Author Archives: conorp

Pompeii and the Roman Villa Exhibition Arrives in Mexico

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Two centuries before our era, the region of Campania became the favorite place of Roman emperors-from Julius Caesar to Nero- and aristocrats to relax, due to the beauty of the Bay of Naples. Pompeii, Herculaneum and nearby villages represented leisure for some and work for others, like artists.

A hundred pieces, which reveal the luxury and sophistication that this Mediterranean zone reached before the Vesuvius erupted in 79 of the Common Era, arrive to Mexico as part of the exhibition “Pompeya y una Villa Romana: Arte y Cultura alrededor de la Bahia de Napoles” (Pompeii and the Roman Villa. Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples), to be opened at the National Museum of Anthropology in November 2009.

As part of the cultural exchange program between Mexico and Italy, the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) sponsors this international exhibition within its cycle “Great Civilizations”. In return, “Teotihuacan, City of Gods” will be displayed at the Palace of Exhibitions in Rome in 2010.

“Pompeii and the Roman Villa” was presented before at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, United States, with an important affluence of visitors. The exhibition was organized by both museums with the support of Direzione Regionale per i Beni Culturali e Paesaggistici della Campania and the Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Napoli e Pompeii.

Most objects are part of the Naples National Archaeological Museum collection, while others come from the heaps of Archaeological Museum of Campi Flegrei, Pompeii Excavations Office, as well as Oplontis, in Torre Annunziata. A sculpture of young Hercules exhibited is part of the collection of Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

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A Pompeiian Spectacle for a Sunday Night

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Professor Martin Winkler, internationally renowned expert in Classics and Film Studies, wowed Gusties on Sunday night, Nov. 1st with his lecture “The Last Days of Pompeii: From Fact to Fiction and Film.”  Professor Winkler took us through a whirlwind tour of receptions of Pompeii across the centuries and via a range of media, from books to the stage to the movie screen.  The lecture kicked off a number of events throughout the week, during which Professor Winkler visited classes, met with students and faculty, and presented a rare Italian film of Vergil’s Aeneid to members of Eta Sigma Phi on Wednesday.  Many thanks to Professor McHugh, who arranged the visit, and to other departments across campus who assisted in planning and hosting Professor Winkler!

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Pompeii vineyards provide new wines

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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.’

A Day in Pompeii – Australia’s most popular museum exhibition

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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

Sydney academic unearths the secret of Pompeii’s bones

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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.

http://sydney-central.whereilive.com.au/news/story/sydney-academic-uearths-the-secret-of-pompeiis-bones/

Pompeii exhibition in Melbourne has drawn record-breaking crowds

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Pompeii exhibition in Melbourne has drawn record-breaking crowds
Article from: Herald Sun

Simon Plant

August 05, 2009 12:00am

ANCIENT Pompeii is one of Italy’s hottest tourist attractions.

But an exhibition about the doomed Vesuvian city in Melbourne is drawing its own record-breaking crowds.

Yesterday, Melbourne Museum welcomed its 100,000th visitor to A Day in Pompeii. The lucky visitor, Caroline Neilson, of Box Hill South, scored a $100 Pompeii prize pack and free museum membership.

“To have that many people through in just over five weeks is simply phenomenal, museum manager Brett Dunlop said.

“These figures mean it’s on track to be one of the most successful touring exhibitions ever held at the museum.”

A Day in Pompeii, a Winter Masterpieces exhibition exclusive to Melbourne, has proved so popular the museum is extending its opening hours.

From August 15, the Pompeii show will be open until 6pm on Saturdays and Sundays instead of 5pm.

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Italian archaeologists find lost Roman city of Altinum near Venice

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The bustling harbour of Altinum near Venice was one of the richest cities of the Roman empire. But terrified by the impending invasion of the fearsome Germanic Emperor Attila the Hun, its inhabitants cut their losses and fled in AD452, leaving behind a ghost town of theatres, temples and basilicas.

Altinum was never reoccupied and gradually sunk into the ground. The city lived on in Venetian folk tales and historical artefacts but its exact position, size and wealth gradually faded into obscurity.

Now, using aerial photography of the region, Italian archaeologists have not only located the city, but have produced a detailed map revealing its remarkably intact infrastructure and showing it to be slightly larger than Pompeii.

The abandonment of the city and its subsequent preservation makes it an archaeological time capsule, a unique find in Roman heritage. “It’s extremely unusual for a town to go out of use like this and that is what makes it absolutely invaluable for achaeologists. It gives a full profile of what the town looked like without the imposition of modern infrastructure,” said Dr Neil Christie, a specialist in the Roman empire at the University of Leicester.

The team behind the study located the ancient city by studying hundreds of aerial photographs of the region, mostly taken by private companies for cartography purposes.

In July 2007, during a particularly dry summer, crops were suffering from drought and were highly sensitive to the subsurface presence of stones, bricks or compacted soil. On the image taken by the mapping company Telespazio, the lighter crops indicated stonework, while the darker patches revealed depressed features such as pits and canals.

The team, reconstructing the town using the aerial images and knowledge of Roman architecture, was able to identify temples, theatres, a basilica, the marketplace and city walls as well as hundreds of smaller structures. Also visible is a large canal, which would have been used for the transportation of oils, wines and foreign luxuries inland to the Roman capital of Milan and other powerful cities such as Verona.

“Everything is just as it was. When we saw the picture we couldn’t believe it,” said Alessandro Fontana, an archaeologist at the University of Padua and a co-author of the paper, which is published today in the journal Science.

He added that as flights from Venice’s San Marco airport fly directly above Altinum, it was surprising that no one had spotted the traces of the city before now.

The team behind the study hopes to carry out carefully planned excavations in the future, but is first collecting more aerial images. It is taking pictures every ten days, as different conditions will show up different features more clearly. By the end of 2009 the experts aim to have compiled all the data and produced an even more detailed map of Altinum

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Pompeii guide ‘died in tourist row’

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(ANSA) – Naples, July 6 – A tourist guide died at Pompeii last month after a squabble with rivals, union sources reported Monday.

The dead man was identified as F.C., 84, one of the so-called ”historic” guides at the Ancient Roman site. Guides are becoming more aggressive in their bids for customers at the buried city, the UGL union said.

Long-established guides like the late F.C. were having to defend their turf from unauthorised upstarts, it said. ”They’re like dogs around a bone,” said the UGL’s culture pointman, Renato Petra.

”If two of them get in a bidding war things can turn nasty and then you get something like what happened three weeks ago: one of them falls, breaks his leg and dies”.

The union urged Pompeii authorities to regulate the sector.

UGL provincial secretary Francesco Falco said guides should receive formal authorisation and tariffs should be set.

Pompeii, buried by Vesuvius in 79 AD, attracts almost three million visitors a year.

Original article