Pompeii Archaeology

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Vesuvius and Pompeii in 1870

Pompeii (30 minutes by train from Naples and Sorrento) is the famous Roman town destroyed and entombed in ash in the huge A.D. 79 huge eruption of by Vesuvius. It is Italy's most visited tourist attraction (the Vatican receives more but technically it is part of the Vatican State not Italy). About 2 to 4 million visitors visit the 250 acre site each year. When the famous German poet Goethe toured Pompeii in the 1780s he remarked, “Many disasters have befallen the world , but few have brought posterity so much joy.”

Forgotten for 17 centuries Pompeii lay quietly under a three-meter-thick blanket of hardened ash until it was rediscovered in 1600. The first discoveries were made by farmers who dug down below their fields and found parts of buildings. Archeologists began digging Pompeii in 1748, making it the world's oldest archaeological dig. Today Pompeii is overseen by Massimo Osanna, the director of the archaeological site.

The discovery of Pompeii triggered an interest in all things Roman throughout Europe the same way the discovery of King Tut’s tomb set a wave of Egyptmania in the 1920s. Pompeii became an important stop on the grand tours of Europe. Tourists, some of them with shovels in hand, strolled though the ruins and took home souvenirs to decorate heir homes.

The discovery of Pompeii also set in motion a neo-classical movement in Europe in which aristocrats and monarchs attempted to recreate Rome with architecture, art and literature. Napoleon, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette all decorated their houses with Pompeiian touches. Christian dogmatists turned the event into a mortality tale highlighting the fate of those indulged in the decadent Roman lifestyle.

The artifacts unearthed at Pompeii have given archeologist valuable insights into everyday Roman life. Among the items that have been found are paintings, furniture, kitchen utensils and a bakery with 81 carbonized loaves of bread. There was lots of graffiti. Pompeii houses were mostly windowless. Their plaster walls proved t be inviting canvasses for people to express their written thoughts, some of which seem familiar today such as “Auge Loves Allotenus” and “Gaias Pumidius Dipilus was Here.”

Artistic pieces that have been unearthed include a gold bracelet of a two-headed snake that weighs half a kilogram; a silver wine goblet adorned with olives that hang off it like pearl earings; a bronze gladiator helmet sculpted with reliefs of women; a gold and silver statuette of Mercury with a small goat; and a finely-crafted necklace made of 94 ivy leaves made of gold foil. Most of these treasures are at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples.

Websites on Ancient Rome: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Rome sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Late Antiquity sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; BBC Ancient Rome bbc.co.uk/history; Perseus Project - Tufts University; perseus.tufts.edu ; Lacus Curtius penelope.uchicago.edu; The Internet Classics Archive classics.mit.edu ; Bryn Mawr Classical Review bmcr.brynmawr.edu; Cambridge Classics External Gateway to Humanities Resources web.archive.org; Ancient Rome resources for students from the Courtenay Middle School Library web.archive.org ; History of ancient Rome OpenCourseWare from the University of Notre Dame web.archive.org ; United Nations of Roma Victrix (UNRV) History unrv.com

Early History of the Excavations at Pompeii

from the Casa de Frutteto

Pompeii was rediscovered in 1599. Excavations at Pompeii began in 1748 but the identity of the site as being Pompeii was not confirmed until 1763. According to Archaeology magazine: “Pompeii lay entombed for 1,500 years, until its existence was hinted at in the late sixteenth century by small discoveries of ancient remains made by the Renaissance architect Domenico Fontana during construction of an underground water tunnel. No further work took place at the site for almost 150 years. In 1763, an inscription was found confirming that the site, until then known only as La Cività, or “The City,” was in fact Roman Pompeii. [Source: Benjamin Leonard and Jarrett A. Lobell, Archaeology Magazine, July-August 2019 ^^]

Joshua Hammer wrote in Smithsonian Magazine: In 1738, Maria Amalia Christine, a nobleman’s daughter from Saxony, wed Charles of Bourbon, the King of Naples, and became entranced by classical sculptures displayed in the garden of the royal palace in Naples. Digging began in Pompeii ten years later. Workers burrowed far more easily through the softer deposits of pumice and ash, unearthing streets, villas, frescoes, mosaics and the remains of the dead. “Stretched out full-length on the floor was a skeleton,” C.W. Ceram writes in Gods, Graves and Scholars: The Story of Archaeology, a definitive account of the excavations, “with gold and silver coins that had rolled out of bony hands still seeking, it seemed, to clutch them fast.” [Source: Joshua Hammer, Smithsonian Magazine, July 2015 ~|~]

