Last week, the BBC aired what’s likely to be the final instalment of its coverage of what has been called the biggest dig at Pompeii in a generation. Two years ago, excavations began at a block on Via Nola, a once busy and prosperous street at the archaeological site’s northern edge, part of a section of the city known as Regio IX. The work’s main objective was to rationalise an uneven excavation front, to make conservation easier and to minimise risk to the already excavated blocks either side of this mostly buried insula. Throw so much as a trowel into the ground at Pompeii, of course, and you’re going to hit upon ancient remains. But the quality of what’s been unearthed in this particular dig has exceeded expectations.
Delicate figures adorn the walls of a shrine room painted in Egyptian blue, with niches for sacred objects in cinnabar red. Photo: courtesy Parco Archeologico di Pompei
Detail of a corner of a decorative niche in the shrine room. Photo: courtesy Parco Archeologico di Pompei
When I visited the excavation last summer, the BBC’s film crew were hard at work capturing the most recent developments of the dig for the episode released last week. ‘They basically live here,’ explained my guide, the archaeologist Sophie Hay. On the street-facing side of the block (IX.10), excavations had already revealed a house with commercial premises – a bakery and a laundry – attached (with one fresco in the house depicting a silver platter loaded with fruits, nuts, and a bread-based arrangement that looks thrillingly like a pizza). Behind this complex, however, lay a much larger, grander property. Digging out the pumice and ash layers had brought to light rooms including a glamorous black dining hall painted with scenes relating to the Trojan War; a sacrarium, or shrine room, decorated with female figures representing the seasons and allegories against sky-blue walls; and a courtyard containing a monumental staircase (‘I don’t know another one on this scale,’ Hay told me at the time).
What was now emerging, however, was a suite of rooms amounting to a private bathhouse: a furnace room, changing room, caldarium, tepidarium, and frigidarium – this last consisting of an exercise area frescoed with athletes and surrounding a cold plunge pool. ‘There are other private houses with their own bath complexes,’ Hay commented, ‘the House of the Menander, for instance – but it’s pretty rare.’ It’s easy to picture a wealthy owner inviting guests to join him in a bath before dinner – a sequence Pliny the Elder managed to indulge in even as Vesuvius was raining down pumice on the roof.
Here, there is in fact a clue as to who that owner might have been. In multiple places in the block, the name Aulus Rustius Verus appears, including on the bakery’s millstones. In 77AD, two years before the Vesuvian eruption, this man was duumvir, the highest office in the city council. So while such a figure is likely to have lived in the grander property towards the back of the block, ‘He may have patronised the bakery,’ Hay explained, ‘because one of the tricks you can do as a politician to get votes is to make and give away free bread; people need it every day, and if they’re thankful for your bread on a daily basis, they might vote for you. It’s like putting on games – bread and circuses.’
Part of the frigidarium in the residence’s newly uncovered bath complex, with lead pipe visible (the house was undergoing renovation in 79AD). Photo: courtesy Parco Archeologico di Pompei
As the recent BBC episode covers, two human skeletons had also been found at the property, in a small room not far from the black dining hall. One is that of a very young man, most probably a slave, considering the wear and tear to his body already. The other is that of a woman in her forties, in good health. Around her body were gold and silver coins, and a pair of gold and pearl earrings. Could she have been Aulus’s wife? Terracotta bowls, an oil lamp, pristine glass bottles and an overturned bronze lampstand give a remarkably clear idea of the room at the moment of destruction. When the team found a marble tabletop, they were able to pour plaster into the cavities in the ash left by its disintegrated wooden frame and legs to end up with a cast of the table.
Speaking to me this week from Pompeii, Hay says she’s pleased that the BBC episode – ‘a love letter to Pompeii and to those who work on site’ – has been aired now, while the new excavation can still be accessed by the public (before closing for extensive conservation): for the past year, archaeologists from the site have been giving daily tours of the uncovered rooms to a limited number of ticket holders. ‘It shows we’re not hiding things,’ Hay says. ‘Rather than being off-limits, everything’s nice and open.’ In the same spirit, it’s been possible to view ongoing excavations and conservation in a different area of Regio IX, a large block of multiple properties first unearthed in the 1980s and known as the Insula of the Chaste Lovers, via a ‘floating’ overhead walkway. When Hay took me to see it last summer, the block’s vast, state-of-the-art roof had only recently been finished (and had, she told me, proved almost more exciting than anything else at Pompeii for Wes Anderson, who had come for a tour shortly before).
The most recently uncovered room in Insula 10 of Regio IX, still being excavated: an oecus with Corinthian columns and a Second Style megalographia depicting various game and fish. Photo: courtesy Parco Archeologico di Pompei
Here and at the new dig at block 10, excavations are winding down. At the latter, there is more of the grand residence to uncover but, says Hay, ‘this investigation will wrap up around the end of February’. The regular e-journal set up by Pompeii’s current director Gabriel Zuchtriegel to publish the site’s latest findings cites Article 2 of the European Convention on the Protection of Archaeological Heritage (1992), and the aim to ‘preserve material testimonies so that future generations can study them’. A twin – and more pressingly pragmatic – consideration is one of funds. The enormous costs involved in excavation are merely the start: whatever has been unearthed must then be conserved, made accessible and maintained. (There are, as it is, ‘some really big conservation projects going on around Pompeii,’ Hay says. ‘One of them extends across about a quarter of the southern wall of the city; it’s a huge insular block that overhangs the valley below, which is falling off the hillside, so it’s about stabilising that. They’re not as sexy, these projects, because there are no big reveals – but they’re of course essential.’)
Leda and the Swan – one of several scenes decorating the walls of a dining room discovered in Insula 10 of Regio IX in Pompeii. Photo: courtesy Parco Archeologico di Pompei
An obvious boundary for the IX.10 dig’s end point, as the e-journal explains, is provided by ‘the dividing wall between a large peristyle, which will remain unexplored, located in the southern zone, and a columned hall, which will mark the limit of the current excavation’. ‘It’s in the process of being excavated now,’ Hay says of the latter. ‘They’ve dug halfway down the room. So none of us knows what’s going to come to light at the bottom.’ So far, what has been uncovered in the room’s upper register is promising: a series of large-scale still-life paintings of hanging game and catches of fish within trompe-l’oeil architectural elements in a symphony of reds – the theme suggesting this may be another dining hall.
While this era of fresh discoveries within Pompeii itself – made possible largely by EU funding and the launch of the Grand Pompeii Project in 2012 – seems to be coming to an end, a period of consolidation and streamlining is well underway. In November, a cap on daily visitor numbers came into force which, along with the fact that many more buildings and rooms have been reopened, should significantly improve the visitor experience in the busy summer months. ‘I think it’s a really good thing both for tourists and the archaeological site itself,’ Hay says. ‘There’s no loser here.’
Pompeii – The New Dig: House of Treasures is on BBC iPlayer.