In 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius exploded with sudden violence and in a few hours it swept away and wiped out two thriving Roman cities, Pompeii and Herculaneum, along with many patrician villas in the surroundings. Only in the XVIII century were the vestiges of such settlements found under layers of ash and pumice stone: they were still extraordinarily well preserved. It was a first in the international history of archaeology, a natural disaster physically protecting a cross-section of late Republican and early Imperial Roman life. Pompeii was compact in size but it was an extremely wealthy trading centre; Herculaneum was a holiday resort for Roman aristocrats, as proven by the outstanding noble villas that were found there.
[expand title=”A natural disaster that left its mark on the ancient world: the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the I century AD”]
Before the disaster, the area around Mount Vesuvius was prosperous and intensely populated. The slopes of Mount Vesuvius were covered in vineyards and lush woods, while the fertile countryside was dotted with country villas. Pompeii lay on a lava ridge about one km from the coast; the city grew along the River Sarno, which was navigable and had a port. Stabiae and Oplontis were on the coast, while, north of Pompeii, Herculaneum stood on the slopes of the volcano, scenically overlooking the Gulf of Naples. Those centres were connected by a tight grid of roads. On August 24th 79 AD, having been 700 years dormant, Mount Vesuvius woke up again. The eruption was extremely violent and in a few hours it wiped out the rich area of Roman settlements along its slopes, disrupting the local hydrology and geomorphology in the process: wonderful villas, temples, theatres and baths, shops and inns, streets and squares, and that part of the population that did not manage to escape, got trapped under metres of volcanic ash and pumice stone, hot ash and poisonous gases. The course of the River Sarno deviated, and the coastline sank dozens of metres into the sea. The result was a prison of volcanic detritus, a time capsule that kept the treasures of Pompeii, Herculaneum, Stabiae and Oplontis unaltered for centuries. That event was one of the most tragic pages in the ancient history but it turned into the most outstanding opportunity for us to learn about the everyday life of Roman citizens.[/expand]
[expand title=”The eruption of Mount Vesuvius”]
Two particularly strong earthquakes had been felt before the eruption, probably the harbingers of the reawakening of Mount Vesuvius, but those ancient people did not associate them with the volcano. The first earthquake happened in 62 AD, the second one in 64 AD. The damage caused by such earthquakes to Pompeii’s buildings was detected by the archaeologists, who found that, at the time of the eruption, in 79 AD, some of those buildings were still being rebuilt. The 79 AD eruption of Mount Vesuvius was an explosive one. It all began the morning of August 24th, 79 AD. At 01.00 pm, the first, terrible explosion was caused by the rocks breaking up and the magma flowing out along with gas. The crater of the volcano blew off its roof, and a pyroclastic surge flowed out and up to about 30 km high, in the small hours of the night. Pliny the Younger described the ‘umbrella pine’ of smoke rising out of Mount Vesuvius, which goes to prove that it was visible from dozens of km away. Then, volcanic ash and lapilli began to pour down. This was the first stage of the eruption. Herculaneum, the city closest to the slopes of the volcano, was not immediately swept over by the eruption, because the prevailing winds channelled the fall of pumice and ash to the area south-east of Mount Vesuvius, so those who immediately left Herculaneum for Naples saved themselves. Pompeii was instantly wiped out by an endless shower of ash and lapilli, which darkened the sky as if night had fallen; the detritus hurt those who were running away, hampered their steps, and broke into the roofs of the buildings, while the shocks made everything crumble and fall down. The second stage of the eruption was perhaps even more scaring and took place the day after, August 25th, at dawn, when the pyroclastic surge started to collapse in on itself, forming what volcanologists call ‘surges’, incandescent clouds of materials, their temperature ranging between 300 and 500 degrees centigrade, flowing down at a few hundreds of km per hour. The surges blew away the surrounding surface of the Vesuvius, within a range of several km. The impact was extremely violent and destroyed whatever was still alive in Pompeii. In a few minutes, everything was trapped down, so that the excavations unearthed upsetting remains of everyday life, such as dogs still chained and loaves of bread in the ovens. The human victims’ bodies were found hugging each other or next to weapons, oil lamps, amulets, statuettes of Lars, or bundles with jewels and money, the most beloved and valuable things they could grasp in their desperate run.[/expand]
[expand title=”The victims: the tragedy that lives forever in the plaster casts”]
