Pompeii is amazing, but Herculaneum[1] is just mind-blowing. They're maybe 30 minutes from each other, so it's possible to visit them on the same day if you start early.

While Pompeii was covered in lava, Herculaneum was a bit further away from the volcano, so it got covered in ash - and therefore it's much better preserved.

Herculaneum was kind of a beach resort for the Pompeii rich. It has luxurious villas, the shops you'd expect, and a thermal bath that you could use today and not notice is 2000 years old.

Same with the houses, and the city in general. There's something incredibly familiar in them; I always get the feeling that we haven't invented much stuff since the Romans.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herculaneum

I found this part to be extremely interesting.

> Scratched lightly, but legibly, on an unfinished wall of a house that was being refurbished when the volcano blew is a banal notation in charcoal: “in [d]ulsit pro masumis esurit[ions],” which roughly translates as “he binged on food.” While not listing a year, the graffito, likely scrawled by a builder, cites “XVI K Nov”—the 16th day before the first of November on the ancient calendar, or October 17 on the modern one. That’s nearly two months after August 24, the fatal eruption’s official date, which originated with a letter by Pliny the Younger, an eyewitness to the catastrophe, to the Roman historian Tacitus 25 years later and transcribed over the centuries by monks.

> Massimo Osanna, Pompeii’s general director and mastermind of the project, is convinced that the notation was idly doodled a week before the blast. “This spectacular find finally allows us to date, with confidence, the disaster,” he says. “It reinforces other clues pointing to an autumn eruption: unripe pomegranates, heavy clothing found on bodies, wood-burning braziers in homes, wine from the harvest in sealed jars. When you reconstruct the daily life of this vanished community, two months of difference are important. We now have the lost piece of a jigsaw puzzle.”

Inscription: https://thumbs-prod.si-cdn.com/b-AKU2VJ_IfsLSz6vS4uxPtuRAQ=/...

I can picture the situation. A construction worker is annoyed because their coworker is off eating and not helping construct a wall. The construction worker vents their frustration by doodling on the unfinished wall. That doodle lasts 2000 years and helps archeologists determine when Mount Vesuvius eruption occurred.

Is the Getty Villa built at a 1:1 scale with the original? Because it's impressively big.