Italy Blog #83: Pompeii Part 4: Interesting Streets and Waste Disposal

Wheel indent in Pompeii street

In this blog about Pompeii, Italy we're going to make you look down at the streets, because they were pretty amazing and ingenious. We'll also explain how they had indoor toilets and waste water disposal.

STREETS - The streets throughout the entire city were all hand laid stone. Not only that, but they were engineered with gutters along each side of the street, to carry waste water and run-off from rains, to a lower location outside of the city. It was ingenious!  To think, that that was part of a society built before 100 B.C. is amazing. What's sad is that was lost and forgotten for 1500 years until after the middle ages.

Pompeii indoor toilet

RIDDING WASTE WATER - "Roman hydraulic engineering and city design being what it was, Pompeii was well supplied with constant flows of spring water from the inland mountains.It seems that most streets were constantly flushed with water overflowing from fountains, and so waste (as in the case of that brothel chamber pot) could be disposed of by dumping it into the continuously flushed gutter,"According to: http://toilet-guru.com/pompeii.php). It's a pretty basic one-hole frame design. A chamber pot would be placed below the hole, and then taken out and emptied into the sewer immediately outside.
So, it's an indoor toilet, but not indoor plumbing.

STEPPING AROUND WASTE WATER - The Pompeii people were so ingenious they thought of everything. To avoid stepping in waste water that would run down the streets, the installed 3 stones in the street from one side to the other, so people could step on to cross. Animals and wheeled carts were simply maneuvered around them.

A main street with gutters

WHEEL MARKINGS - As we walked through the city we also noticed there were streets where the rock was worn down. We learned that merchants would use carts with wheels to bring their goods to market, and continual traffic wore grooves in the stone where the wheels traveled.


NEXT:  THE BROTHEL AND PENIS DIRECTIONS (yes, really)