Early on, these excavations were less scientific explorations than treasure-hunting expeditions aimed at collecting the paintings, sculptures, mosaics, jewelry, and silver that now fill many of the world’s museums.After decades of largely disorganized, poorly documented projects, Italian archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli became director of excavations at Pompeii in 1860. He meticulously documented and mapped the site, dividing it into the nine regions (Regio I–IX) that are still in use. ^^

Fiorelli, poured liquid plaster into the cavities in the solidified ash created by the decomposing flesh, creating perfect casts of Pompeii’s victims at the moment of their deaths—down to the folds in their togas, the straps of their sandals, their agonized facial expressions. Early visitors on the Grand Tour, like today’s tourists, were thrilled by these morbid tableaux. “How dreadful are the thoughts which such a sight suggests,” mused the English writer Hester Lynch Piozzi, who visited Pompeii in the 1780s. “How horrible the certainty that such a scene might be all acted over again tomorrow; and that, who today are spectators, may become spectacles to travelers of a succeeding century.”~|~

Later History of the Excavations at Pompeii

Franz Lidz wrote in Smithsonian magazine: Amedeo Maiuri, a human dynamo, who, as superintendent from 1924 to 1961, directed digs during some of Italy’s most trying times. (During World War II, the Allied aerial assault of 1943 — more than 160 bombs dropped — demolished the site’s gallery and some of its most celebrated monuments. Over the years, 96 unexploded bombs have been found and inactivated; a few more are likely to be uncovered in areas not yet excavated.) Maiuri created what was effectively an open-air museum and hired a staff of specialists to continuously watch over the grounds. “He wanted to excavate everywhere,” says Osanna. “Unfortunately, his era was very poorly documented. It is very difficult to understand if an object came from one house or another. What a pity: His excavations made very important discoveries, but were carried out with inadequate instruments, using inaccurate procedures.” [Source: Franz Lidz, Smithsonian magazine, September 2019]

By the late 2000s, the Italian government had slashed spending on culture to the point where ancient Pompeii was falling down faster than it could be repaired. Though the site generated more tourist revenue than any monument in Italy except the Colosseum, so little attention had been paid to day-to-day upkeep that in 2008 Silvio Berlusconi, then prime minister, declared a state of emergency at Pompeii and, to stave off its disintegration, appointed Marcello Fiori as the new special commissioner. It didn’t take long for the restorer to disintegrate, too. In 2013, Fiori was indicted after he allegedly awarded building contracts inflated by as much as 400 percent; spent $126,000 of taxpayers’ money on an adoption scheme for the 55 feral dogs wandering forlornly amid the ruins (about $2,300 per stray); $67,000 on 1,000 promotional bottles of wine — enough to pay the annual salary of a badly needed additional archaeologist; $9.8 million in a rush job to repair seating at the city’s amphitheater, altering its historical integrity by cementing over the original stones; and $13,000 to publish 50 copies of a book on Fiori’s extraordinary accomplishments.

Rebecca Mead wrote in The New Yorker:“In 2014, the archeologist Massimo Osanna was appointed director of Pompeii, and he immediately launched an effort to restore confidence in the future of the ancient past. Sophie Hay told me, “I went to Pompeii shortly after Osanna got the job, and after five minutes on the site with him I got the idea of where he was going. He walked down the main street, the Via dell’Abbondanza, and there was all this horrible plastic netting in the doorways of buildings, the sort used on building sites to keep people out.” The site looked bandaged and bruised. “He was absolutely horrified — he called people over who were working there and said, ‘Can’t we just remove all of this?’ ” Osanna made Pompeii more inviting to visitors, and by 2019 their numbers had swollen to four million annually. That year, the House of the Gladiators reopened to the public after a reconstruction of its damaged frescoes, becoming a symbol not of Pompeii’s decline but of its renewed vitality. [Source: Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker, November 22, 2021

