The fragile escarpment threatened to make a ruin of the ruins.
(When chunks of the escarpment broke off, artifacts and structures buried inside it were often obliterated.) Collapses aside, the weight of the unexcavated land in Regio V put the adjacent excavated area at risk by exerting immense pressure on exposed walls, some of which date to the first or second century B.C. Made up of impacted ash and lapilli, or pebbles of pumice, it had become increasingly vulnerable to collapse, especially after heavy rain. Since 2018, restoration work has been under way in Regio V to reshape and shore up the escarpment. This is the site of the first significant excavations in decades of ruins embalmed by the 79 A.D. But I wasn’t too disappointed-my interest was in what lay just beyond it, at a newly exposed crossroads. I discovered that the mansion was closed for renovations: the clattering of workmen emanated from behind its high brick walls. In the ruins of Pompeii, discovery has often gone hand in hand with destruction. The spacious house, which is believed to have belonged to a Pompeiian bigwig named Lucius Albucius Celsus, included a salon fitted with a barrel-vaulted ceiling supported by columns of trompe-l’oeil porphyry, and an atrium, decorated with frescoes, that scholars regard as the finest of its kind in the city. For many years, the formal excavations stopped here, just past one of Pompeii’s grandest mansions: the House of the Silver Wedding, which was uncovered in the late nineteenth century and named, in 1893, in honor of the twenty-fifth wedding anniversary of the Italian monarch, Umberto I, and his wife, Margherita of Savoy. I had come to Pompeii to explore one such boundary, at the abrupt terminus of the Vicolo delle Nozze d’Argento-the Street of the Silver Wedding-in a corner of what archeologists have designated as Regio V, the city’s fifth region. This is the boundary between Pompeii’s revealed past and its still buried one. And, every so often, a visitor comes across a street or an alleyway that dead-ends at a twenty-foot-high escarpment covered with scrubby grass.
#SECRETS OF THE LOST TOMB SCALE FULL#
But at Pompeii, once you walk inside the gates, you can almost block out the modern world: the ancient city is full of spectacular vistas, with the straight lines of its gridded streets leading to Vesuvius in the distance. About a third of the ancient city has yet to be excavated, however the consensus among scholars is that this remainder should be left for future archeologists, and their presumably more sophisticated technologies.Īt some ancient Roman sites, such as nearby Herculaneum, unexcavated areas have been topped with contemporary buildings. After the ruins were rediscovered, in the mid-eighteenth century, formal excavations continued throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, with successive directors of the site exposing mansions, temples, baths, and, eventually, entire streets paved with volcanic rock. Its population is estimated to have been about eleven thousand, roughly the same number as live in Battery Park City. Before Pompeii was drowned in ash, it had a circumference of about two miles, enclosing an area of some hundred and seventy acres-a fifth the size of Central Park. I got off at the stop called Pompeii Scavi-“the ruins of Pompeii”-and headed toward the modern gates that surround the ancient city. Pliny the Younger compared the shape of these trees to the volcanic eruption, with its column of smoke rising to a puffy cloud of ash that hovered, and then collapsed, burying a good part of what is now the Circumvesuviana’s route. My view sometimes opened up in the opposite direction, toward the volcano, to reveal farmland or a stand of umbrella pines, their tall trunks giving way to billowing needle-covered branches. Pliny, who led a rescue effort by sea, was killed by one of the volcano’s surges of gas and rock his nephew, Pliny the Younger, provided the only surviving eyewitness account of the disaster. Occasionally, the mountainous coast across the bay came into sight, in the direction of the old Roman port of Misenum-where, in 79 A.D., the naval commander and prolific author Pliny the Elder watched Vesuvius erupt. The area is built up, but when I travelled the route earlier this fall I could catch glimpses of the glittering sea behind apartment buildings. Vesuvius, on one side, and the Gulf of Naples, on the other.
The journey from Naples to the ruins of Pompeii takes about half an hour on the Circumvesuviana, a train that rattles through a ribbon of land between the base of Mt. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.