A Day in Pompeii

The archaeological park is a museum, a think tank, a dig, a graveyard, and a place to reflect

T he devastation of prosperous, unsuspecting Pompeii in a.d. 79 is the stuff of pathos. Vesuvius spared nothing and no one. Pliny the Younger’s blow-by-blow account is definitive. Suffice it to say, few were scribblers then. He was nearby, a teenager visiting his uncle, the admiral Pliny the Elder, in Misenum, a premier Roman naval base. Uncle Pliny was a Vesuvius fatality. He died trying to rescue people, asphyxiated by sulphuric gas. “Snuffed like a candle” is how we think of Pompeii’s casualties. It was, of course, more complicated.

The eruption shocked as well as smote. Vesuvius had been more or less quiet for centuries. The concept of a volcano was vague. An apocalypse like Pompeii’s came from fate ruled by the gods. Or, many wondered then, were the gods dead? Pompeii today looks like a bombed-out city, rubble gone, no smoke, no fire, but battery of thousands of jagged walls sweep toward Vesuvius. It looms. Vesuvius isn’t part of a chain of mountains. It’s the one-and-only, the Boss, the Heap. And it seems to think. “What’s next?” It last blew its top in 1944, a warning to the just fled Germans not to darken its doorstep anytime soon.

A cloud of smoke from the exploding mountain darkened the daytime sky. Then came falling ash, a flurry at first. Young Pliny was reading a Livy history — no video games then — when one of his uncle’s commanders ordered him and his mother to flee. Mother Pliny begged him to leave without her. She was rickety. She’d hinder him, and they’d both die. The teen dragged her out into a melee of shrieking women, crying children, and shouting men. Misenum had nice views, among them out to Capri. These disappeared in a weird twilight of sun and ash. Pliny thought the world was ending. Making him stronger as he pulled and prodded his mother was his pride in his own composure. They got to a safe place.

Pompeii and the towns closer to Vesuvius such as Herculaneum weren’t so lucky. After a few hours came a tempest of hot ash, pumice, which is frothy bits of lava, rock, wind, and toxic gas. Hitting in waves, it collapsed roofs, killed everything that lived, and buried Pompeii. Most people living and working there escaped, but many chose — wrongly and wretchedly — to stay. What was a bustling port and tony town was no more, buried unevenly but in as much as a dozen feet of volcanic gunk.

Looking at the bright side, we see today that the gunk was an effective preservative. Before too long, Pompeii was forgotten. It wasn’t until around 1700 that, first, the locals and, before long, antiquarians deduced that a city lay hidden. Since excavations began in earnest in 1748, Pompeii has been the most prolific, the most fertile, and the most authoritative source of information about how Romans lived and, for art historians, aesthetes, and voyeurs, how they decorated their homes. It’s been the world’s foremost archaeological site since the 1750s. Archaeology wasn’t invented there, but as the discipline developed over the centuries, most innovations — positive ones — happened first at Pompeii.

I visited the archaeological park three weeks ago, looking at the state of archaeology today and the site’s interpretation and program. At 160 acres and with many hundreds of buildings, tens of thousands of walls, and acres of wall paintings, it’s a giant, mostly open-air museum. Only about two-thirds of Pompeii’s old urban core has been excavated. Around 2.5 million tourists a year walk in the footsteps of Pompeiians and on their aggressively unflat ancient roads. If Vesuvius doesn’t kill you, a broken hip might.

So what’s news in Pompeii? It’s not news that Pompeii is fantastic and unforgettable.

What’s news is how cutting-edge it is in technology, scholarship, and self-promotion. And the site discovers new things all the time. It’s a national park and part of Italy’s system of parks like ours, but it’s also a museum and a think tank.

I took the train from Naples and walked from the station to the park entrance. I guided myself. Goodness, I’m an art historian, so I should be able to do it. That said, one needs some preparation. Pompeii is dense, deep, rich, big, and gobsmacking. To their great credit, Italians aren’t hand-holders, unlike Americans and the Brits. Most times in museums, you’re on your own.

The main drag after the admissions booth leads to the amphitheater, built in 70 b.c. and the oldest Roman amphitheater still intact. It’s rock-concert big. It held 20,000 and evokes, since I’ve got an imagination, gladiators, fights to the death, frenzied animals, lots of gore, masses of sweaty Romans, and the ancestors of soccer hooligans. I’d hate it. Tucked a few steps away is the Covered Theater, much smaller, seating a thousand, used for poetry readings, but I thought Barbara Cook or Bobby Short at the Carlyle. Very classy.

Via dell’Abbondanza — the Street of Plenty — is Pompeii’s longest street. Running the length of the city, it provides access to the theaters, the forum, baths, businesses of all kinds, apartments, modest and grand houses, shrines, and the city gate leading to villas and farms. The street’s made from lava blocks. Pedestrian crossings are thick, square blocks rising a foot or so from the street, roughly even with Pompeii’s rudimentary sidewalks. The square blocks are spaced so carts would have been able to pass.

Pompeii’s not for the lame and halt, and it has forever been thus. The archaeological park is committed to improving access for the mobility-challenged. Lots of luck, and rightly so. It’s an archaeological site, not a senior center.

