asked Miss Z about them.
“People would leave their pee in those jugs to be taken away,” she explained.
“Where did they take it?” Julia asked. “What did they do with it?”
“Do you really want to know?” asked Miss Z.
“No,” Julia replied. “I’m sure it’s gross.”
“Where did kids go to school?” asked Isabel.
“They haven’t dug up any schools or classrooms,” Miss Z told her. “Teachers would just take their students out in the street or anywhere it was convenient for a lesson.”
Isabel took the TTT out of her backpack again and sent a quick text to Mrs. Vader. . . .
HAVING FUN. WISH YOU WERE HERE.
SO DO I was the quick reply.
Miss Z told Luke to stop pushing her wheelchair for a moment.
“Think of it,” she told them. “All of this, the entire city, was covered by twenty feet of ash after Vesuvius erupted. It formed a seal around the city. That’s why these ruins are still here today for us to see.”
“So it’s sort of like a big time capsule,” Isabel noted.
“Yes!” Miss Z agreed. “Isn’t it ironic? The volcano completely destroyed Pompeii, but at the same time it preserved Pompeii.”
She told the kids how the city had sat undisturbed under that layer of ash for over fifteen hundred years. And then, in 1748, it was rediscovered. Ever since then, archeologists have been uncovering this lost city, piece by piece. To this day, there are still parts of Pompeii that haven’t been excavated.
“It’s like a ghost town,” Miss Z said. “But the ghosts are still here. Let me show you something.”
A little farther down the street was a small glass building, like a greenhouse. When the group got closer, they could see it was filled with white figures of men, women, children, and animals posed in different positions. They looked almost like sculptures.
“Are they mummies?” David asked.
“No,” Miss Z said. “They’re not even dead bodies.”
She explained that over the centuries, the bodies of the victims had disintegrated under all that volcanic ash. That left cavities in the shapes
