NEWS-FINANCE -QUOTE-EDUCATIONAL AND MOTIVATIONAL
Every generation has offered a reaction: Christians tutted at it; Mussolini had dinner in it; Professor Beard metaphorically winked at it. It is often called a “lost city” but few cities have had such exposure per square metre. Its art is found on fridge magnets and its mosaics made into doormats. The city has been recast as a souvenir. So much of Pompeii is known that it is easy to forget how much is not known: one-third of Pompeii is still unexcavated.
That is obvious once you look closely. Walk through the popular bits of Pompeii—past the theatre, amphitheatre and brothel—and keep going and you will find yourself in quieter streets with fewer people and more pigeons. There are shopfronts here too, but their windows open onto a wall of earth: nothing seems to be behind them. These are the undug streets.
But, after an injection of EU cash, archaeologists started digging in 2023. The dig is “complicated”, says Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the director of the site and author of “The Buried City”, a recent book. If you were to add an archaeologist to your novel, you would add Dr Zuchtriegel: German, handsome, he is fluent in three languages and mildly forbidding in all of them. (To cheer himself up, he reads the New Testament in ancient Greek.) Ask him his feelings on uncovering this stuff and he says “nothing”: you are just “so concentrated”. The epigraph of his book comes from Herman Melville’s diary: “Pompeii like any other town. Same old humanity. All the same whether one be dead or alive.”
To call this a “dig” is to underplay the speed of it. Pompeii offers some of the finest archaeology in the world; it also offers some of the fastest. When Vesuvius erupted in 79AD, sending a cloud of ash 32km into the sky and surprising the locals—who not only did not know that Vesuvius was a volcano, but had no word for “volcano”—what fell on Pompeii was not lava but pumice stones, so light that locals, as Pliny the Younger, a Roman writer watching from a nearby villa noted, “tied pillows over their heads…for protection”.
The stones kept falling at a rate of 15cm an hour. In three hours, they reached people’s knees; in six, the height of a toddler. Most people fled—perhaps 90% escaped. Those who sheltered and stayed became, like the skeletons in the house, trapped. Their room, says Sophie Hay, an archaeologist, “became their tomb”. Walls started to collapse under the weight (one killed the young man). Then the volcanic cloud collapsed and a wave of superheated pumice, gas and ash raced, at speeds of 100kph and temperatures of over 200°C, down the slope. In Pompeii, people suffocated. In Herculaneum, people’s brains boiled.
It is hard to imagine a more appalling end—or, for archaeologists, a better one. The grains of pumice beneath were so light and dry that they protected all they fell on; so easy to remove that archaeologists, says Dr Hay, call it “Amazon packaging material”. You less excavate Pompeii than unbox it, brushing grey, frozen-foam crumbs of pumice from a fresco here and shovelling it out of a swimming pool there. In days columns start to emerge, inverse Excaliburs, from a slowly sinking lake of grey.
The problem with Pompeii is not getting stuff out: it is keeping it upright once you have. The same pumice-pyroclastic one-two that caught bodies as if in freeze-frame—this one clawing at a throat, or that little boy writhing—caught buildings in the same way. A shattered column or wall mid-fall can be wholly held up by pumice. Take it away and, like a game of giant Jenga, the whole thing might fall. A cat’s cradle of scaffolding winds its way around the walls. Dr Zuchtriegel likens digging to performing “a complicated operation”.
The new excavations, by contrast, are pristine. A bathhouse has such perfect curved steps on its plunge pool you could imagine slipping into it today. A nearby wall is painted with such rich pigment you might find it on a Farrow & Ball colour chart (“Cataclysmic Ochre”). Many of the houses are mid-refurbishment. In one, roof tiles sit stacked, ready, on the floor; a builder’s plaster-splashed bucket waits by a wall. Archaeologists play a game—a Roman Rightmove—of which house is nicest: the not-pizza-fresco one? The baths one?
It is a bit of fun. But there is a ghoulish guiltiness to ogling Pompeii. Posterity accuses the Bourbons of “collector syndrome”—the urge to acquire antiquity. But, Dr Zuchtriegel suggests, tourists are guilty of it too, acquiring experiences as greedily as Bourbons snatched artefacts. Millions visit each year, sweating across its forum, smirking in the brothel where the audio guide tells you about “la vie ***uelle de Pompéi” in nine languages. Dr Zuchtriegel has limited the daily number of visits to 20,000, down from 36,000.
He would prefer people not to tick off lists but to look at one thing, carefully. Which thing? He shows a favourite: in a small house there are little charcoal drawings of some gladiators. When they first uncovered this last year, they thought it might have been a stylised adult’s drawing. Then they dug further and found that the artist had, in their way, autographed it, drawing round their own hand in charcoal. To judge from the size of the hand, the artist must have been six or seven. When they see it, everyone does the same thing, Dr Zuchtriegel says: they stretch out their own hand to hold it over where the Pompeiian child put theirs. Same old humanity, whether one be dead or alive. ■
Photographs: Danilo Scarpati
