Workers burrowed far more easily through the softer deposits of pumice and ash, unearthing streets, villas, frescoes, mosaics and the remains of the dead. Inside stone archways that framed the entrance to a series of boat houses, skeletons huddle, frozen for eternity in positions they had assumed at the moment of their deaths.
Some sit propped against stones, others lie flat on their backs. Children nestle between adults; a few loners sit by themselves. Instead, they were overcome by a 1,degree Fahrenheit avalanche of gas, mud and lava, which burned the flesh off their bones, then buried them.
Packard, an heir to the Hewlett-Packard fortune , in partnership with the British School at Rome, and the Superintendency for the Archaeological Heritage of Naples and Pompeii, the government body that administers the site.
The project began to take shape one evening in , when Packard who declined to be interviewed for this article considered ideas for a new philanthropic endeavor with his friend and renowned classics scholar Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, then director of the British School at Rome. Hadrill recommended Herculaneum. Roofs were collapsing. It was a disaster. Herculaneum, of course, faced cronyism and financial shortages that Pompeii has today.
But Packard staffers took advantage of private money to hire new specialists. The ancient city sits some 60 feet below the modern city of Herculaneum, and rain and groundwater tends to collect in pools, weakening foundations and destroying mosaics and frescoes.
The project hired engineers to resurrect the Roman-era sewage system—tunnels burrowed three to six feet beneath the ancient city—two-thirds of which had already been exposed by Maiuri.
They also installed temporary networks of aboveground and underground drainpipes. Pesaresi ushers me through a tunnel chiseled through the lava at the entrance to the ruins.
Our conversation is nearly drowned out by a torrent of water being pumped from beneath Herculaneum into the Bay of Naples. We stroll down the Decumanus Maximus, a street where public access has long been quite limited, because of the danger of falling stones and collapsing roofs. After millions of dollars of work, the facades are secure and the houses are dry; the street fully opened in Workers have painstakingly restored several two-story stone houses, piecing together original lintels of carbonized wood—sealed for 2, years in their oxygen-less tomb—along with terra-cotta-and-wood roofs, richly frescoed walls, mosaic floors, beamed ceilings and soaring atriums.
Pesaresi leads me into the Casa del Bel Cortile, a recently renovated, two-story home with an open skylight, a mosaic-tiled floor and a restored roof protecting delicate murals of winged deities posed against fluted columns.
Unlike Pompeii, this villa, as well as numerous others in Herculaneum, conveys a sense of completeness. For some years, the Getty Institute has experimented with laser techniques to restore frescoes, employing a noninvasive approach that strips away wax but leaves paint untouched.
Now the Getty team has applied that technique at Herculaneum. It was Maggi who uncovered the victims of Vesuvius, along with their belongings, including amulets, torches and money.
It is definitely worth a visit, especially for those interested in history and archaeology. No trip to Italy would be complete without taking a step back in time and visiting this ancient Roman city, marveling at how life in Pompeii used to be.
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Pompeii lies at the base of Mount Vesuvius This is the volcano that erupted and destroyed the entire city, freezing it in time beneath layers of ash and pumice. The volcano is categorized as a stratovolcano and could erupt at any time - nobody knows when, and an evacuation plan is permanently in place in case of any warning signs 2. Nobody knows the exact date of the eruption Pliny the Younger, a Roman writer who provided an eye-witness account of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, noted the date as August 24th.
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There is no reason to think Pompeiians were anything other than typical Roman citizens, so their remains can probably speak for many across Italy at the time.
While they suffered the diseases and discomforts that still affect us today, in general their health beyond childhood higher infant mortality is likely was not greatly different from our own.
However, one study suggested an important exception to this rule: the state of teeth and jaws point to poor dental hygiene. The slopes of Vesuvius were known for its fertile soils and wine from Pompeii was an important export — at least one wine jar made it all the way to England. The city had been badly damaged by severe earthquakes 15 years before the eruption. Yet none of this was connected to volcanism. There was nothing to fear…. Since its discovery in , people have been digging up Pompeii for over years.
We are far from really understanding what made Pompeii tick. Modern science and archaeology have replaced the old-style treasure-hunting for fine artefacts and wall paintings. In the process, everyone has realised how much knowledge was lost through earlier work — and how much more we can learn now.
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