soaking them in mercury, or dunking
them in boiling water—resulted in the
scrolls turning to dust or mush. In a
potent example of the advantage of
waiting a few hundred years for tech-
nological advances to occur, scientists
are now hoping to develop techniques
for reading carbonized scrolls virtu-
ally, using microscopic-imaging tools
devised for use in the drug and chem-
ical industries.
Archeological techniques became
more sophisticated in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, and at Pom-
peii there was a breathtaking innova-
tion. Preserved in the compacted ash
were numerous oddly shaped holes,
and artisans made plaster casts of these
cavities, thereby creating vivid repre-
sentations of the city’s residents in their
final moments: writhing helplessly on
the ground, seeking to protect a loved
one from the rain of ash. But Pom-
peii’s rising popularity as a tourist des-
tination paradoxically contributed to
the site’s erasure. Charles Dickens, who
visited in 1844, writes, in “Little Dor-
rit,” about a family of tourists who made
off with pocketed fragments—“mor-
sels of tessellated pavement ... like
petrified minced veal.”
Less than a century after Dickens’s
visit, much of the buried city had been
unearthed, largely under the watch of
Amedeo Maiuri, Pompeii’s director
from 1924 to 1961. At the bidding of
Mussolini, who sought to connect
the grandeur of ancient Rome with
the triumphs of contemporary Italy,
Maiuri significantly accelerated the
pace of excavation, exhuming residen-
tial areas of the city, and also the build-
ings that lined the Via dell’Abbon-
danza. The scale of activity made it
hard to protect the site from weeds
and looters. But experts praise Maiuri
for having a scholarly interest not only
in grand houses but also in the sim-pler structures—workshops, brothels,
public latrines—that have increasingly
become a focus of Pompeii scholars.
Astonishingly, the new excavations
in Regio V have prompted historians
to reconsider one of the fundamental
facts they thought they knew about
Pompeii: the date of the eruption. In
Pliny the Younger’s first-person ac-
count, he writes that the disaster oc-
curred on August 24th. But, in a house
down the street from the newly dis-
covered thermopolium, archeologists
have found a wall bearing the char-
coal inscription of a date: the Roman
equivalent of October 17th. Though
the inscription doesn’t include a year,
many scholars suspect that it dates
from 79 A.D. Paul Roberts, a Pom-
peii scholar at the Ashmolean Mu-
seum, at Oxford University, told me,
“Charcoal doesn’t tend to hang around
too long. I am quite convinced that
this was put on the wall not long be-
fore it was buried.” The inscription
backs up a theory that another for-
mer director of Pompeii, Grete Ste-
fani, proposed in 2006: that the cor-
rect eruption date was late October.
Stefani based her argument on an array
of archeological evidence, including
the discovery of fruit that would have
been out of season in August.
The charcoal marking is in a newly
excavated residence that has been
named the House of the Garden, be-
cause it once featured a lovely, ver-
dant courtyard surrounded by a low
wall decorated with images of plants.
I visited it not long before the site
closed for the day, when the declin-
ing sun was casting slanted light over
Pompeii’s largely emptied streets, tint-
ing the clouds beyond Vesuvius a gor-
geous gold-pink. The inscription, at
eye level on a wall, had a makeshift
shield propped in front of it, protect-
ing it from light damage. When a cus-
todian removed the shield to show
me the writing, I found it both in-
decipherable and disconcertingly fa-
miliar—it was the jotting of someone
keeping track of housekeeping, just
as I might use a whiteboard calendar
to note a forthcoming appointment
with the dentist.
The other rooms of the mansion
were sumptuous, especially one in
which a round fresco of a woman’s“What a year! I’ve been having terrible trouble hibernating—
I wake up at 3 A.M., sweating with anxiety.”