“Meanwhile, the charismatic Osanna won over the press by trumpeting discoveries resulting from the restoration work in Regio V. “He was absolutely brilliant at it,” Mary Beard told me. “Without actually doing any major excavation, he gave a series of carefully timed bits of good news.” A headless male skeleton was discovered at a crossroads next to the House of the Silver Wedding, as was a huge block of stone, which lay, almost cartoonishly, right where the skull should have been. (The gruesome suggestion that the man had been decapitated was overturned by later analysis, which suggested that he had been suffocated by the pyroclastic flow — superheated rock, ash, and gases that rushed down Vesuvius’s flank.) In a house that had been buried beneath a swath of rough land, a fresco depicting the god Priapus weighing his oversized member on a scale was uncovered. The press hailed the new discoveries, and in 2020 Osanna was named director general of Italy’s state-run museums.

Despite this nearly constant collecting, surveying, mapping, and digging, as of 2018, about a third of Pompeii still had never been excavated. At this point, in Regio V, in the northern part of the city, the layers of lapilli, ash, and volcanic mud started to collapse under their own weight, imperiling excavated properties and adjacent streets. To address this, a new excavation project was begun in a previously unexplored part of Pompeii. ^^

In February 2021, when he was 40 years old, Gabriel Zuchtriegel, was appointed the director of the Archeological Park of Pompeii. The German-born Zuchtriegel was formerly the director of the archeological site at Paestum, forty-odd miles south of Pompeii. He has also been adept with the press, bringing attention to this and that new discovery while focusing on cpnservation and restoration. He told The New Yorker: We are not going to excavate just for the sake of excavating. It would be very problematic, and somehow irresponsible.” Among other things, Zuchtriegel has introduced a program whereby trained hawks sweep the ruins, frightening off the pigeons. Pigeon droppings are especially damaging to wall paintings and stucco. He said this way, “You can reduce the pigeon population by eighty-five to ninety per cent!” [Source: Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker, November 22, 2021]

Excavations at Pompeii

Excavation work at Pompeii continues today, with archeological teams using everything from backhoes to dental picks to uncover the lost city's secrets. One crew is attempted to assemble an entire roof from bottle-cap-size pieces, a project that could take more than hundred years. "We've probably got another thousand years of archeology left before we finish with Pompeii," one archeologist told National Geographic.

Pompeii street

Pompeii is far from the pristine, undisturbed site it is sometimes made out to be. The Cambridge classicist Mary Beard has pointed that Pompeii is “disrupted and disturbed, evacuated and pillaged... It bears the marks (and the scars) of all kinds of histories. It has endured scavengers and looters who took to the site soon after the eruption and the ‘the rough and ready approach’ of early excavators,” making reconstructing an early history of the city difficult.” Pompeii was heavily bombed by the Allies in World War II and many of the houses tourists visit have had to be rebuilt twice.

Over the years, archaeologists have excavated golden coins with Nero's face; snake-like bracelets worn by the wife of Nero; gladiator helmets; sculptures of Nike and Venus; 500 bronze seals with names of homeowners or their administrators; and a 115-piece silver service found on the table at Meander's House. Most of these items as well as the best mosaics and frescoes are in the archeological museum in Naples. A shocking number of paintings and painted signs have been lost after vanished when exposed to air and the elements. Among these were an elaborate series of bright murals from the amphitheater’s curtain wall destroyed by frost the year after they were discovered in 1815.

Relatively little archeological work has been done under the A.D. 79 layers to determine Pompeii’s history before the eruption. From what has been ascertained so far the city was founded in the sixth century B.C. Pompeii and Herculaneum were occupied by native Oscans, Tyrrhenians and Pelasgians, and also by Samnites, Etruscans and Greek colonists. In 80 B.C., Pompeii became a Roman veteran's colony.

