That image above is from Herculaneum which was swallowed in lava. Pompeii was smothered in ash, buried to a depth covering even the tallest temples so that no one knew it was there for 1700 years. When it was discovered, the excavation revealed spooky human-shaped casts made of ash showing how the citizens were frozen where they were caught.
Only a few are still on public display. I didn't expect the Pompeii site to still have the streets strewn ghoulishly with bodies like in that old National Geographic article, but I was surprised at how stripped and denuded it was. The houses and streets are all empty of furnishings, carts or other debris, and that frozen-in-time quality is hard to sense.
What you do see is one lane after another of intact structures, more preserved than any ancient ruins we've seen. Most remarkable is the frescoes still on the interiors of some buildings.
You have to imagine that vaulted room (a public bath house) completely filled in with ash and that piazza (the site of the Temple of Apollo, I think) covered over the height of the columns to get a sense of the eruption.
The visit is also a little bittersweet for us. We've been referring to this trip as the semester abroad we never had. In-depth trips with our favorite professors to Greece and Rome in Ilene's case and to England in my case always seemed on the horizon when we were in college but never did work out. We've always regretted missing them. We're making up for a lot of that now, but the flying visit to Pompeii without the scholarship (and having forgotten so much of our Latin in the meantime) makes us miss our youth a little more.
