Posted on 07/01/2015 5:37:25 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
...The two towns remained largely undisturbed, lost to history, through the rise of Byzantium, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In 1738, Maria Amalia Christine, a nobleman's daughter from Saxony, wed Charles of Bourbon, the King of Naples, and became entranced by classical sculptures displayed in the garden of the royal palace in Naples. A French prince digging in the vicinity of his villa on Mount Vesuvius had discovered the antiquities nearly 30 years earlier, but had never conducted a systematic excavation. So Charles dispatched teams of laborers and engineers equipped with tools and blasting powder to the site of the original dig to hunt more treasures for his queen. For months, they tunneled through 60 feet of rock-hard lava, unearthing painted columns, sculptures of Roman figures draped in togas, the bronze torso of a horse -- and a flight of stairs. Not far from the staircase they came to an inscription, "Theatrum Herculanense." They had uncovered a Roman-era town, Herculaneum.
Digging began in Pompeii ten years later. Workers burrowed far more easily through the softer deposits of pumice and ash, unearthing streets, villas, frescoes, mosaics and the remains of the dead. "Stretched out full-length on the floor was a skeleton," C.W. Ceram writes in Gods, Graves and Scholars: The Story of Archaeology, a definitive account of the excavations, "with gold and silver coins that had rolled out of bony hands still seeking, it seemed, to clutch them fast."
In the 1860s a pioneering Italian archaeologist at Pompeii, Giuseppe Fiorelli, poured liquid plaster into the cavities in the solidified ash created by the decomposing flesh, creating perfect casts of Pompeii's victims at the moment of their deaths -- down to the folds in their togas, the straps of their sandals, their agonized facial expressions.
(Excerpt) Read more at smithsonianmag.com ...
S’cool that some of the bones were preserved, including this guy’s kinda “vandalized graveyard” dentition.
House of the Vetti Family. Garden in back of town house.
Is that statue on the right peeing into the trough?
I had heard that the bodies one can see at Pompeii and Herculaneum are plaster casts of voids in the volcanic ash. I wasn’t clear if there is a surviving skeleton inside each of these casts but perhaps those teeth answers the question.
Ancestor of Rodin.
Sometimes there are some bones, or a skull.
I’ve got a walk-through VR file of some kind, of the House of the Vettii, I think this is the same place. It’s an atypical layout, the final owners were freed slaves who’d married, and obviously had accumulated some cash over the years. Often those coffeetable books of Roman art have a fresco or two from this place. The cook (who was probably a slave, most household staff were slaves) had his bedroom right off the kitchen, and the walls of his room have erotic frescoes. :’) The front of the house was two-storey, the stairs survived, the second storey didn’t. Two atriums; the tablinum and triclinium opened off this peristyle (odd).
I’ll be darned, here’s something similar:
http://www.indiana.edu/~leach/c409/vplan.html
Here’s a nice shot of the main atrium; the, uh, impluvium? conpluvium?, the pool has been restored, and when excavated, the original roof tiles with deflectors for the rainwater were found in the ash filling the pool. They were reinstalled when the roof was reconstructed.
http://www.museumsyndicate.com/item.php?item=36622
Oh, okay, looked it up, im- is the pool, con- is the opening in the roof.
some example wall paintings:
https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/prec/www/course/mythology/0900/1501.jpg
https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/prec/www/course/mythology/0900/herakles.htm
Okay, last one, here’s another sort of walk-through of the house:
http://www.pompeii.co.uk/CDROM/VETTII/FRAMES/F0.HTM
SAVE
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.