Revision Lesson 5 Television Day: Pompeii
This is the city of Pompeii. It is 13 miles south of Naples in Italy. You can see a few tourists in the streets. You can see the volcano, Vesuvius, in the background. It all looks very peaceful. Yet nearly 2000 years ago, in 79 A D, there was a terrible earthquake. No one expected it. One quiet day in August, Vesuvius erupted and hot ash and stones fell on Pompeii for nearly two whole days. Everywhere in the city people died suddenly. Everyone was busy at the time. The baker was baking bread, shopkeepers were shutting their shops, people were crossing the streets... but the lava from the volcano covered everything. The city disappeared. Many hundreds of years later, in 1748, a water engineer accidentally found some interesting objects. Over a hundred years passed before, little by little, archaeologists uncovered the city. You can still see the marks of wheels in the streets, the loaves of bread at the baker's and the alphabet on the schoolroom wall! |