And before anyone thinks that I'm making a bad pun based on the angle of the shot, I assure you that I'm not. Instead I'm referring to a comment that I've heard from a couple of people who have visited Pompeii, that it's "just a pile of rocks".

It's not that I can't understand why they say this. The word "Pompeii" has come to be associated with a window into the past. People have often come to expect that what they will see is a city that is frozen in time as if they were stepping back directly to 79 A.D.

Of course, it's not like that at all. The place was buried by a volcanic eruption; something like that is hardly going to preserve everything in a pristine state. Buildings were damaged, buildings were destroyed. Most organic matter, including wood, was obliterated. Some things have been rebuilt but most have been left as they were found after the volcanic debris was removed.

What is left is like a skeleton. To see the entire picture of what was once there, you need to do your part as well. You need to fill in the blanks and use your imagination. And unfortunately, imagination is a skill that is atrophying in direct proportion to the improvement of graphics in video games.

Some of the buildings have pots at the front. These were the food bars of the time, a time when few places had kitchens. The owners would cook large meals in the pots and people would come along and buy that food. But the roofs of those buildings are long gone, along with the shutters that once opened and closed in sync with the trading hours.

Stop. Take in the sights and the textures. Imagine these walls when new. Now fill the streets with people. They were people like us; they made meals, they made homes, they made goods to sell, they made lives, they made love, they made do. They had dreams, though most of them lived out lives which were entirely unremarkable much as most people's are today. They worked, they ate, they slept; they talked, and perhaps laughed on a good day. They were people unlike us. Slavery was normal to them and they watched people die for entertainment. And yet when someone close to them died they doubtless mourned. That is what this place is. It is an outline of the past, a sketch that your mind needs to fill with colour and form and texture to appreciate the similarities and the differences from our own time. The "pile of rocks" will not do that for you. Not even the pictures of the sexual positions in the supposed brothel (there is some debate over whether that's what it really is) will do that for you. Not even the plaster casts of some of the victims, such as the one we see here, will do that for you.

But here we have the central problem. I suspect that few people go to see Pompeii themselves which is understandable because the site is much larger than a lot of people realise and also because you need someone to try to explain what was where. They use tour guides instead, such as the one who was provided for us by the tour company. We had far too short a time but even if we had more time it's unlikely that we could have seen the entire site in a single day. However this was academic as once again the tour consisted of rushing through the site with the guide pointing to "the theatre over here, now we go through into this street where you can see some pots which were used for serving food, let's keep going down here, over here we will see the brothel then if we turn left here and keep going down you can see lead pipes and everybody keep up with me now..."

Finally we reached the end of the tour, went straight out through the gift shop without even pausing and back out of the site. Which we cannot re-enter without paying a new admission fee. Not that it mattered, because we had to find some lunch so that we could be ready to be on our way to the next destination.

I regard this as being undoubtedly the worst single tour that we had in the entire trip. Such was the pressure to keep up with the guide that while I could pause quickly to take snapshots, at no time could I stand there and feel the sun on my face as they did in 79 A.D. Nor to imagine how the buildings would have looked then. Or how the streets would have sounded. Or even how the place would have smelt.

It didn't help that some Philistine who is in charge of administering the site decided to give some sculptor whose name I don't remember free range to dump his sculptures in the middle of it for a (thankfully temporary) exhibition. Admittedly they were not entirely out of character with the site since they did use classical styles to some extent. This does not alter the fact that when trying to imagine what it was like to have been there I had abundant visual pollution that was simply not part of that time. Also the parts of Pompeii that are open and the parts that are closed are rather arbitrary as a number of visitors have observed over the years. The administration of the site could be far worse, but it could be far better as well. An indoor museum which completely reconstructs some of the houses, the furniture and so on would probably be a welcome addition as well. I saw an exhibition of Pompeii and some of its artefacts at the Melbourne Museum a few years ago. It was extremely well done and in some ways made me feel more connected to the site than actually being there did. However it is likely that having the extra time to pause and reflect that I didn't have at Pompeii is what made the difference there.

So I have been to Pompeii. But I have not yet been to Pompeii.