THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021 39
gherita of Savoy. The spacious house,
which is believed to have belonged to
a Pompeiian bigwig named Lucius Al-
bucius Celsus, included a salon fitted
with a barrel-vaulted ceiling supported
by columns of trompe-l’oeil porphyry,
and an atrium, decorated with fres-
coes, that scholars regard as the finest
of its kind in the city.
I discovered that the mansion was
closed for renovations: the clattering
of workmen emanated from behind
its high brick walls. But I wasn’t too
disappointed—my interest was in
what lay just beyond it, at a newly ex-
posed crossroads. This is the site of
the first significant excavations in
decades of ruins embalmed by the
79 A.D. eruption. Since 2018, resto-
ration work has been under way in
Regio V to reshape and shore up the
escarpment. Made up of impacted ash
and lapilli, or pebbles of pumice, it
had become increasingly vulnerable
to collapse, especially after heavy rain.
(When chunks of the escarpment
broke off, artifacts and structures bur-
ied inside it were often obliterated.)
Collapses aside, the weight of the un-
excavated land in Regio V put the ad-
jacent excavated area at risk by exert-
ing immense pressure on exposed
walls, some of which date to the first
or second century B.C. The fragile
escarpment threatened to make a ruin
of the ruins.
Through a careful combination of
archeology and engineering, the es-
carpment has been reshaped into a
more gradual slope, with an exposed
surface of rocky fragments secured by
sturdy mesh. In order to lessen the
gradient, it has been necessary to un-
earth a small area of previously bur-
ied streets and structures. In recent
decades, most archeological excava-
tions at Pompeii have been of layers
that predated the first-century city—
digging down to reveal, for example,
that several of the town’s temples were
built on structures that dated to the
sixth century B.C. The new excava-
tions in Regio V—conducted with
the latest archeological methods, and
an up-to-the-minute scholarly focus
on such issues as class and gender—
have yielded powerful insights into
how Pompeii’s final residents lived
and died. As Andrew Wallace-Hadrill,
a professor emeritus at Cambridge
University and an authority on the
city, told me, “You only have to exca-
vate a tiny amount in Pompeii to come
up with dramatic discoveries. It’s al-
ways spectacular.”M
y guide to the restorations of
Regio V was Gabriel Zuchtrie-
gel, who this past February was ap-
pointed the director of the Archeo-
logical Park of Pompeii. Forty years
old, the German-born Zuchtriegel was
formerly the director of the archeo-
logical site at Paestum, forty-odd miles
south of Pompeii. As we walked around
Regio V, he deftly navigated the un-
even roads and talked about ongoing
work: “We are not going to excavate
just for the sake of excavating. It would
be very problematic, and somehow ir-
responsible.” However, in the course
of stabilizing this stretch of the bound-
ary, in 2019, archeologists realized that
they had come upon a structure wor-
thy of a full excavation: a thermopolium,
or snack bar, which was situated just
across the street from the House of
the Silver Wedding, as if the Frick
mansion were cheek by jowl with a
Gray’s Papaya.
The thermopolium, which opened
to visitors in August, is a delight. A
masonry counter is decorated with ex-
pertly rendered and still vivid images:
a fanciful depiction of a sea nymph
perched on the back of a seahorse; a
trompe-l’oeil painting of two stran-
gled ducks on a countertop, ready for
the butcher’s knife; a fierce-looking
dog on a leash. The unfaded colors—
coral red for the webbed feet of the
pitiful ducks, shades of copper and
russet for the feathers of a buoyant
cockerel that has yet to meet the ducks’
fate—are as eye-catching now as they
would have been for passersby two
millennia ago. (Today, they are pro-
tected from the elements and the sun-
light by glass.) Another panel, bor-
dered in black, is among Pompeii’s
most self-referential art works: a rep-
resentation of a snack bar, with the
earthenware vessels known as ampho-
rae stacked against a counter laden
with pots of food. A figure—perhaps
the snack bar’s proprietor—bustles in
the background. The effect is similar
to that of a diner owner who displaysa blown-up selfie on the wall behind
his cash register.
It turns out that few of Pompeii’s
more straitened residents had a place
at home to cook. “Rich people had
kitchens in their houses, and banquet
rooms and gardens,” Zuchtriegel told
me, as we walked around the thermo-
polium. “But most inhabitants didn’t
live in such places—they had small
apartments, or even one-room flats.
During the daytime, their place was
a shop or a workshop, and at night
the family would just close up the
front and sleep there. And, when they
could afford it, they would come here
and have a warm meal, and take their
plate and eat it on the street.”
Several tourists were peering through
the glass into the thermopolium, as if
they were hungry Pompeiians survey-
ing the fare on offer. Zuchtriegel took
a step back, toward a fountain; it would
have provided fresh water for drink-
ing, bathing, or cooling down. “It was
life on the street, as today we can still
see in Naples,” he said.
The thermopolium on the Vicolo
delle Nozze d’Argento is far from
unique—through the centuries, about
eighty such establishments have been
identified in Pompeii. But archeolog-
ical science is now more evolved,
Zuchtriegel told me, and at the new
site scholars “can use modern tech-
nologies and methodologies to ana-
lyze what was inside the pots.” Frag-
ments of duck bone were discovered
in one of the containers, which are
known as dolia, suggesting that the
paintings of ducks served not just as
decoration but as advertising. In other
dolia, scholars found traces of cooked
pig; what appears to be a stew of sheep,
fish, and land snails; and crushed fava
beans. A book of recipes attributed
to Apicius, a celebrated Roman gour-
met from the first century A.D., ex-
plains that “bean meal” can be used
to clarify the color and flavor of wine.
These near-invisible remains of
foodstuffs do not just provide infor-
mation about the diet of Pompeii’s
working classes. According to Sophie
Hay, a British archeologist who has
worked extensively at Pompeii, they
also shed new light on the rhythms
of civic life. “Up until this bar was ex-
cavated, people who study these things