Mystique of ancient Pompeii at Union Station
Roman social and cultural historian, Andrew Wallace-Hadrill says, “It’s a paradox of archeology; you read the past best in its moments of trauma.” Such a moment of trauma is the subject of an international touring exhibit that opened Nov. 18.
Wallace-Hadrill’s words appear on a panel in the exhibition dedicated to Pompeii, an ancient Roman city buried when Mount Vesuvius erupted on Aug. 24, 79 A.D. Pompeii: The Exhibition is making its North American debut in Kansas City. Union Station is hosting the display of about 200 artifacts on loan from the Naples National Archeological Museum in Italy. It’s the first time that some objects in the collection have been exhibited in the U.S.; some have never before traveled outside of Italy.
Artifacts in the collection excavated from the 2,000-year-old site include food morsels, frescoes, furniture, gladiator armor and weaponry, jewelry, kitchen and glassware, lamps, medical instruments, statuary and tools. There are also haunting plaster casts of actual Pompeiian people and a pet at the agonizing moment of death. They were created by filling the cavities left in the once-powdery ash by victims of the eruption, a practice pioneered by Italian archeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli in 1863.
The tour begins with a four-minute video that sets the scene with dramatic reconstructions of Pompeii and Mount Vesuvius. Providing a sense of daily life with projections, audio and visual effects, photographic murals and reproductions of frescoes and mosaics, the exhibit guides visitors through the stately villa of a wealthy family, a public market, a temple, an amphitheater, baths and a brothel. Visitors will share the sensory experience of Pompeiians on that fateful August afternoon in a “4D eruption theater,” but with the advantage of knowing what’s happening. The word volcano didn’t exist in Latin, the language of Pompeiians.
It’s estimated that 80 percent of Pompeii’s residents may have managed to escape before nightfall on Aug. 24, and that upwards of 2,000 Pompeiians perished. They choked to death on ash and sulfurous gas, were crushed by buildings collapsing from seismic tremors and from the weight of accumulating lapilli (rock fragments exploding from an erupting volcano), were fatally struck by larger pyroclasts, or they died from thermal shock.
The full fury of Mount Vesuvius didn’t destroy Pompeii and nearby communities. It encased them under some 20 feet of pumice stones and dust in fine-grained volcanic ash, which acted as a preservative. There, they remained entombed for two millennia, protected against looters until 1595 when laborers constructing an aqueduct uncovered Pompeii. The site was pillaged, then forgotten until 1748. Bourbon King Charles III began excavations to find art treasures.
As more of the ancient city was unearthed in succeeding centuries, its allure grew. Pompeii became an international tourist attraction. It was romanticized in popular culture and influenced contemporary art and architecture. After touring the ruins in the 1780s, Goethe, the German poet wrote, “Many disasters have befallen the world, but few have brought posterity so much joy.”
Pompeii, which dates back to about 600 B.C.E., was a thriving regional center at the southeastern base of Mount Vesuvius on Italy’s West Coast. The prosperous city of 10,000-20,000 inhabitants lay only a few miles from the Bay of Naples and Herculaneum, an exclusive seaside resort. In 79 A.D., both communities were recovering from a cataclysmic earthquake 17 years earlier. Scientists suggest it was a precursor to Mount Vesuvius’s devastating eruption – one of history’s most famously fascinating natural disasters.
Pompeii: The Exhibition continues through spring at Union Station From here, the collection will visit two more U.S. cities before traveling to Russia.
