Anyone who has been a reader of these pages for very long knows I have a thing about ancient roads. I can't really explain it, except to say that it interests me that in certain places, a public thoroughfare is built and rebuilt and rebuilt, but remains in the same geographical location for hundreds of years. Walking one of these ancient pathways is a little like time travel.
Tourists show how the crosswalks work at Pompeii. Photo by Bob Demey
Oh well, enough justification, silly or not. Here's the latest peep into the ruins of Pompeii.
Comments
Thank you very much. Those were some awesome pics!!! Whoever took them, really had a good “photographer’s eye”.
They showed just how ingenious these long ago people were! I loved the stepping stones! Note the spaces between them: Probably cart wheels would fit exactly between 2 such sets of spaces.
The holes in the stone wall to tether animals, at the “Y”, reminds me of the iron rings that existed, in many places, even in the “modern city” of Phoenix (where I lived), as late as the 1960′s! (Horses were once common there, but the rings started disappearing when Mr Ford’s horseless carriages became popular, and there were less and less each year. I would think there might be none left today.)
Some of those old stone roads, look to be in almost as good shape as some of our modern ones!
This may interest you:
Pompeii (“Bang Bang (My Lover Shot Me Down)” by Nancy Sinatra)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1E9AL0r-uY4
And here it is in French:
https://soundcloud.com/historyteacherz/french-pompeii
Take Care.
Ah ha, when I studied geography it was made clear that due to geographical constraints like river crossings and mountain passes and so forth there are only certain routes that can be followed. Therefore as people (and animals) will always take the easiest route it follows that many routes or roads will remain much the same for centuries! Only when the Romans started bulding their roads (usually straight) did things start to change although certainly after they were gone the roads were still used. They also had to use the same passes and river crossings. OK?