Visit Pompeii (also Stonehenge & Versailles) with Google Street View

The sto­ry of Pom­peii is well known. Back in 79 AD, Mount Vesu­vius erupt­ed and cov­ered the neigh­bor­ing Roman city with 60 feet of ash over the course of two days. The city was wiped out and then entombed for cen­turies, until archae­ol­o­gists start­ed unearthing the ruins in the 18th and 19th cen­turies, offer­ing the mod­ern world an amaz­ing win­dow into the fin­er details of ancient Roman life. (Just for the record, dig­ging con­tin­ues there today, and I even got to do some this past sum­mer.) Today, Google is help­ing deep­en the mod­ern con­nec­tion to the ancient world. Using Google Street view, you can tour Pom­peii in 3D from the com­fort of your own home. To begin walk­ing through the ancient city, just click here.

As a side note, this isn’t the first time Google has used Street View in such a way. You can also find tours of Stone­henge and Louis XIV’s Ver­sailles. Plus, you can also use Google Earth, anoth­er Google pro­gram, to tour the ancient city of Rome.

Final­ly, to dig deep­er into ancient his­to­ry, I’d rec­om­mend look­ing through our pre­vi­ous post, Learn­ing Ancient His­to­ry for Free. This will point you to some of the best free cours­es avail­able on the web.

via Mash­able and the Nation­al Post