the Wry Baby Blog

I don’t think it’s just me, but when you’re a kid and you see something incredible (at least to you then at that early point in life) it burns into your imagination so deep that it stays with you forever. You never lose the initial feeling of wonder about it. Pompeii was one of many of those things for me. That a whole city was decimated by a volcano yet perfectly preserved by it at the same time was just fascinating to me as a kid. The Discovery Place in Charlotte helped me rekindle that fascination by playing host to A Day in Pompeii. A traveling exhibit of artifacts exhumed from Pompeii and a detailed time line of what exactly happened that fateful day in the summer of 79 A.D.

No, these kids aren’t on the phone, there’s a terrific audio tour that’s geared for kids and a separate audio program for adults.

From recovered pottery, coins and sculptures to colorful frescoes recovered from the walls of preserved homes to detailed plaster casts of the homeowners themselves who couldn’t escape, the exhibit was incredibly informative. The many artifacts are so incredibly preserved and so beautiful, too. Did you know that the Vesuvius erupted at 6 am and by 3 pm Pompeii was buried under 5 feet of ash and rock? Incredible.

Surprisingly, Charlotte was the exhibit’s last stop having only been to three other stops before it leaves the US. And major metros like NY, SF and LA weren’t on the schedule, either. I felt truly lucky to be able to see this terrific collection.

A Pompeian man covers his mouth with a cloth before succumbing to the volcanic gases.

For more information on Pompeii, check out the Soprintendenza Archeologica di Pompei website. They were responsible for this exhibit. There you can take a virtual tour of Pompeii and look in on current Pompeian excavations and restorations.