Hammer wrote: “Pompeii continues to amaze with fresh revelations. A team of archaeologists recently studied the latrines and drains of several houses in the city in an effort to investigate the dietary habits of the Roman empire. Middle- and lower-class residents, they found, had a simple yet healthy diet that included lentils, fish and olives. The wealthy favored fattier fare, such as suckling pig, and dined on delicacies including sea urchins and, apparently, a giraffe—although DNA evidence is currently being tested. “What makes Pompeii special,” says Michael MacKinnon of the University of Winnipeg, one of the researchers, “is that its archaeological wealth encourages us to reanimate this city.” ~|~

Pompeii Graffiti

According to Archaeology magazine:Anyone walking along Pompeii’s busy streets couldn’t help but notice the eye-catching letters painted across many of the city’s houses, shop fronts, and public spaces. Some of this graffiti promoted political candidates, while other examples advertised everything from gladiatorial games to rooms for rent. However, not all messages on Pompeii’s walls were so showy. [Source: Benjamin Leonard and Jarrett A. Lobell, Archaeology Magazine, July-August 2019]

Pompeii graffiti

Thousands of examples of a less conspicuous type of ancient graffiti — writings and drawings incised in wall plaster, or occasionally written with more ephemeral materials such as charcoal and chalk — survive today and capture communications among Pompeii’s residents. “Unlike most modern graffiti, graffiti in ancient Pompeii was a positive form of social exchange,” says epigrapher Rebecca Benefiel of Washington and Lee University. One of the most commonly found words in this more informal style of graffiti is feliciter (“happily”), which, when paired with personal names, indicates good wishes for friends, colleagues, and even the emperor.

“Benefiel is director of the Ancient Graffiti Project and is currently documenting and analyzing all the extant graffiti in Pompeii, much of which is at risk of fading away. She has identified examples of all sorts of writing across the city, including tally marks scratched on shop walls to track item inventories and the words of satisfied customers who scrawled praise for the sexual prowess of prostitutes in the city’s main brothel. In both private houses and public buildings, Benefiel has found that people traded quotations from the first-century B.C. love poets Ovid and Propertius, often adapting poetic lines to humorous effect. Says Benefiel, “Looking at graffiti in context gives such a strong sense of the people who inhabited these spaces and left their mark.”

Digitalization of Pompeii Graffiti

On inscribed graffiti at Pompeii, the historian William Stearns Davis wrote: “There are almost no literary remains from Antiquity possessing greater human interest than these inscriptions scratched on the walls of Pompeii (destroyed 79 A.D.). Their character is extremely varied, and they illustrate in a keen and vital way the life of a busy, luxurious, and, withal, tolerably typical, city of some 25,000 inhabitants in the days of the Flavian Caesars. Most of these inscriptions carry their own message with little need of a commentary. Perhaps those of the greatest importance are the ones relating to local politics. It is very evident that the so-called "monarchy" of the Emperors had not involved the destruction of political life, at least in the provincial towns. [Source: William Stearns Davis, ed., “Readings in Ancient History: Illustrative Extracts from the Sources,” 2 Vols. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1912-13), Vol. II: Rome and the West, pp. 260-265]

Pompeii graffiti

Adrienne LaFrance wrote in The Atlantic: “But despite all this appreciation, Pompeii’s graffiti hasn’t been easy for most people to access. Even in the Internet age, a time when there’s aague expectation that all of human knowledge has somehow coalesced online (it hasn’t), the inscriptions haven’t been comprehensively digitized. Scholars have to either piece together disparate texts found only in research libraries, or visit Pompeii in-person. But much of the graffiti—indeed, much of Pompeii’s history—has been looted, defaced, or destroyed over time. Ironically, some of that vandalism has come at the hands of people who’ve etched their own graffiti over the originals. “Overall, people want to write on things to be known. To be everywhere at once yet nowhere at all.” [Source: Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic, Mar 29, 2016 |^|]

“All this is why Benefiel is leading an effort to map the graffiti of Pompeii and Herculaneum, a nearby town that was also buried by the 79 A.D. eruption. With a grant from a National Endowment for the Humanities, she and other scholars are building a suite of tools to digitally catalogue, contextualize, and analyze these ancient inscriptions. |^|

““I’m really interested in trying to look at the whole of what we have from these cities, and thinking a bit more broadly about how we can identify who’s writing messages and where they’re writing them,” Benefiel said. “Right now, that’s really hard to do just because of how they’ve been published, and how the map has completely changed because excavations got much more expansive.” |^|

“Digitizing what’s known about the graffiti at Pompeii—and making a searchable database that’s rich with metadata like height, writing style, language, and other details—is also a way of teasing out connections between inscriptions that aren’t otherwise apparent. Perhaps, for example, scholars will be able to identify common authorship among a variety of geographically disperse messages. Or maybe they’ll be able to understand what kinds of establishments are adorned with certain graffiti, based on the nature of the messages written there. |^|

