Pompeii is being brought back to life by new wines produced in the vineyards dating back to Roman times.
The wines are only made from grapes grown inside the ancient city which was destroyed when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79AD.
Bottles will be sent to embassies worldwide and the millions of visitors a year can sample it.
It is not known, however, if the wine will go on sale.
Pompeii Tourist Board said: “Wine was important to the ancient Vesuvians.’
THE Melbourne Museum closed its doors last night on the most popular museum exhibition ever seen in Australia, A Day in Pompeii.
Since it opened on June 25, one in 10 Victorians, or 325,000 people, visited the collection of films about, and artefacts from, the lost city of ancient Roman times. The figure exceeded the museum’s projected audience by 60 per cent.
“I’m delighted to be wrong,” said Patrick Greene, chief executive of the Melbourne Museum.
“We’ve never had an exhibition beyond 170,000 before.”
Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum, by comparison, said the 2003 Star Wars exhibition was the most popular it ever staged, attracting 230,000 visitors.
The National Gallery of Victoria earlier this month reported 330,000 visitors to its Salvador Dali Liquid Desire exhibition, which like Pompeii was badged as a Melbourne Winter Masterpiece and given marketing support by the Victorian Major Events Co and Tourism Victoria.
The Victorian government will not disclose how much these exhibitions cost to mount or what the gross box office figures are on the grounds they are commercial-in-confidence.
“We don’t release the cost and conditions of securing these major cultural events as it would provide rival cities with an unfair advantage,” said a spokesman for Arts Minister Lynne Kosky.
However, unlike some previous Winter Masterpieces exhibitions, which were imported from foreign museums and galleries, both the Dali and Pompeii shows were unique to Melbourne, a credit to the local curators who worked for many years developing them.
But having been developed within the local institutions, other institutions, both local and overseas, are unable to compete for them.
“An exhibition like this cost a number of millions to put on,” Dr Greene said.
Melbourne Museum has also managed to offset its costs by selling the exhibition to Wellington’s Te Papa museum, after which Pompeii will most likely enjoy a season in Singapore.
Original article from Australian Newspaper
The ruined Roman city of Pompeii continues to yield secrets, this time in a book by a Sydney University academic in the first systematic study of human bone remains.
Resurrecting Pompeii by Dr Estelle Lazer, archaeologist at Sydney University, was launched earlier this month.
The book discusses the information gained from looking at the skeletal remains of victims of the AD 79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Although Pompeii has been continuously studied since 1748, early scholars were seduced by the more glamorous artefacts and wall paintings yielded by the site. The less attractive evidence, the bones, was largely ignored.
Until Dr Lazer’s work, there had not been a systematic study into victim profiling information that could be gathered from studying bones, including sex, age, general health and height and population affinities.
Dr Lazer found that, contrary to previous thinking, Pompeii’s victims were not mainly the infirm, women, children and the aged. “The bones look like a normally distributed population sample,” Dr Lazer said.
A close study of bone remains also indicate the average lifespan was much longer than previously thought. Dr Lazer also discovered the incidence of age-related diseases were at levels similar to today’s world.
In October, Dr Lazer will begin a study to identify sustainable design practices and techniques from Ancient Roman architecture that can be applied to modern design.