Today we live in a society obsessed with speed, lack of time: the rhythms of work and various daily activities are increasingly frenetic.
Because of technology, urbanisation and consumerism, everything immediately becomes obsolete and has to be put aside. We must constantly try to keep up with the changes that pervade our lives and we do not realize the damage that this entails. It seems that the important thing is to live a fast and productive life, rather than one of beauty and full of lasting emotions and values. The ideal way to recover the true sense of time is to live an experience of beauty and intense culture, walking along cobbled streets dating back two thousand years, but still perfectly preserved and intact, despite the relentless passing of the years.
Pompeii and Herculaneum are actually suspended cities, stuck in the eternity of time. Taking a plunge into the past and visiting cities that have remained unchanged, even if destroyed, will surely be a balm for our minds and hearts, which will help us to find more sustainable rhythms and to appreciate life more, considering its wonder and its fugacity.
The eruption of Vesuvius made Pompeii and Herculaneum two immortal cities, even though they had been buried.
Everyone should visit these sites, included among the UNESCO World Heritage Sites since 1997, at least once in their lifetime and perhaps repeat the experience several times. They are places of immense and inestimable historical value, immortal and fixed in a precise moment and are therefore, in this constantly changing world, something exclusive and unique and absolutely to be preserved, both to know our origins and to build solid foundations for a prosperous future.
Pompeii was a rich, prosperous city, as shown by the numerous Roman Domus, with large gardens, many rooms, sculptures, mosaics and wall paintings of rare beauty and value that can be admired in the excavations area and also the presence of a theatre and an amphitheatre. And still today everything appears “alive” and well preserved: the buildings, the streets, the frescoes, the vases, the casts of the bodies.
Herculaneum, on the other hand, was mainly a holiday resort and the excavations are smaller because a large part of the ancient city is still under the present one, making the atmosphere more intimate. There are no casts because it was not covered by ash and lapilli, but submerged by a mud flow that sealed everything, so the buildings are even better preserved.
We have all dreamed at least once of travelling with a time machine and getting to know ancient civilizations and these are the only places in the world where you can relive the daily life of ancient Rome and its greatness and feel part of a splendid past, of a wonderful history, discovering many interesting aspects of life in those days.
In order to really know and understand cities like Pompeii and Herculaneum it is therefore necessary to make this sort of journey through time, deepening the indissoluble bond we have with the eruption of Vesuvius and approaching with respect a tragic event that has changed forever those territories, where the temporary destruction has become a perennial preservation of a culture and civilization and where the loss of everything, becomes a precious asset for the whole of humanity, to be preserved and continue to be handed down.