Shocking!

My head is spinning.

I went everywhere in Pompeii, and was blown away by the dearth of actual artifacts and the very few remains considering how large and famous Pompeii is.

Herculaneum still has intact tiled mosaics and decorative tiled flooring, kitchens, entire houses, fossilized wood mantles in place above the door.

The rare dusty, largely intact table in Pompeii did not hold a candle to what is mostly an intact town with infrastructure like drainage, architectural features, hundreds of artifacts, the wildly vivid mosaics and tiling everywhere.

Pompeii is larger but it has so few actual artifacts and so few human remains compared to ercolano, in far worse states of preservation.

I’m surprised you think there’s more there. I spend hours walking to every corner and was shocked at how little pompei had considering how popular it was.

It was only later that I found out pompeii was popular because it was found 7 years before ercolano or whatever.

I visited every single marked spot they provided. It was a plod.

The majority of the pompeii buildings are entirely or mostly missing or broken down, and you just have little placards that tell you what maybe used to be there.

In ercolano you actually have the buildings, the sewers, the kitchens, the pots they cooked in, the tiling, and the bones right there in front of you, all across town

You can touch the same ercolano walls, the wooden mantle that they entered their house under.

And also yeah pompeii was hot and dusty and barren and that sucked and Ercolano was extremely comfortable, had the intact artifacts, was structurally intact, had human remains, and was easier to walk.

Pompeii barely made an impression on me, but I have many transformative memories of ercolano.