Some scholars, including Giuseppe Mastrolorenzo, a volcanologist, claim that, at the second stage of the eruptions, the people in Pompeii did not slowly choke to death – as it had been believed for a long time – but died suddenly from thermal shock due to the surges, their huge strength taking just a couple of minutes to crash down on Pompeii. After the 79 AD explosions, the landscape around Mount Vesuvius was completely devastated: Herculaneum was completely buried under a 16-30 metres thick layer of volcanic detritus; the roads in and around Pompeii were not restored until one century later, but the city remained empty. The population of Pompeii had been estimated at about 12 thousand before the disaster; over one thousand victims have been found in the excavations so far (about 1,150 in the town alone). Human bodies were often found in groups, piled up in the courtyards, in the buildings or in the streets. Some of Pompeii’s most famous examples are: the bodies of the priests of the Temple of Isis, some found inside the building, some outside, already on the run to the city doors; the matron buried with the gladiators’ bodies; the families found in the Garden of the Fugitives. In the late 19th century, the excavations supervised by Giuseppe Fiorelli from 1861 to 1875 found, in the volcanic detritus, the cavities left by the human bodies crushed under the cataclysm: more often than not, the ash had stuck to the victims’ body, so they took on their exact shape. Fiorelli invented a method to make casts of the victims’ bodies by pouring liquid plaster in the cavities; the resulting casts outstandingly showed the faces, limbs, sometimes the dresses, of the residents of Pompeii. The body language of the plaster casts is so tragic and upsetting that it impressed the 19th-century public and still comes as a shock to today’s visitors. [/expand]
[expand title=”The first archaeological excavations in the Age of Enlightenment and the myth of Pompei”]
After the 79 BC eruption, Pompeii was so heavily devastated that the survivors could not go back there, as it happened in Stabiae, instead. Emperor Titus promoted a rescue campaign, but the area of Pompeii was merely used to take building materials, pillage statues and steal precious stone. In the mid-18th-century, Charles, King of Bourbon, and his wife, a keen student of classical antiquity, started the first official excavations in the archaeological sites to bring home the findings, raise the prestige of the Royal House, and occasionally arrange private visits for guests of royal descent. These were not scientific excavations; first, parts of the buildings were robbed of their most valuable features, then often buried back. A lot of Pompeii’s treasures was stolen, lost or damaged; however, the myth of Pompeii and Herculaneum spread all over Europe, and Mount Vesuvius was included in the Italian Grand Tour by artists, scholars and the noble scions of the European elites. But, between the XVIII and the XIX century, such widespread interest also led writers to publish books that misrepresented the reality of the two ancient Roman cities, imbuing them with romantic inventions and historical inaccuracies. In the early 19th century, when Naples was ruled by the French, Caroline Bonaparte promoted new excavations, no longer to get hold of valuable works of art but to dig up Pompeii’s buildings and get an insight of the layout of the lost city. Then, the House of Bourbon went back to Naples and the excavations went on with the extraordinary finding of the House of the Faun (1829-1832) and its awesome Hellenistic mosaics. The season of scientific archaeology began in Pompeii after the Italian Unification. The excavations were directed and supervised by Naples-born Giuseppe Fiorelli, who broadened the archaeological sites and carefully rationalised and sorted out the information that had been collected about the site until then. Fiorelli revolutionised the working methods and trained his students, such as the talented Vittorio Spinazzola, to continue his work. In 1924, Amedeo Maiuri, an archaeologist, took over as supervisor of the excavations in Pompeii and Herculaneum and described many of the truths hidden in Pompeii’s site in a widely understandable form. Nowadays, Pompeii is a sort of open-air museum, a unique experience that calls the visitors to be extremely careful and respectful. (For additional teaching materials from Soprintendenza Speciale Beni Archeologici Pompei, Ercolano, Stabia, visit www.pompeiiisites.org)[/expand]
[expand title=”Pompeii”]
So far, the excavation campaigns have unearthed 44 hectares of the urban fabric, out of the about 65 covered by the ancient Pompeii. The city had a Hippodameian layout, with evenly-spaced neighbourhoods and perpendicular streets, marked by two decumani (east-west) and three cardi (south-north). The high-class neighbourhoods were not separated from the working-class and traders’ neighbourhoods, because the fronts of the houses looking out on to the streets very often accommodated the tabernae, the craftsmen’s and traders’ shops; the most elegant houses could be in the same insula as the middle-class houses or the servants’ or traders’ families’ apartments. Pompeii’s residential buildings are some of the most exhaustive and interesting examples of the way people lived in ancient times. There are several types of houses that combine Italic patterns with distinctively Hellenistic features and describe the evolution of the Roman domus. Pompeii’s most famous houses include: the House of the Surgeon, a