40 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021
have gone around believing that the
dolia contained only dry foodstuffs,”
she told me. “There are Roman laws
that said bars shouldn’t serve this kind
of warm food, like hot meat, so we’ve
been guided by the classical sources.
Then, suddenly, there is this one bar
that is definitely serving hot food.
And is it the only bar in the Roman
world to have done this? Unlikely. So
that is huge.” A new story appears to
be emerging from the lapilli: of a
cunning bar owner who reckons that
an authority from distant Rome isn’t
likely to shut down his operation, or
who is confident that the local au-
thorities—the kind of Pompeiians
who live in grand houses—will turn
a blind eye to an illegal takeout busi-
ness that keeps their less aff luent
neighbors fed with cheap but tasty
fish-and-snail soup.
A
decade or so ago, a different story
about the walls of Pompeii pre-
vailed—that they were crumbling from
neglect and from the ineptitude of
the site’s custodians. In late 2010, a
stone building known as the House
of the Gladiators imploded after heavy
rains, severely damaging valuable fres-
coes inside. That disaster was followed
by the collapse elsewhere in the city
of several other walls. The media re-
sponded with a wave of alarmed sto-
ries; a typical headline, from National
Geographic, asked, “pompeii is crum-
bling—can it be saved?” Italy’s
President at the time, Giorgio Na-
politano, declared the condition of
Pompeii “a shame for Italy.” Pompeii
was also afflicted with human corrup-
tion, with the Camorra—the Neapol-
itan Mafia—exerting influence over
its custodial ranks and on the local
businesses that catered to the 2.3 mil-
lion tourists who visited annually. In
2012, the European Union intervened,
underwriting the Great Pompeii Proj-
ect, which offered a hundred and forty
million dollars to Pompeii for con-
servation and restoration.
Despite this narrative of decline—
much of which presumed that Italy
was unwilling, or unable, to take care
of its greatest asset, its cultural patri-
mony—the deterioration at Pompeii
was inevitable. In some instances, what
had given way and caused walls to
crumble were not bricks laid by an-
cient Romans but concrete resto-
rations carried out after the Second
World War, during which Pompeii
was assaulted by Allied forces who
mistook corrugated-metal roofs cov-
ering excavation sites for Nazi bar-
racks. Mary Beard, a professor at Cam-
bridge University who is among the
Anglophone world’s best-known in-
terpreters of Roman history, told me,
“The fate of Pompeii is quite mythol-
ogized, and has become a shorthand
symbol for lots of other issues in her-
itage management. The P.R. used to
be ‘Well, we can’t even keep Pompeii
up, the place is falling down, it’s a ter-
rible disgrace.’ Of course the place is
falling down—it’s a ruin. There are
totally unreasonable expectations of
what Pompeii can be, and how it can
be preserved.”
In 2014, the archeologist Massimo
Osanna was appointed director of
Pompeii, and he immediately launched
an effort to restore confidence in the
future of the ancient past. Sophie Hay
told me, “I went to Pompeii shortly
after Osanna got the job, and after
five minutes on the site with him I
got the idea of where he was going.
He walked down the main street,
the Via dell’Abbondanza, and there
was all this horrible plastic netting in
the doorways of buildings, the sort
used on building sites to keep people
out.” The site looked bandaged and
bruised. “He was absolutely horri-
fied—he called people over who were
working there and said, ‘Can’t we just
remove all of this?’” Osanna made
Pompeii more inviting to visitors, and
by 2019 their numbers had swollen to
four million annually. That year, the
House of the Gladiators reopened to
the public after a reconstruction of its
damaged frescoes, becoming a sym-
bol not of Pompeii’s decline but of its
renewed vitality.
Meanwhile, the charismatic Osanna
won over the press by trumpeting dis-
coveries resulting from the restoration
work in Regio V. “He was absolutely
brilliant at it,” Beard told me. “With-
out actually doing any major excava-
tion, he gave a series of carefully timed
bits of good news.” A headless male
skeleton was discovered at a cross-
roads next to the House of the SilverWedding, as was a huge block of stone,
which lay, almost cartoonishly, right
where the skull should have been.
(The gruesome suggestion that the
man had been decapitated was over-
turned by later analysis, which sug-
gested that he had been suffocated by
the pyroclastic f low—superheated
rock, ash, and gases that rushed down
Vesuvius’s flank.) In a house that had
been buried beneath a swath of rough
land, a fresco depicting the god Pri-
apus weighing his oversized member
on a scale was uncovered. The press
hailed the new discoveries, and in
2020 Osanna was named director
general of Italy’s state-run museums.
One day during my visit to Pom-
peii, I was wandering alone when I
came upon the house with the Pria-
pus, which is around the corner from
the House of the Silver Wedding, on
the Via del Vesuvio. The fresco of the
erect god was in the entrance hall.
Phallic imagery was common in Pom-
peii, and according to scholars such
images were usually seen as symbols
of good luck, rather than of ostenta-
tious lewdness. It would have been
interesting to know whether Priapus’
facial expression was one of pride or
discomfort, but the fresco was miss-
ing the disk-shaped area where his
head had once been. In a nearby room,
a better-preserved painting depicted
the mythical story of Leda and the
Swan, in which Zeus assumes the
form of a bird and copulates with a
Spartan queen. After archeologists
discovered the painting, in late 2018,
and peeled back its curtain of gray,
crumbly lapilli with scalpels, Osanna
unveiled it to the public by describ-
ing the “pronounced sensuality” of
Leda, who, he declared, was “welcom-
ing the swan into her lap.” Examin-
ing the painting, I decided that Leda
could just as easily be said to have an
expression of trepidation, even panic.
Archeologists have since excavated
the room to which the painting be-
longed: a small, richly decorated cham-
ber featuring wall panels festooned
with floral motifs. The lower half of
the walls were painted in the rich red
color indelibly associated with Pom-
peii. This look is consistent with what
historians have classified as the city’s
Fourth Style, which was prevalent in