Poking At the Phlegrean Fields
Interesting item — there’s possibly hubris or a bit of Greek or Latin poetry lurking in here — from the UK version of Wired: The mayor of Naples, Luigi de Magistris, has approved the first stages of a plan to drill into the Campi Flegrei caldera, a so-called “supervolcano” in the south of Italy. The [...]
Another Wall Collapse at Pompeii
Not sure whether this will make it out of the Italian press … the La Repubblica coverage briefly mentions the collapse of an interior wall of a house without one of those fancy schmancy names in Regio V … the area wasn’t open to the public: Ancora un crollo all’interno degli Scavi di Pompei. L’ennesimo [...]
Pompeii and Sodom and/or Gomorrah
The July/August issue of Biblical Archaeology Review has a very interesting article by Herschel Shanks about Jewish oracles relating to the destruction of Pompeii. A useful summary can be found in the Jerusalem Post, post alia: [...] Shanks recently told The Jerusalem Post that the idea to examine a connection between the two events came [...]
Pompeii Poop
Tip o’ the pileus to the fine folks over at Blogging Pompeii for bringing our attention to an article in the Discovery Channel Magazine highlighting the work of Dr Andy Fairbairn and crew who have been poking around the potties of Pompeii to learn more about what the folks were eating etc. … very interesting [...]
How Can We Sleep When Our Ruins Are Crumbling?
That cryptic title is a vague reference to a song by Midnight Oil which is currently stuck in my head … whatever the case, we fairly regularly get an annual article that this or that particular monument is being neglected by authorities (e.g., most recently, e.g., a chunk falling off the Colosseum), but in the [...]
Andrea Mall on Roman Domestic Decor
Image by Tintern via Flickr I suspect this one from the Toledo Museum of Art will be popular among our readers: Andrea Mall discussed room groupings in Roman domestic architecture and their decoration at the Toledo Museum of Art. These suites of rooms, or diaetae as they were called in Latin, likely had their origin [...]
The Price (Cost?) of A Vesuvius Eruption?
They don’t seem to take into account spinoff damage to tourism that would no doubt follow another destruction of Pompeii and the like … A major eruption of Italy’s Mount Vesuvius could result in 8,000 fatalities, 13,000 serious injuries and total economic losses of more than $24 billion, according to a new study supported by [...]
Pompeii Casts on Display
Nice little video from the BBC: more about “Pompeii Casts“, posted with vodpod From the accompanying text (with a somewhat unfortunate headline, as FT noted on twitter last night): They are the skeletal remains of the victims that have been preserved under a thin veneer of plaster, to give them their life form. “Until now, [...]
Mary Beard on Pompeii
Mary Beard was talking at the University of Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Department of Classics hosted a distinguished professor of classics for a lecture about the ancient Roman city of Pompeii at the Chazen Museum of Art Thursday night as part of the Year in Humanities. Mary Beard, a professor of classics from Cambridge [...]
What is Going On At Italian Sites???
Okay … for the past while I’ve been trying to understand a number of Italian newspaper articles about changes going on at the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali . It seemed that there were things going on ‘at the top’, but it took an item in English from the March edition of [...]
Citanda: Pompeii to Offer Live Excavation Experience : Discovery News
Some very nice photos: Pompeii to Offer Live Excavation Experience | Discovery News.
Mice Casts from Pompeii!?
Tim Parkin posted (on Facebook) this potentially very interesting snippet of a documentary featuring casts of mice who were caught at Pompeii: … but I’m trying to figure out how genuine this is … if you follow the link at the end, it takes you to an artist’s site which has these same mice in [...]
Last Days of Pompeii
Something a little different this year … here’s the final clip of the 1960 Last Days of Pompeii (it’s the part where the volcano erupts etc. … very cheesy): If you want to watch the whole thing … begin here (then click the links in the info boxes). Wired has a nice feature on the [...]
Theatre Masks (re)Discovered
Discovery News’ Rossella Lorenzi is reporting on the rediscovery of 15 life-size theatre masks from Pompeii which were originally excavated in 1749, then stored and forgotten in a Bourbon palace storage room. Mariarosaria Borriello, who made the rediscovery dixit: “They ended up being totally forgotten, and indeed we do not have much information about them. [...]
New Finds at the Villa of the Mysteries
A pair of articles in the Italian press have been lingering in my box for a couple of days … I figured something would have appeared more widely in the Italian press and at least something in the English press on this by now, but apparently not. Anyhoo, according to the news reports, there have [...]
Pompeii Tidbits
An item in Adnkronos about a theme parkish thing called Italia in Miniatura includes this little item at the end: But there is still more to come and soon Italia in Miniatura will be expanding and the expansion of the theme park means double the surface area and the introduction of extraordinary interactive attractions, first [...]
New From Herculaneum – A Depiction of the Oschophoria?
Tip o’ the pileus to Francesca Tronchin for alerting us to a post at Blogging Pompeii about a new item installed at the National Museum of Naples’ Herculaneum section. For a full description, visit Blogging Pompeii, which includes this image (which is also available in much larger format there): The official description suggests this is [...]
Modified Cookie Cutter Houses at Pompeii?
Science Daily picks up this item from NWO which originally hit the interweb back in January: Metrological analysis of ancient houses reveals the use of standard models that were ingeniously adapted to suit individual situations. Pre-Roman atrium houses exhibited a striking number of similarities as part of a long Italic building tradition. Dutch researcher Noor [...]
