Pompeii Description (What it looked like before the eruption)Pompeii was a town in the Roman Empire, located South of Naples on the western coast of Italy. Many rich Romans had "country homes” there. At its height Pompeii had a population of almost 20,000 people. The town was excavated in the 19th and 20th century CE and because of its excellent state of preservation it has given an priceless insight into the Roman world. Pompeii was one of the more important ports on the Bay of Naples because the nearby settlements such as Nola, Nuceria and Aceria would have sent their produce to Pompeii for transportation across the empire. Pompeii itself, in the Roman tradition, was surrounded by a wall with lots of gates, usually with two or three arched entrances to make pedestrian and vehicle traffic separated. Inside the walls there were wide smooth concrete streets in a largely regular layout (with the exception of the rather haphazard southwest corner) but there were no street numbers or names. The town had a surprising mix of several thousand buildings including shops, large villas, modest housing, temples, taverns (cauponae), a pottery, an exercise ground, baths, an arena, public latrines, a market hall (macellum), schools, water towers, a flower nursery, fulleries, a basilica, brothels and theatres. In between all of these were hundreds of small shrines to all kinds of gods, and ancestors and around forty public fountains.
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