Four Things My Geeky-Jock-of-a-Best-Friend Must Do in Europe Read Online Free Page B

not get lost. In the lost city. (Hehe.)
    When we were standing at Pompeii’s forum—which is a Roman-type gathering place, sort of like the grass fields on the Mall at the Washington Monument—we had a perfect view of the mountain, and Sergio told us what it was like for the people of Pompeii the day they got buried by the volcano. He said that people stood right where we were standing, probably talking about ordinary things and enjoying the view, when the ground started to shake. Then, before they could get home to their families or find their best friends, the top of Vesuvius blew off in an enormous explosion of lava, and even though the mountain was a few miles away, darkness fell over Pompeii within MINUTES, and 20 feet of ash covered the city within hours. And then it was all quiet. Very quiet. Very, VERY quiet. And it stayed like that, forgotten in time, until the 1700s, when someone was out digging a hole and found the place.
    I saw some of the original Pompeii people while I was there. And I don’t mean ghosts, either. I saw THE PEOPLE. Well, OKAY, they were models. You see, the archaeologists who dug out Pompeii found lots of bodies, but there wasn’t much left of them, except these perfect outlines of their shapes in hardened ash. So they filled the outlines up with plaster and made casts of the people. There are a couple of buildings that have these people-casts in them, frozen in time, running, hugging other people. Molto eerie.
    We didn’t see all of Pompeii because it’s really big, and I guess tour groups just get to see the guide’s favorite places. Sergio, as it turns out, has a special interest in frescoes, so we got to see lots of those. Frescoes, Delia, are murals that Italians have been painting forever and ever. They have some way of getting the paint to bleed into the wall, which sounds weird but seems to work pretty well, seeing how the frescoes of Pompeii were put there before 79 AD, then had a volcano erupt all over them, then were buried in ash for about 1,700 years, then were dug out and looked at by tourists for another 200 years or so, and the pictures are STILL there.
    One place that had really cool frescoes was the House of Venus. My fave was a painting of—can you guess?—VENUS, lounging about in a seashell with little birdies flitting around. (I do mean the GODDESS Venus, not the planet, Delia.) And then there was this other fresco-covered place with a SPLENDID name: the Villa of Mysteries. In it there was a huge mural that went all around a room and was sort of like a life-sized comic strip. You see, there were different panels, and a story was going on in them. But it wasn’t the kind of story you’d see in the Sunday comics, because it seemed to involve things like animal sacrifices and drinking blood. I can’t tell you anything else about it, though (oh, I know you are MOLTO disappointed), because when Sergio got to that part in the explanation, the panini I had eaten for lunch started rumbling in my stomach. Fearing that I might be the next thing spewing all over Pompeii, I wandered outside to wait until we moved to a new destination, which, I figured, HAD to be less gross.
    Uh, WRO-ONG!
    The next (and thankfully the last) house we went to was the House of Vettii. At first, it seemed like a completely harmless, cozy home. There were frescoes of cupids all over the walls, everywhere, doing all kinds of fun things—cooking, making jewelry and clothing, chariot-racing, surfing on the backs of crustaceans. (You know, typical cupidesque things.) I was making a little game of counting how many cupids I found and had sort of wandered off on my own, when I rounded a corner and happened upon this fresco that covered a whole wall in what turned out to be the entry foyer of the house.
    This thing, Delia, ranks right up there on my all-time, Top Ten List of Hideous Things I Have Encountered in Life. It was of a truly ugly figure, which had a HUGE you-know-what (think health class—the