2019-07-13_Archaeology_Magazine

archaeology.org 33

GARDENS: THE CASA

DELLA REGINA CAROLINA

P

ompeii’s residents spent a great deal of time socializing in the city’s

lush public and domestic gardens. “What’s remarkable about Pompeii

is the enormous variety of gardens, and the extent to which Pompeians

lived both inside and outside,” says archaeologist Kathryn Gleason.

“Pompeians’ devotion of valuable real estate to gardens is noteworthy.”

One of the largest private gardens could be found at the back of the

Casa della Regina Carolina, an opulent dwelling named in the nineteenth

century after Caroline—the queen of Naples and sister of Napoleon

Bonaparte—who visited during its initial excavation. Celebrated for its

vibrant decoration in the years after its discovery, the house was largely

forgotten as its wall paintings faded.

Returning to the property after more than a century, a team of archae-

ologists including Gleason and Caitlín Barrett of Cornell University and Annalisa Marzano of the University of Reading now

hopes to learn about the garden’s original landscaping, as well as find traces of religious activity that might have taken place there.

In particular, they plan to explore the house’s two garden shrines, where nineteenth-century excavators found such objects as

a marble incense burner and a statuette of the goddess Diana. “These shrines provide us with sites where ritual activity took

place,” says Barrett. “The material culture can hopefully speak to the performance of those rituals.”

COMMUNICATION: ANCIENT GRAFFITI

A

nyone walking along Pompeii’s busy streets couldn’t help

but notice the eye-catching letters painted across many of

the city’s houses, shop fronts, and public spaces. Some of this

graffiti promoted political candidates, while other examples

advertised everything from gladiatorial games to rooms for rent.

However, not all messages on Pompeii’s walls were so showy.

Thousands of examples of a less conspicuous type of ancient

graffiti—writings and drawings incised in wall plaster, or occasion-

ally written with more ephemeral materials such as charcoal and

chalk—survive today and capture communications among Pom-

peii’s residents. “Unlike most modern graffiti, graffiti in ancient

Pompeii was a positive form of social exchange,” says epigrapher

Rebecca Benefiel of

Washington and Lee

University. One of the

most commonly found

words in this more

informal style of graf-

fiti is feliciter (“hap-

pily”), which, when

paired with personal

names, indicates good

wishes for friends, col-

leagues, and even the

emperor.

Benefiel is director

of the Ancient Graffiti Project and is currently documenting and

analyzing all the extant graffiti in Pompeii, much of which is at

risk of fading away. She has identified examples of all sorts of

writing across the city, including tally marks scratched on shop

walls to track item inventories and the words of satisfied custom-

ers who scrawled praise for the sexual prowess of prostitutes in

the city’s main brothel. In both private houses and public build-

ings, Benefiel has found that people traded quotations from the

first-century b.c. love poets Ovid and Propertius, often adapt-

ing poetic lines to humorous effect. Says Benefiel, “Looking at

graffiti in context gives such a strong sense of the people who

inhabited these spaces and left their mark.”

Atrium, Casa della Regina Carolina

Feliciter graffito, House of Maius Castricius

Painted election

slogans, Regio V