The big news at Pompeii is the restoration of the House of the Vettii, among the city’s most opulent houses and closed for most of the past 20 years. It premiered reborn last year. The park calls it “a stunning beauty and crude reality,” and I think this conveys Pompeii. Yes, 20 years is a long time to close for renovation one of Pompeii’s — and the world’s — best cycles of Roman wall painting, but the analogy to a bombed-out city is apt. The park is in the business of maintaining thousands of decaying ruins. Each building presents its own quirky basket of troubles.

The wall paintings depict mythological scenes like the child Hercules strangling a snake — there’s a kid who isn’t a snowflake — and the punishment of Ixion, who was tied to a fiery chariot wheel for eternity for flirting with Jupiter’s wife. Pompeii was hit by a serious earthquake in a.d. 63, Vesuvius’s warning, damaging lots of houses and stimulating a renovation boom. The frescoes are from that period. Everything is now fresh and discreetly interpreted. Restoring the wall paintings was, in itself, a huge project. Millimeter by millimeter, old restorations had to be repaired and reversed.

The House of the Vettii was hydraulically sophisticated, too. The big houses had indoor plumbing, giving the Vettii family not only lovely fountains for their indoor and outdoor gardens but toilets.

We know from carved inscriptions that the house belonged to two Vettii brothers, most likely freed slaves, who made a bundle in the wine business. The house is immense — about 12,000 square feet — and self-sufficient. A big staff was there to cook, sew, and clean, and these activities are represented in charming wall paintings of Cupids at work. Cupids are making perfume, wine, and jewelry, too, all probably Vettii businesses. Graffiti in the slave quarters as well as erotic wall paintings there suggest that the hired help ran a bordello on the side. The god Priapus guarded the house, signaled by his image by the front door. Priapus’s permanently erect penis was thought by both Romans and Greeks to frighten evildoers. The Vettiis must have been high-spirited. Puritan they weren’t.

The Pompeii park always has a dozen big renovations under way, but discoveries happen all the time as well. In 2021, a deluxe, four-wheeled carriage was found just north of the city gates near the remains of three horses found in 2018. Where there’s a stable, there ought to be a garage. It’s a ceremonial chariot with intact wheels, ropes, iron components, and bronze and tin decoration. These discoveries aren’t excavated with a steam shovel but with brushes to remove ash. It’s labor-intensive, every step of the way. And that costs money.

I’ve written a few times about Italy’s push to modernize its museums and especially to wade into the bracing waters of American-style fundraising — not embrace the cold bath, but it’ll get there. The park has a development office and does project sponsorships but has a long, long way to go. It doesn’t have an American Friends of Pompeii yet, but that’s where the big bucks are. The park is a very attractive proposition for donors.

There’s fundraising and friend-raising, but there’s also attention-getting. Pompeii is doing lots of that. The amphitheater, after nearly 2,100 years, is in the news. If gladiators aren’t available to perform, just hire John Legend, the ’60s Italian boy band Pooh, now a geriatric band, or the Italian operatic pop trio Il Volo. All were on recent marquees for “Beats of Pompeii,” the site’s concert program. Pompeii doesn’t need more tourists. With so many people visiting already, it’s facing wear-and-tear and capacity issues. It needs visitors with deep but niche interests.

Pompeii was instantly famous and internationally so from the first excavations in the 1750s, and, surprise of surprises, with fame came not theft but a robust, heedful, and vigilant commitment to getting the excavations right. By the 1860s, the site was plotted and buildings and streets catalogued. The site was a test case for new technologies in archaeology, the most famous of which is plaster casting. The technology — filling the fragile voids left in the ash with liquid plaster — emerged around then. The dozens of Pompeii victims, writhing in what seems like anguish, are hard to see, and hard to skip. They’re ghosts. Volcanic ash hardened over time around bodies and everything else that was organic. The organic material decayed, but the shape remained.

Eighteen body voids were found a few years ago in the luxe House of Menander, at 19,000 square feet another of Pompeii’s palaces. Given the proximity of lamps, shovels, and pickaxes to what were once bodies, it’s possible that the 18 people were robbers making hay while the ash fell and after the owners had fled. We’ll never know.

Technology-wise, today Pompeii’s archaeologists use AI to re-create ancient wall paintings from bits and pieces. Drones, satellites, and new forms of ground-penetrating X-rays are now in place and transformative. Pompeii has been an archaeological site for 275 years, but it wasn’t until recently that scholars developed central, scrutable, and accessible databases for everything that’s been found. And by “everything” I don’t mean just art, artifacts, and scrolls we can now read with AI and CT scans. I mean rooms, walls, and streets, matching find spots with objects, and a bibliography.

The Pompeii Bibliography and Mapping Project and the Pompeii Artistic Landscape Project, both based at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst but with lots of collaborators, aim at developing these resources. The ancient world did indeed have libraries whose contents were destroyed. Today, we’re developing new ones and re-creating what was thought to be lost.

Coming up, I’ll write about the Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii and Naples’s Archaeological Museum.