Pompeii - Life and Death in a Roman Town ( Mary Beard )
Posted on 04/08/2016 2:06:05 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
About 400 years ago, a throng of dusty workmen laid down their shovels and huddled around an ancient painted wall -- a fresco, technically -- unearthed in a tunnel near Italy's Bay of Naples. The men were at work on a massive construction project, burrowing through a hill to build a canal for a local armament factory and mill. No one expected to find fine art. But as the workmen dug deeper into the hill, they encountered wonder upon wonder -- house walls painted blood red and sunflower yellow, fragments of carved inscriptions, pieces of Roman statues.
The architect supervising the project took little interest in the curious finds. But in the decades that followed, scholars deduced -- correctly -- that the costly canal had cut through a part of Pompeii, a Roman seaside town last glimpsed on a black day in August, 79 CE, when nearby Mount Vesuvius shook off centuries of sleep, hurling molten rock and other volcanic debris across the countryside. The scholars' deduction launched an age of exploration. Art collectors, engineers, and eventually archaeologists combed the 80-kilometer-long bay and the neighboring island of Capri, uncovering the ruins of ancient seaside resorts and more than 130 waterfront villas belonging to Rome's upper crust. The Bay of Naples, it transpired, was the Malibu of the ancient world.
Wealthy Romans, says classical archaeologist Elaine Gazda of the University of Michigan, were likely the first in history to snap up waterfront properties and build spectacular, sumptuous summer homes overlooking the sea. The coastal real estate boom that followed was unprecedented in antiquity. "We don't really have ruins resembling these in the Hellenistic world," says Gazda, who has studied villas along the Bay of Naples. "It's a completely new phenomenon."
(Excerpt) Read more at hakaimagazine.com ...
Those are the houses of the 1%ers. Most people lived in two room flats.
There was a documentary about the fish farms built by the Romans that was on cable recently—but the pictures weren’t as good about the interior of the villas. Maybe they couldnt get permission to shoot or something.
It focused on the engineering.
A good many lived in those grand houses, but they were slaves.
Nuceria is where one of the big garum factories was located, that one got buried by the eruption as well. :’(
Huh. That looks very much like the bread I bake, dark and crunchy.
Would you like to post that here?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3419582/posts
“University with 2% graduation rate bemoans loss of federal funding”
It has always been good to be in the 1%.
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.