typical example of an Italic Roman house that took its name from the collection of surgical instruments that was found inside; the House of the Faun, the House of the Lovers; the famous Villa of the Mysteries, with a cycle of frescoes that celebrate Dionysian ritual mysteries; the huge House of the Centenary; elegant seaside villas with sloping terraces, the Villa of the Golden Bracelet and the Villa of M. Fabius Rufus. Pompeii’s forum – the area of the public buildings and the surrounding places of worship – was concentrated in the south of the city, where the Civil Forum and the Triangular Forum stood; this was assumedly the oldest part of the town, judging from its tightly winding streets. The ancient Temple of Athena and Hercules stood In the Triangular Forum, surrounded by a grand colonnade and visible from the sea. The theatre district was in the East and included the Large Theatre, the Samnite Gymnasium, the Gladiators’ Barracks, and the Odeion. The Odeion was a partly roofed theatre for singing and dancing shows that were very popular in Augustus’s age. Then, there were the Temple of Isis and the Temple of Asclepius. The Large Gymnasium and the Amphitheatre were built on the south-easternmost point of the city, In the II century AD. The Civil Forum was the largest and most important public area, used for trade at the time of the Samnites, then for races and games as well. The Forum was altered in the II century BC, with the addition of some porticoes and a floor, then some triumphal arches; the nearby Basilica and the Comitium, buildings that served a political and legal purpose, were also built in the II century BC. The Temple of Apollo was located south-west of the Forum, while the Temple of Jove was on the shorter north side of it. There were plenty of baths: the most sumptuous were the Stabian Baths; the Republican Baths, near the Triangular Forum; the Central Baths are the most recent ones and were still being built at the time of the eruption, in 79 AD. Pompeii throve on its maritime trades and on its crafts, the connections between Nocera and Naples. The II century was an extraordinarily prosperous age, and its population increased so much that the city had to be extended by adding new neighbourhoods, renewing the walls, temples and many houses. Pompeii was the meeting place of the great ancient Mediterranean civilisations: Greeks, Etruscans, Samnites, Romans settled in and around Mount Vesuvius, as an unprecedented melting-pot that can be explored nowadays to find the roots of the European man.[/expand]
[expand title=”Herculaneum”]
While digging a well in Herculaneum, the workers found some blocks of polished marble that, centuries later, turned out to come from the theatre of Herculaneum. It was 1710, and that event marked the rediscovery of the ancient buried civilisations of Herculaneum and Pompeii, attracting crowds of visitors, scholars and curious people, and sparking off a passion for archaeology that caught up all over Europe. Herculaneum rose on a ridge of volcanic tufa, its houses clinging to the slopes as far down as the sea, overlooking the Gulf of Naples. Ancient sources tell that, because of its location, the city was salubrious in every season. Because of that and because of the beauty of the place, Herculaneum was a favourite with the local aristocrats. Currently, just a quarter of the about 20 hectares the city covered has been unearthed; the area of the public and holy buildings still lies underneath the modern city, while the old city has been excavated and has revealed villas and private houses in all shapes and sizes and decorations, but all of them apparently belonged to a fairly wealthy and affluent population. Impressive baths and sumptuous villas were unearthed, the most famous being the Villa of the Papyri, not entirely excavated yet: arguably the suburban house of a nobleman, it has a library and a porch with a vast collection of statues, deeply inspired by Hellenistic culture. The villa was found by chance while digging a well; the first exploratory tunnels were opened in 1750, under the supervision of Rocque de Alcubierre.[/expand]
[expand title=”Oplontis”]
Oplontis stood in the area where Torre Annunziata is now located, approximately 5 km from Pompeii, and most of its residents were noblemen and dignitaries. There were baths, food storage and travellers’ facilities. Oplontis was completed destroyed by the eruption in 79 AD and the modern town has covered most of the Roman settlement. Two outstanding villas, Villa A and Villa B, have been found. Villa A belonged to Poppaea Sabina, Emperor Nero’s second wife. Villa Poppaea was a grand estate, not entirely excavated yet, and one of the Emperor’s properties. It seems it was uninhabited in 79 BC and was being refurbished, maybe because of an earthquake or because it had been sold to new owners. It had a remarkable ornamentation, with wall paintings and Roman statues, copies of Greek sculptures; there was a big pool, gardens and colonnades. Then, there is Villa B, attributed to L. Crassius Tertius, which was maybe a vast insula; there was a Doric porch on the ground floor and storage facilities at the sides. All of the ground floor was used for the food trade, so it contained many different amphorae, amphorae for wine, oil, fruit, while the company’s owner lived upstairs.[/expand]