Joyika
93130
1601
9
Feb 18, 2024 9:18 PM
Joyika
93130
1601
9
Sm9yCg
Also horse piss and shit
monkeyshines
That'd do a job on your undercarriage
saganworshipper
Um…no. Horsesh!t and more on the streets. It does rain a whole lot along the Amalfi.
RichardHardley
If you get to that part of Italy, Ercolano is much the same, but, it's much less crowded.
HeraldOfTheBadger
Also chariots made the wrong width tab into them and broke. Which may have been a defense against foreign chariots? Idk if the got debunked
TheJackKetch
Yeah, but what have the Romans ever done for us?
smellyhippy
Do you come this way often? No, it must be the cobblestones
AllTheGoodUserNamesAreTakenFML
I thought Roman roads had adequate drainage.
CgnCalling
Also to not step in horse shit
AnDanDan
You can also see the grooves in the road made from carts passing through the intersection. These curbs/stones are like 2-3 inches off the ground, they felt quite high up.
ChewyTheWookie
Fun Fact: Did you know that the width modern day axles and the width of Roman chariots are the basis of many modern day arguments on various message boards?
QueenNova
God I love that place
IAmGORT
I've walked up that very street in Pompeii waaay back in 1990. I have an almost identical pic.
Another cool thing about Pompeii is that they put chunks of white quarts rock into their roadways because on a moonlight night their reflections are clearly visible....they invented highway cat's eyes! Amazing place if you can visit there.
Thornaxe
Added bonus of making the wagons slow the hell down.
DragonBjorne
Something something train tracks.
SlyeFox
Something something false myth.
Twinklepot
They used a type of white reflective stone on the sides of roads used at night (our road council workers could take a few tips from the Romans)
IlluminaBlade
I'm guessing the wheel bases were expected to pass through the gaps?
kInADress
I recognize it from here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGwPSPIhohk :)
ICutRocksOnYoutube
Shit, maybe this is where I get it.
JimWasTaken
Also I imagine the lower roads were steeped in horse poop.. also also, found it funny how those 2000+ year roads had pedestrian sidewalks whereas many of the modern surrounding towns do not and it’s a free for all.
Winchcove
You can see where zebra crossings originated
Ilickedthecinnabar
The wear n tear on the stones have helped archeologists understand the flow of traffic within Pompeii and that some streets were one-ways
thetonestarr
Reminds me of the launching ramp on the Great Sky Island in Tears of the Kingdom.
GiddyKipper
@bullseyecherry32
DrDadJokes
I have an idea of an album cover about musicians crossing that street... oh and one of them is wearing shoes
Ploty
Prove that Romans had SUV's
onlyhalfghost
yes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariot
TheSlouchOfBethlehem
Imagine watching the Roman work crew that laid this thing down. Bunch of dudes come by with rocks tied to jackasses and a week or a year later you've upgraded to paved roads.
songbird811
* slaves
UtahGimm3Tw0
The Roman army had some of the best engineers of the ancient world. When Caesar was laying siege to Alesia he had two massive walls built around the city; the first to keep people from leaving and the second from keeping reinforcements from coming in and then just posted up between those two walls. So cool
AllMaktAtTengilVarBefriare
He and his legion also built the first two bridges across the Rhine river, absolutely crazy.
VictusVonGuyver
The crazy thing is that the reinforcements besieged the outer walls as Caesar besieged the settlement. Eventually both the city and the reinforcements started pushing through into both those walls but Caesar still won.
UtahGimm3Tw0
Fucking nuts. My favorite description of Rome was that as a culture and as individual citizens they were at their most dangerous when they were cornered. So much so that oftentimes they’d purposely put themselves in situations like that
VictusVonGuyver
Yes, a famous example is Cortes burning his own boats so his men won't have a way home from the lands they are conquering. Various generals have put their armies to the back of a river so that they'd have to fight or die. Another one was one Zhuge Liang who bluffed an invading army into not attacking and undermanned city by simply sitting and having tea at the open gates to that city.
LifeIsADanceOfMinds
Also, the stones kept those crazy Roman low-rider chariots off the main thoroughfares.
BenderRodriguezz
Those got-dang hooligans!
bufordTjustice
BlueskydragonFX
ROGUEdenied
You can see the ruts cause by the carts on the stones
seanmccorkle
Right. We 'll have none of that "Fast and Furious" nonsense here https://youtu.be/frE9rXnaHpE?si=QKQrxRF8PWhX0dDR
uniquepseudonym
You're not entirely wrong. Cart traffic was generally banned during day time hours in Roman cities under the Lex Julia municipalis. Deliveries to shops were to be done at night.
RogueAndPeasantSlave
Pimp my raeda
BillHubbard
Just this, actually.
I0VE525P00GE
I heard they lived their lives 10 minutes at a time.
ferdinandmagellin31415
Huh?
