pompei tour Pompei & Vesuvius
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...
