Incredibly, wooden homes, clothes and even food were carbonized and preserved to this day, giving an unparalleled glimpse into daily life in the ancient world.
The grandiose villa was a residence for receptions and leisure and helped influence the function and design of houses built in Pompeii and Herculaneum: it features columned arcades and two garden courtyards. There is a second villa of interest to visitors, the rustic villa of Lucius Crassius Tertius which was most likely an emporium. There is little evidence of decoration in the villa but many interesting artifacts were found within in, including jewelry, coins, food and dozens of human remains.
Located further down the coast near the Sorrento peninsula, Stabiae was a small port with numerous luxury villas. A vast wealth of elaborate, well-preserved frescoes and art were found at Stabiae and are today housed in the National Archeological Museum of Naples. Stabiae spans acres and much of it remains unexcavated and unexplored: additional treasures are surely hidden just below the surface. Located in close proximity to both Pompeii and Oplontis, Boscoreale was prized during Roman times for its agriculture, namely wine and olive oil.
The excavated Villa Regina is an excellent example of a working farm estate and features remains of vineyards and a wine cellar; vines have since been replanted to give the effect of what the villa would have looked like in ancient times. Numerous other villas were excavated at the end of the 19th century only to be reburied, meaning there is significant archeological work to be done at this site. The archeological site contains a small museum, the National Antiquarium of Boscoreale, that displays archeological finds and relics such as food, fabric and household items.
Historians deduced that Mount Vesuvius, a mountain known to the ancient world as anything but a volcano, had shown no signs of volcanic activity; the eruption in 79 AD was a surprise to all.
Herculaneum was closer to Vesuvius than Pompeii, lying to the west of the volcano. As a result of volcanic lava and rock at extreme temperatures, Herculaneum was essentially frozen for centuries. Racing to keep up are his two small daughters, the younger one with her hair in a braid. Close behind is their mother, scrambling frantically through the rubble with her skirts hiked up. She clutches an amber statuette of a curly-haired boy, perhaps Cupid, and the family silver, including a medallion of Fortune, goddess of luck.
But neither amulets nor deities can protect them. Like thousands of others this morning, the four are overtaken and killed by an incandescent cloud of scorching gases and ash from Mount Vesuvius. In the instant before he dies, the man strains to lift himself from the ground with one elbow.
With his free hand, he pulls a corner of his cloak over his face, as though the thin cloth will save him. The ancient Roman cities were buried under layers of volcanic rock and ash—frozen in time—until their rediscovery and exploration in the 18th century.
To most people today, the scope of the calamity in a. The doomed couple fleeing down an alley with their two daughters if they were indeed a family; some have suggested the man was a slave were the first Vesuvius victims to be so revealed, although these early casts are not in the exhibition. In , an ingenious Italian archaeologist named Giuseppe Fiorelli noticed four cavities in the hardened layer of once-powdery ash that covered Pompeii to a depth of ten feet.
By filling the holes with plaster, he created disturbingly lifelike casts of this long-departed Pompeiian family in its final horrifying moments. It was as though an eyewitness from antiquity had stepped forward with photographs of the disaster. Pompeii in A. Its narrow streets, made narrower by street vendors and shops with jutting cloth awnings, teemed with tavern goers, slaves, vacationers from the north and more than a few prostitutes.
A colossal new aqueduct supplied running water from the Lower Apennine mountains, which gushed from fountains throughout the city, even in private homes. Pompeiian wine was shipped throughout Italy.
The Roman statesman and writer Pliny the Elder complained it produced a nasty hangover. At the House of the Centenary, a lavish residence converted to a winery in the first century A. Found on a wall in the same house, a large, loosely painted fresco depicts the wine god Bacchus festooned in grapes before what some scholars have identified as an innocent-looking Mount Vesuvius, its steep slopes covered with vineyards. In the towns below it, most people would not have known that Vesuvius was a volcano or that a Bronze Age settlement in the area had been annihilated almost 2, years before.
And that was not the first time. Southern Italy is unstable ground, Janney says. Under pressure underground, the gases stay dissolved. But when the magma rises to the surface, the gases are released. Had Roman knowledge in the summer of 79 been less mythological and more geological, Pompeiians might have recognized the danger signs. A major earthquake 17 years earlier had destroyed large swaths of the city; much of it was still being rebuilt. Early in August, a small earthquake had rocked the town.
Wells had mysteriously gone dry. Finally, at about one in the afternoon on August 24, the mountain exploded. Fifteen miles away, Pliny the Elder witnessed the eruption from a coastal promontory.
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