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The two, a master and his slave, fled desperate together, from a Pompeii that had become a hell: they were looking for an impossible salvation. Near instantaneous death (from intolerable heat, is the 2020 diagnosis) surprised them during the eruption of Vesuvius on October 24, AD 79, at 9 a.m. The archaeological area does not stop producing treasures like these two men who resurfaced from the excavations of Civita Giuliana, in the suburban town of Sauro Bardato, 700 meters northwest of Pompeii, in the same area where the three horses admired with their ornaments. The villa had a large terrace overlooking the Gulf of Naples and Capri. In the cryptoporticus covered by the terrace, the footprints left under the lava material were found by a boy between 18 and 23 years old, 1.56 meters tall, and by a man between 30 and 40 years old, 1, 62 high. The first should be a slave: the first analysis of the body prints revealed some crushing of the vertebrae, compatible with very heavy work. The old man wore a woolen cloak fastened on the left shoulder and a tunic. The wealth of the garments would confirm their belonging to a good social class.
Techniques that reveal the smallest details
Current techniques have made it possible to obtain details from plaster in a vacuum that were unthinkable until a few years ago: the textures and folds of the fabrics, their quality. Many bone fragments have been recovered: the teeth, the bones of the boy’s skull and the man who left the marks of his chin, lips, nose, his bent knees. The veins in his hands also reappeared. All the extreme movements before death have been reconstructed: the slave has the left arm bent with the hand on the abdomen and the right arm on the chest: an extreme attempt at protection? Along with the two figures, fragments of white plaster dragged by the ash cloud and lapilli: they came from the collapse of the upper floor. The technique is brilliantly devised by the archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli around 1863: a plaster cast in the voids produced by the decomposition of bodies under the ashes. Today’s more refined, highly hydroscopic plaster is capable of recording the smallest details that have thrilled the excavators themselves.
The importance of the site
The director of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, and the new general director of the ministry’s museums, Massimo Osanna, recalls the importance of the excavations at Civita Giuliana “also because they were carried out together with the Torre Annunziata Prosecutor’s Office to avoid clandestine excavations.” The Minister of Cultural Heritage, Dario Franceschini, underlines that “Pompeii is important in the world not only because of the large number of tourists, but because it is an incredible place of research. There are still twenty hectares to be excavated, a great job for archaeologists today and tomorrow.
November 22, 2020 (change November 22, 2020 | 09:15)
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