Studying Pompeii’s Garbage

Researchers at Pompeii have done a systematic survey of street trash, buckets and even storage containers to gain an understanding of the relationship between Romans and their possessions. “We’re actually starting to see evidence of people’s choices and how they dealt with their objects,” Caroline Cheung, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, involved in the project, told USA Today. “We get a sense of how people were using them, how they were storing them, whether they were throwing them away or keeping them.” [Source: Traci Watson, USA Today, January 20, 2017]

Pompeii bakery

Traci Watson of USA Today wrote: “The humble objects left behind show that people didn’t necessarily go easy on their possessions, even though the articles of everyday life were often purchased rather than homemade. “Take the objects discovered at a farmhouse near Pompeii, where the cooking range was so heaped with ashes that it’s clear “they just basically didn’t take out the garbage,” says Theodore Peña of the University of California, Berkeley. “Like frat boys.” Peña leads the project, which is taking a close look at artifacts found during previous excavations.

“In a storeroom of the kitchen, shelves held gear that “had the hell beaten out of it,” Peña says. There was a bronze bucket full of dents, perhaps where it had banged into the side of the well just outside the farmhouse. There were pots with bits of the rims broken off and a casserole so badly cracked that it was close to falling apart, but people had kept them to use again.

“At a complex near Pompeii that seems to have been a wine-bottling facility, there were more than 1,000 amphorae, ceramic vessels that were the shipping containers of their day. Many were patched and waiting to be refilled, presumably with wine, Peña says.

“When the researchers delved into street rubbish, they expected to find lots of broken glass, used for perfume bottles and other common items. Instead they found almost none, a sign that even shards of glass were being collected and made into something else. “It’s too early to say whether the people of Pompeii were thrifty adherents of recycling. But the indications so far are that “ceramics and other types of objects were being reused, repurposed or at least repaired,” Cheung says, in contrast to today’s “throwaway society. … If I break a cheap mug, I probably throw it away. I don’t even think about repairing it.”

Problems at Pompeii

Dr Joanne Berry wrote for the BBC: At Pompeii, “The archaeological record has also been affected by clandestine excavations, and by the poor preservation of some materials, such as wood. Critics complain that too much money is being spent on glamorous high-profile digs at Pompeii and not enough is being spent to preserve structures that have already been unearthed and are in danger of collapsing. Some archaeologists argue that a ban on new digs should be imposed and money should go into preservation. It is estimated that $280 million is necessary to halt Pompeii's decay, about ten times it annual budget. [Source: Dr Joanne Berry, Pompeii Images, BBC, March 29, 2011 |::|]

Vandals have knocked the heads off statues; stray dogs wander around; tourists take pieces of marble as souvenirs; water bottles are left at the feet of statues; and squatters have planted vegetable gardens in unexcavated areas. When archeologist excavated he House of Amarantus in the 1950s they unearthed neat stacks of amphorae. When the returned in 1994 all the vessels had ben smashed.

Frescoes have faded, walls have collapsed, 2,000-year-old floor tiles are exposed to the rain. Guides are known to accept bribes for letting tourists go into unauthorized areas. Guards have been accused of participating in lotting One guarded pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a tourist from Texas in 1996 and he didn't loss his job.

Crime is a problem. Organized crime groups have been awarded contracts for maintenance and restoration projects. Thieves frequently raid the sites. During the past 35 years more than 600 items form frescoes to bricks have been pilfered from Pompeii. One of the worst thefts occurred in 1977 when someone hacked 14 frescoes from a villa knows as the House of Gladiators. In January 2004, thieves cut frescoes from the House of Chaste Lovers. Visitors also complain that there is a shortage of toilets and many signs are only in Italian.