Frederf
10 second quarter mile phrase but slower
turdswindler9000
OmnipotentBeing
AllMaktAtTengilVarBefriare
True Roman bread for true Romans!
flacoloco
Brilliant show
AyatollahBahloni
Pompeii and Herculaneum are two of the most amazing archæological sites I have ever visited. I could spend days there exploring and just taking in the amazing antiquity and preservation, and contemplating the disaster.
Carrera26
Agreed. Also, sooo many stone cocks!
pm1001
So colorful
jemappelletosca
Me too, I could have spent weeks at those two locations. Fascinating, and you can imagine what it was like because so much is still there.
englishmaninnm
Ditto, I found Herculaneum more interesting, probably because it has paint on the walls still, stuffike that. I'm in a part of the UK where there's tons of Roman stuff, so it was all familiar, but definitely more special. There also an old villa out past Sorrento, stuck brought out on a kind of promontory, they must've had a hell of a view when Vesuvious went off.
truthader
How cool! . Travel
raptorlight3000
Went there last year after staying in sorrento, that little cove in the old roman villa was amazing
englishmaninnm
Right? Crazy. And no-one (it seems) knows anything about it!
phiemale
Bath?
englishmaninnm
Cirencester
phiemale
Ahhh cool!
lpooptoomuch
favorite part of pompeii was the arena in the back, I liked it more than going to see the colosseum because you could actually go anywhere in it.
jemappelletosca
Yes, and when I was there it was super quiet!
AyatollahBahloni
1971, a friend of mine at the amphitheater.
AyatollahBahloni
... In the snow, a rare occurrence for Pompeii.
RIxspacexCK
I've seen the same stone photo and it indicated that these were needed because that was a drainage ditch with the town's waste; human and all types of garbage etc. So those stones were needed to forge the vile river of muck.
arikelrecords2000
Just an average Roman day
EmanNiemThcin
Possible, but you can clearly see the identations in the stone of decades or even centuries of wheels going down the same track at the bottom of the image so I have doubts about that version.
Hyzenthlay021
Rick Steves audio guide only mentions them as chariot control devices
Rookvlees
Bingo. Before autos, city streets were awash in shit from horses and other draft animals. Those long steps up to the front of fancy rowhomes in parts of London, Philadelphia, NYC? To rise above the shit. Metal boot scrapes outside as well to scrape off all the shit. Or as much as people could manage. You still see boot scrapes outside the doors of some old houses.
MissNY
When I was there a few years ago, the tour guide confirmed this view.
drduffer
*ford. Forge is a different thing entirely. Autocorrect only goes so far.
bildschoen
You're not fording it, though (crossing through at a shallow spot.] *traverse?
SaturnineCult
I kind of like "..to forge the vile river of muck!" Has to come from a fantasy story villain.
Whatdoyousaytoanicecupoftea
Burning poo!
RIxspacexCK
Yes, ford. I missed my chance at saying this was to ford the fjord (although I know a fjord is a narrow sea inlet with steep sides created by a glacier).
ExtremeDevice5938
Good bot
IllegalDuckling
I don't ever wanna smell something like that, but part of me does wonder how bad it actually was
zenoshogun
The volcano can only have been an improvement.
Achterhuis
Hard to say. There would have been horse manure all over any place that used them. I heard there was hundreds of thousands, if not millions of tons of manure removed from 19th century city streets every year. Probably was enough to make your eyes water and throat seize if it was dry out.
dobe0TieDancer
There was so much poop that the level of the land went up over the years. It's why there's a lot of ancient buildings discovered underground.
DanielAsparagus
Well They didn’t wait till the last minute like it was taxes. You scoop as you go.
DanielAsparagus
It was bad enough that the aristocratic practice of living in a summer country home was only a thing because of the stench of cooking summer shit in the cities. Think London.
Toffeeaccident
The more things change the more they stay the same
DanielAsparagus
Imagine changing your zip code for 4 months a year because of the smell. If you haven’t seen it watch Perfume: the story of a murderer. Does more to explain the power of smell than anything I’ve ever read.
Toffeeaccident
Oh I was more referring to the fact that London smells like shit.
troublemutt
Romans had sewerage. Muck wasn't thrown into the streets until way later after the fall of the empire
forreference
Not all cities did.
InkyBlinkyPinkyAndClyde
Generally yes, but private toilets in Pompeii and Herculaneum weren't usually connected to the sewage system. So a servant had to clean out the toilets and dump the human waste manually into the seage system - ie the street. Garbage was also dumped into the street, which would clog up the sewage system. And then horse poop, probably dog and cat poop, etc. not to mention just mud and dirt. You wouldn't want to walk through it all.
QuartzPoker
True, but horses do their business in the streets because it's hard to potty train a horse. There used to be an entire workforce devoted to keeping horse crap out of the streets, then the car was invented
agonarch
I mean, there's the manure bag? That was required in some places as.. uh.. 'emissions regulations'
QuartzPoker
Horse diapers weren't invented until sometime later