44 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021
which have remained vulnerable to
the incursion of illegal diggers. Schol-
ars have made various new discover-
ies in these outlying areas, such as the
remains of a horse that died during
the eruption; the cavity formed in the
rubble by the horse’s body has now
been cast in plaster. Earlier this month,
Zuchtriegel announced the discovery
of slave quarters: a hum-
ble room, equipped with
three wooden beds and
amphorae stacked in a cor-
ner. “It is certainly one of
the most exciting discov-
eries during my life as an
archeologist, even with-
out the presence of great
‘treasures,’” Z u c htriegel
said. “The true treasure
here is the human expe-
rience, in this case of the most vul-
nerable members of ancient society.”
But Zuchtriegel is likely to be less
hyperbolic in his promotion than
Osanna sometimes sought to be. I
asked him how he could make pres-
ervation as exciting as discovery. He
paused, then said, “Well, it doesn’t
have to be so exciting. But we have to
do it, anyway. I think what Massimo
showed in these years is that excava-
tion, research, and preservation are
not opposites. As we see with the ther-
mopolium, this was an excavation that
had as a primary goal to preserve the
conservation of the site.” He went on,
“It’s very important to explain that ar-
cheology is very complex—from the
excavation to the restoration to the
exhibition, analysis, publication, and
study. It’s important to make this trans-
parent, and share it with the public,
so that people understand that arche-
ology is not about treasures and pre-
cious objects—that’s only a small part.
It’s really about reconstructing the life
of people in the distant past.”
Zuchtriegel and I wandered over
to a section of the city that was closed
to visitors. A custodian holding a bunch
of keys seemed on the verge of warn-
ing us off when he recognized his rel-
atively new boss. We then entered an-
other of Pompeii’s grand mansions,
the house of Maximus Obellius Fir-
mus, one of the city’s most prominent
citizens in the period before the erup-
tion. This mansion also demonstrated
the Pompeiian fascination with Greek
culture, Zuchtriegel explained. An in-
terior garden was surrounded by a peri-
style—a rectangular perimeter of cov-
ered columns—which was popular in
classical Greece. “There is an attempt
to transform a traditional Roman house
into a Greek space,” Zuchtriegel said.
“You could be here in the middle of
Pompeii, and feel like you
were in a different space.”
He encouraged me to
look upward. A restored
rafter was serving as a perch
for a few pigeons, whose
droppings are especially
damaging to wall paintings
and stucco. Zuchtriegel
had introduced a program
whereby trained hawks
sweep the ruins, frighten-
ing off the pigeons. “I did the same in
Paestum,” he said. “You can reduce the
pigeon population by eighty-five to
ninety per cent!”O
ne of the challenges facing any
director of Pompeii is coping with
the tourists who flock, like pigeons, to
explore the ruins. As Italy reopens for
both domestic and international tour-
ism, crowds are again lining up to enter
Pompeii’s more celebrated locations,
including the street-corner brothel in
which partitioned chambers equipped
with masonry beds are decorated with
obscene wall paintings—an X-rated
version of the dead ducks painted on
the counter of the thermopolium in
Regio V. A feminist interpretation of
the practice of sex work, and its role in
Pompeiian society, has not yet been in-
corporated at the site. An official guide
who showed me around the city one
day regaled me uncritically with the
anecdote, found in the satires of the
poet Juvenal, that Messalina, the wife
of the emperor Claudius, liked to moon-
light in a brothel—a story that Mary
Beard and other contemporary critics
view with a witheringly skeptical eye.
Counterintuitively, one of Zuchtrie-
gel’s goals as director of Pompeii is to
persuade visitors to go elsewhere—to
the ruins of Herculaneum and to other,
smaller sites that lie in the shadow of
Vesuvius. One day, I got off the Cir-
cumvesuviana at Torre Annunziata
Oplonti, and walked from the stationfor ten minutes through the town’s
steep, scruffy streets to reach a site
known as the Villa Poppaea—once a
luxurious suburban domicile with views
of the islands of Ischia and Capri. The
villa gets its name from Nero’s second
wife, Poppaea Sabina, whose family is
believed to have come from Pompeii;
it is thought to have been her country
residence.
The site had just opened for the day,
and I had it to myself as I descended
to the 79 A.D. level and walked through
a garden, where what looked like car-
bonized tree stumps remained in the
ground. The villa, a sprawling complex
of reception rooms and gardens and
walkways which dates to the first cen-
tury B.C., was stunning. First redis-
covered at the end of the fifteenth cen-
tury, when engineers were digging a
canal, it was partially excavated in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
then more fully exposed in the late
twentieth century. Archeologists cleared
away pumice and ash, and in rooms
edging a garden they uncovered mag-
nificent frescoes of the birds and plants
that appear to have once f lourished
there. A large, decorated peristyle sur-
rounded another garden: Greek-style
living at its finest.
For all the interest offered by the
new discoveries of the modes of every-
day living at Pompeii—with its snail
stews and its Greek theatrics—an
empty, unfamiliar, luxurious villa re-
tains an irresistible allure. The gran-
deur of the Villa Poppaea brought to
mind images of an élite class of indi-
viduals who thought themselves safely
removed from the grubbing hardships
endured by the poor, but whose vast
wealth provided them with no pro-
tection from a titanic natural disas-
ter. At the eastern perimeter of the
site, there was a feature to stir the
envy of a Silicon Valley plutocrat: a
swimming pool more than sixty me-
tres in length. It was filled with weeds
and gravel now, but in 79 A.D. it would
have been edged by lavishly decorated
salons and gardens—and it was easy
to imagine Roman aristocrats loung-
ing around a glittering pool, gazing
across the sea with the dormant moun-
tain at their backs, confident that the
world was—and always would be—
theirs to enjoy.