34 ARCHAEOLOGY • July/August 2019L
ike most urban areas, ancient Pompeii had
residences of all types, including sprawling
villas, smaller city houses, and multistory
apartment buildings. Few of its homes, however,
were as grand as the Villa of Diomedes. “The
Villa of Diomedes combines the characteristics
of a city dwelling where a wealthy family lived
and received guests, and all the attractions of
a seaside villa spread over 40 , 000 square feet
with a panoramic view of the Bay of Naples,”
says archaeologist Hélène Dessales of the École
normale supérieure of Paris. It was also one of
the first properties in Pompeii to be excavated
when, between 1771 and 1775 , Francesco La Vega,
an engineer serving Charles of Bourbon, the king
of Naples, explored the property.
La Vega kept careful records of his work, andTHE UPPER CLASS: THE VILLA OF DIOMEDES
DEATH: THE PORTA NOLA NECROPOLIS
O
ne of the most interesting cemeteries lining the well-traveled
roads connecting Pompeii with the surrounding area was first
identified more than 100 years ago just outside the Porta Nola, the
gate leading to the city of Nola. “The Porta Nola necropolis is
fascinating because it gives us the opportunity to look at
a wide section of society,” says archaeologist Stephen
Kay of the British School
at Rome, who, alongside
Llorenç Alapont of the
European University of
Valencia and Rosa Albiachof the Valencia Museum of Illustration and Modernity, leads a team
that has been reinvestigating the burial ground. “We have very
high-status monumental tombs such as the one belonging to Mar-
cus Obellius Firmus, a member of one of Pompeii’s richest families,
and a uniquely Pompeian style of semicircular tomb belonging to
a woman named Aesquillia Polla,” Kay says.
Excavations at the Porta Nola have, in addition, uncovered
simple cremation burials of poorer Pompeians that Kay’s team
has now associated with a series of Greek names inscribed on the
city walls. The necropolis also contains four graves of members of
the Praetorian Guard, elite soldiers who served as the emperor’s
household troops and bodyguards. Each grave was marked by an
inscribed marble slab called a columella, and contains a selec-
tion of artifacts. The guards’ burials were first excavated in the
1970s, and the team has now uncovered the ceramic cremation
urns containing all the soldiers’ remains.
Another notable group of Pompeii’s dead is also represented at
the Porta Nola: 15 people who were killed by the eruption and pre-
served in plaster casts made of their bodies during the twentieth-
century excavations. Kay and his team are now
examining the preserved skeletons inside the
casts to see what they might be able to tell about
the sort of people who lived and worked
in the Porta Nola neighborhood.
Says Kay, “These people are an
important part of the city and
its history of death.”c
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th
i
S
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itAn 18th-century engraving of the Villa of DiomedesThe Porta NolaPlaster
body
cast.
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