|Reſlections| Every visit to Pompeii is a meeting between a modern individual and the ancient world – Gabriel Zuchtriegel 60 CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM
WITH SPECIAL THANKS TO PARCO ARCHEOLOGICO DI POMPEI FOR THEIR SUPPORT AND PERMISSIONS The type of discoveries that make the news is also changing. Once, Pompeii was associated, above all, with Roman luxury and decadence. Now it’s the city’s underclass – as well as its perhaps surprising multicultural and multiethnic population mix – that is in the headlines. In November 2021, excavations of a villa whose owner was rich enough to own a ceremonial chariot revealed a room assumed to have been used by slaves, where three plank beds were crammed in among storage vessels, harnesses and a chariot shaft. Zuchtriegel describes it as “a window into the precarious reality of people who seldom appear in historical sources”. Pompeii’s 41-year-old director is keen to diversify and broaden the archaeological site’s visitor base to make it “more inclusive, and more accessible”. But already, he declares, “I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the visitor experience today has improved immensely compared to, say, ten years ago – in terms of cleanliness, in terms of the services offered, in terms of how much of the site is now open to the public”. The Great Pompeii Project stabilised and made safe the entire 44ha excavated area of Pompeii. Of this, 80 per cent is now visitable on a rotation basis (houses and city blocks are periodically closed to prevent wear and tear), while special reservationonly tours accompanied by archaeologists and other experts are periodically offered to parts of the site that are still the object of ongoing digs and research – like the House of the Painter, where a team from the University of Lausanne is using advanced AI and robotics techniques to piece together the fragments of a decorated ceiling damaged first by the eruption of Vesuvius and later by aerial bombardment during the Second World War. In September 2022, in collaboration with a street festival in the modern town of Pompei, Zuchtriegel even invited a group of street artists to display their work on removable panels in the archaeological site. If this sounds like a desecration, it’s worth remembering that back when it was a thriving Ancient Roman port and commercial hub, Pompeii’s walls were covered in graffiti, some of it political, some merely scurrilous. For the man tasked with overseeing one of the world’s most famous “dead cities”, such meetings between old and new are not provocations, but part of the very nature of Pompeii today. “Every visit”, he explains, “is a meeting between a modern individual and the ancient world.” So bringing video art, street art or contemporary sculpture into the archaeological area is not, he believes, “an add-on … it’s a way of making explicit our daily experience of Pompeii, a way of launching a dialogue about what the past means for us today.” Top right: restorer Chiara Ausanio at work on a fresco inside the House of the Chaste Lovers; Left page: a drone-captured view of the sprawling archaelogical site and Mount Vesuvius beyond CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM 61
