Some very nice photos:
Pompeii to Offer Live Excavation Experience | Discovery News.
Category: Pompeii
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 bronze … anyone know?
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 ‘techie’ side today as well …
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. We do not even know where they were unearthed in Pompeii. The 18th century dig journals only vaguely record that 15 masks were excavated … Two masks show letters in the space usually reserved to the mouth. While the meaning of one is incomprehensible, on the other we can clearly read the word ‘Buco’ … Not all of the masks belong to the fabula Atellana, but finding at least one evidence linked to it is very important. Indeed, no fragment of early Atellan farces has survived”
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 recently been revealed at the Villa of the Mysteries:
- a wine cellar with a row of dolia
- ‘rustic’ rooms with their tiles intact
- new areas of the first floor
Other features are mentioned in passing as well. Perhaps more importantly, though, the article highlights the difficulties faced by the folks in charge in regards to dealing with illegal building on the site (including that restaurant that’s ‘right there’ and a family of gypsies living next door).
rogueclassicism 