The Arena And Seats Are Perfect, And All The
Interior Is Perfectly Cleared Out:
So are the dens where the wild beasts
were kept; so that you look down into this amphitheatre as
Into a vast
basin standing on its brink, which is on a level with the rest of the
ground around it, and by means of the seats and passages you may descend
into the arena. This Amphitheatre is at a short distance from the rest of
the town. What is at present discovered of this city consists of a long
street with several off-sets of streets issuing from it: a temple, two
theatres, a praetorium, a large barrack, and a peculiarly large house or
villa belonging probably to some eminent person, but no doubt when the
excavation shall be recommenced many more streets will be discovered, as
from the circumstance of there being an amphitheatre, two other theatres
and a number of sepulchral monuments outside the gates, it must have been a
city of great consequence. Most of the houses seem to have had two stories;
the roofs fell in of course by the act of excavation, but the columns
remain entire. I observe that the general style of building in Pompeii in
most of the houses is as follows: that in each building there is a court
yard in the centre, something like the court yard of a convent, which is
sometimes paved in mosaic, and generally surrounded by columns; in the
middle of this court is a fountain or basin: the court has no roof and the
wings of the house form a quadrangle environing it. The windows and doors
of the rooms are made in the interior sides of the quadrangle looking into
the court yard; on the exterior there appears to be only a small latticed
window near the top of the room to admit light. I have seen in Egypt and in
India similarly built houses, and it is the general style of building in
Andalusia and Barbary. In the rooms are niches in the walls for lamps,
precisely in the style of the Moorish buildings in India.
In many of the chambers of the houses at Pompeii are paintings al fresco
and arabesques on the walls which on being washed with water appear
perfectly fresh. The subjects of these paintings are generally from the
mythology. In some of the rooms are paintings al fresco of fish, flesh,
fowl and fruit; in others Venus and the Graces at their toilette, from
which we may infer that the former were dining rooms and the latter
boudoirs. A large villa (so I deem it as it stands without the gates) has a
number of rooms, two stories entire and three court yards with fountains,
many beautiful fresco paintings on the walls of the chambers. Annexed to
this villa is a garden arranged in terraces and a fish pond. A covered
gallery supported by pillars on one of the sides of the garden served
probably as a promenade in wet weather.
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