London exhibition brings Pompei to life

A new exhibition at the British Museum wants Pompei to be equally famous for raucous, exuberant life, the Idaho Statesman reported.

Most visitors will know how residents of Pompeii and its neighbor Herculaneum died - in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.

The volcano, long thought dormant, belched out a superheated cloud of fast-moving gas and debris that incinerated residents where they stood - and preserved the towns as museums of Roman life, frozen in time.

"Pompeii and Herculaneum were ordinary towns, but it was an extraordinary disaster," said Vanessa Baldwin, assistant curator of the exhibition. "It was a tragedy, but it preserved them for us."

Pompeii's extraordinary end still fascinates, making it one of the world's most-visited ancient sites. "Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum," which opens Thursday and runs to Sept. 29, looks set to be one of the museum's biggest-ever hits. It has sold 50,000 advance tickets, and will reach an even bigger audience when a live event in June is broadcast to hundreds of movie theaters across Britain.

It aims to un-freeze the picture, bringing to life a vibrant society completely unaware that disaster was about to strike.

Many of the 450 objects in the show have never left Italy before. They have been loaned by Italian archaeological officials, who have themselves come under fire for the fragile state of the ancient site on the Bay of Naples.

The exhibition aims to give a vivid sense of how the towns' ancient residents lived, through artifacts including mosaics, paintings, carbonized furniture and even the charred remains of residents' meals.

"We want people to take a fresh look at the Romans," Baldwin said Tuesday. "We want them to come away feeling a bit closer to them, feeling like they can relate more to them. They can go into their kitchens and recognize things that they have in their own kitchen."

The exhibition is structured around the rooms of a typical wealthy resident's house, from the shops at the entrance to the atrium, bedrooms, kitchen and garden - and even the latrine. Among the items proudly displayed are the contents of a cesspit: broken jars, lamps and perfume bottles, coins and jewelry - though not, thankfully, the 700 bags of ancient excrement also found there.

Elsewhere there are sturdy cooking pots, elegant serving dishes and sleek mass-produced tableware, along with wooden items whose survival for 2,000 years - carbonized by the heat of the volcano - seems miraculous.

An elegant wooden side table and a baby's crib are not much different from versions in use today. The heat also preserved items of food, including bread, grains, dates and pomegranates.

Then, as now, food was a key part of home life and the economy. Some merchants grew rich from fish sauce, or garum, a Roman kitchen staple made from fermented mackerel heads and guts. Both ordinary and kosher varieties were available, and several of the elegant clay jars are on display.

British Museum Director Neil MacGregor said that what has emerged from the ash at Herculaneum and Pompeii "was not at all the Rome people thought they would find. It was much more complex - a much funnier, a much livelier place to live."

The exhibition shows that it was certainly a richly decorated, colorful world. Floors and walls were adorned with mosaics and frescoes of plants, animals and humans - the latter often in explicitly sexual poses.

Photos by Daily Mail