Decline of the Pompeii Archaeological Site

fresco in the Casa Deo Vettii

Joshua Hammer wrote in Smithsonian Magazine: “Abruptly, we reach an orange-mesh barricade. “Vietato L’Ingresso,” the sign says—entry forbidden. It marks the end of the road for visitors to this storied corner of ancient Rome. Just down the street lies what Turin’s newspaper La Stampa called Italy’s “shame”: the shattered remains of the Schola Armaturarum Juventus Pompeiani, a Roman gladiators’ headquarters with magnificent paintings depicting a series of Winged Victories—goddesses carrying weapons and shields. Five years ago, following several days of heavy rains, the 2,000-year-old structure collapsed into rubble, generating international headlines and embarrassing the government of then-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. The catastrophe renewed concern about one of the world’s greatest vestiges of antiquity. “I almost had a heart attack,” the site’s archaeological director, Grete Stefani, later confided to me. [Source: Joshua Hammer, Smithsonian Magazine, July 2015 ~|~]

“Since then this entire section of Pompeii has been closed to the public, while a committee appointed by a local judge investigates the cause of the collapse. “It makes me angry to see this,” Irlando, a genial 59-year-old with a mop of graying hair, tells me, peering over the barrier for a better look. Irlando enters the nearby Basilica, ancient Pompeii’s law court and a center of commerce, its lower-level colonnade fairly intact. Irlando points out a stone lintel balanced on a pair of slender Corinthian columns: Black blotches stain the lintel’s underside. “It’s a sign that water has entered into it, and it’s created mold,” he tells me with disgust. A few hundred yards away, at the southern edge of the ruins, we peer past the cordoned-off entrance to another neglected villa, in Latin a domus. The walls sag, the frescoes are fading into a dull blur, and a jungle of chest-high grass and weeds chokes the garden. “This one looks like a war zone,” says Irlando.~|~

“Pompeii has suffered devastating losses since the Schola Armaturarum collapsed in 2010. Every year since then has witnessed additional damage. As recently as February, portions of a garden wall at the villa known as the Casa di Severus gave way after heavy rains. Many other dwellings are disasters in the making, propped up by wooden struts or steel supports. Closed-off roads have been colonized by moss and grass, shrubs sprout from cracks in marble pedestals, stray dogs snarl at passing visitors.”~|~

Pompeii Scolded by UNESCO for Shoddy Restoration and Corruption

Pompeii Temple of Apollo

In 2013, UNESCO, the United Nations agency that seeks to preserve the world’s most significant cultural assets, threatened to place Pompeii on its list of World Heritage sites in peril unless Italian authorities gave higher priority to protecting it. Joshua Hammer wrote in Smithsonian Magazine: “A 2011 Unesco report about the problems cited everything from “inappropriate restoration methods and a general lack of qualified staff” to an inefficient drainage system that “gradually degrades both the structural condition of the buildings as well as their decor.” Pompeii has also been plagued by mismanagement and corruption. The grounds are littered with ungainly construction projects that squandered millions of euros but were never completed or used.In 2012, Irlando discovered that an emergency fund set up by the Italian government in 2008 to shore up ancient buildings was instead spent on inflated construction contracts, lights, dressing rooms, a sound system and a stage at Pompeii’s ancient theater. Rather than creating a state-of-the-art concert venue, as officials claimed, the work actually harmed the historic integrity of the site. [Source: Joshua Hammer, Smithsonian Magazine, July 2015 ~|~]

“Irlando’s investigation led to government charges of “abuse of office” against Marcello Fiori, a special commissioner given carte-blanche power by Berlusconi to administer the funds. Fiori is accused of having misspent €8 million ($9 million) on the amphitheater project. In March, Italian authorities seized nearly €6 million ($7 million) in assets from Fiori. He has denied the accusations.~|~

“Caccavo, the Salerno-based construction firm that obtained the emergency-fund contracts, allegedly overcharged the state on everything from gasoline to fire-prevention materials. Its director was placed under house arrest. Pompeii’s director of restoration, Luigi D’Amora, was arrested. Eight individuals are facing prosecution for charges including misallocation of public funding in connection with the scandal.“This was a truffa, a scam,” says Irlando, pointing out a trailer behind the stage where the police have stored theatrical equipment as evidence of corruption. “It was all completely useless.”~|~

“Administrative malpractice is not unheard of in Italy, of course. But because of the historic importance and popular appeal of Pompeii, the negligence and decay in evidence there are beyond the pale. “In Italy, we have the greatest collection of treasures in the world, but we don’t know how to manage them,” says Claudio D’Alessio, the former mayor of the modern city of Pompei, founded in 1891 and located a few miles from the ruins. A recent editorial in Milan’s Corriere della Sera declared that Pompeii’s disastrous state was “the symbol of all the sloppiness and inefficiencies of a country that has lost its good sense and has not managed to recover it.”~|~

“For its part, Unesco issued an ultimatum in June 2013: If preservation and restoration efforts “fail to deliver substantial progress in the next two years,” the organization declared, Pompeii could be placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger, a designation recently applied to besieged ancient treasures such as Aleppo and the Old City of Damascus in Syria.~|~

Great Pompeii Project

Casa Vettii

The “Grande Progetto Pompei,” or Great Pompeii Project, is $140 million conservation and restoration program launched in 2012 and largely underwritten by the European Union. Is it run by Massimo Osanna is with the aim of restoring public faith in Pompeii after years of neglect.

Franz Lidz wrote in Smithsonian magazine: The robust campaign that Osanna has directed since 2014 marks a new era in old Pompeii, which earlier this decade suffered visibly from age, corruption, vandalism, climate change, mismanagement, underfunding, institutional neglect and collapses caused by downpours [Source: Franz Lidz, Smithsonian magazine, September 2019]

“The project has led to the opening, or reopening, of dozens of passageways and 39 buildings, including the Schola Armaturarum. “The restoration of the Schola was a symbol of redemption for Pompeii,” says Osanna, who is also a professor of classical archaeology at the University of Naples. He has assembled a vast team of more than 200 experts to conduct what he terms “global archaeology,” including not only archaeologists but also archaeozoologists, anthropologists, art restorers, biologists, bricklayers, carpenters, computer scientists, demographers, dentists, electricians, geologists, geneticists, mapping technicians, medical engineers, painters, plumbers, paleobotanists, photographers and radiologists. They’re aided by enough modern analytical tools to fill an imperial bathhouse, from ground sensors and drone videography to CAT scans and virtual reality.

“Osanna laughs softly at the mention of a rumor he spread to combat theft at the site, where visitors regularly attempt to make off with souvenirs. “I told a newspaper about the curse on objects stolen from Pompeii,” he says. Since then, Osanna has received hundreds of purloined bricks, fresco fragments and bits of painted plaster in packages from across the world. Many were accompanied by letters of apology claiming that the mementos had brought bad luck. A repentant South American wrote that after he pinched a stone, his family “had nothing but trouble.” An Englishwoman whose parents had pocketed a roof tile while on their honeymoon returned it with a note: “All through my childhood this piece was showcased at my home. Now that they are both dead, I want to give it back. Please, don’t judge my mother and father. They were children of their generation.”

Pompeii now seems more secure than it has since October 23, 79 A.D. Mary Beard, the Cambridge University classicist and reigning authority on Roman history, contends that the wisest course might be to stop digging for new answers: “One-third of the town is underground, and that is where it should stay, safe and sound, for the future. Meanwhile, we can look after the other two-thirds as best we can, delaying its collapse as far as is reasonable.”

“To preserve Pompeii’s first-century treasures and decipher a history related to the larger narrative of classical antiquity, Osanna has embraced 21st-century technology. “We must leave for the next generation documentation that is very rich in comparison to what previous excavators left to us,” he says. “We can now obtain information that was once impossible to get. This is the real revolution.” Satellites assess risks of flooding to the site today. Ground sensors collect data seismically, acoustically and electro-optically. Drones produce 3-D imaging of houses and document the dig’s progress. CAT scans sweep away old certainties by peering into Fiorelli’s thick plaster casts and drawing a clearer picture of victims and what happened to them. Laser scanning has shown, among other findings, that Pompeiians had excellent teeth thanks to a fiber-rich, low-sugar diet.

Newly-Restored Houses and a Restaurant Open at Pompeii

Pompeii kitchen

In the summer of 2014, ten newlyirestored houses, including the Hunting Lodge (Casa della Caccia) and the House of Apollo (Casa di Apollo), with its exquisite decorations and vivid reliefs of the Trojan War, were opened, some of which had never been open to the public before. [Source: ANSA, August 19, 2014]

The newly opened building also included the Thermopolium (Latin for restaurant) of Vetutius Placidus, where people could buy cooked food to go. It boasts shrines to Mercury and Dionysus (the gods of commerce and wine, respectively), a dining hall, and an adjoining mansion with a vestibule, a garden, and a dining room.

The Hunting Lodge had just undergone renovation when it was buried under meters of ash and pumice in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. An extensive hunting scene is still visible on one of its garden walls, and its interiors are luxuriously decorated with beautiful paintings and marble-like coverings. Also noteworthy are the Domus Cornelia and its exquisite sculptures, the House of Apollo adorned with images of the god to which it owes its name, and the House of Achilles with its impressive reliefs of the Trojan war.

The thermopolium used to open directly on to a main street, the Via dell’Abbondanza. At its reopening visitors could buy sweet, calorie-filled desserts such as mostaccioli and globe — filled with sticky honey and ricotta cheese — which were sold in Roman times.

Pompeii Wine Brought Back to Life

In 2016, The Local reported: “Made from ancient grape varieties grown in Pompeii, ‘Villa dei Misteri’ has to be one of the world’s most exclusive wines. The grapes are planted in exactly the same position, grown using identical techniques and grow from the same soil the city’s wine-makers exploited until Vesuvius buried the city and its inhabitants in A.D. 79. [Source: the local.it, February 2016 ]

“In the late 1800s, archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli first excavated some of the city’s vineyards from beneath three metres of solid ash. The digs turned up an almost perfect snapshot of ancient wine-growing – and thirteen petrified corpses, huddled against a wall. Casts were made of the bodies, as well as the vines and the surviving segments of trellises on which they were growing. But archaeologists didn’t think to restore the vineyards of ancient Pompeii until the late 1980s.

Pompeii market stalls

“When they did, they realized they didn’t have a clue about wine-making, so they called in local winemaker Piero Mastrobeardino. Together they set out to discover how the ancient Romans made wine, and which grapes and farming methods they used. “The team looked at casts of vine roots made two centuries ago and consulted the surviving fragments of ancient farming texts,” Mastrobeardino told The Local. “We even looked at ancient frescoes to try to identify which grapes grew from Pompeii’s soil.” The team discovered that the type of grapes their ancestors were growing, called Piederosso Sciacinoso and Aglianico, were the same varieties still being grown on the slopes of Vesuvius by local farmers. Aglianico is a variety which Piero’s father is credited for saving from extinction after the Second World War.

“Although the grape varieties were still the same, farming techniques had changed significantly since the time of the Romans. “We use a number of methods to grow the fruit and carry out all of the work manually. One thing all our farming techniques have in common is that the grapes are grown at an extremely high density,” Mastrobeardino explained. At first, experts doubted whether the grapes would grow at all at yields almost twice as high as those used today. However, once placed back in Pompeii’s fertile soil, they flourished. Enologists discovered that the Romans’ high-density growth technique is actually beneficial – the technique, now rediscovered, is spreading to the modern wine-making.

“But not everything about ancient wine-making was better. Mastrobeardino ferments the wine according to modern techniques and says Roman wine tasted foul. Pompeii wines were fermented in open-topped terracotta pots, called dolia. These were lined with pine resin filled with wine and buried deep into the earth. Asking a modern wine-lover to drink ancient wine would be foolish. The Romans knew their system was far from perfect but didn’t have the technology to change it.”

“Pompeii wines were considered among the best in the Empire, but were fiercely alcoholic and often diluted with honey, spices and even seawater to mask their rancid flavour. Some 1,500 bottles of Villa dei Misteri are made each year and can be found on the tables of exclusive restaurants in Tokyo, London and New York, Mastrobeardino said. “It’s more of a research project than a commercial enterprise, but it has come a long way. We have now replanted 15 of the city’s ancient vineyards and are experimenting with diverse ancient farming techniques and grape blends.” It might not be a profitable enterprise, but it doesn’t come cheap either – a bottle will set you back around €77.”

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Rome sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Late Antiquity sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; “Outlines of Roman History” by William C. Morey, Ph.D., D.C.L. New York, American Book Company (1901) ; “The Private Life of the Romans” by Harold Whetstone Johnston, Revised by Mary Johnston, Scott, Foresman and Company (1903, 1932); BBC Ancient Rome bbc.co.uk/history/ ; Project Gutenberg gutenberg.org ; Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Live Science, Discover magazine, Archaeology magazine, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, AFP, The New Yorker, Wikipedia, Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopedia.com and various other books, websites and publications.

Last updated October 2024