Pompeii: the thermopoly resurfaces from the excavations. “The food is still intact” – Chronicle

Pompeii (Naples), December 26, 2020 – Another extraordinary, discovered in Pompeii. Give him excavations a thermopoly (Thermopolium in Latin), meaning a kind of street food shed before the letter It was inaugurated in 79 AD, the year of the eruption that covered the Flegrean city. It looks like a photograph of that moment, when pyroplastic material submerged Pompeii.

To anticipate the discovery, the acting director of the Archaeological Park, Massimo osanna, which speaks of an almost intact environment, with all kinds of dishes, including a piece of kid, some snails and a kind of paella of the time. In the thermopoly containers, also clay pots food traces that were sold on the street. Food almost two thousand years old.

The frescoes

Do not miss the decorative part, to surprise you: there are frescoes of a sea nymph on horseback, of two German geese hanging by the legs, a rooster, a dog on a leash on which even a joker had graffiti a homophobic insult. They are so realistic that they appear to be painted in 3 dimensions.

Pompeians used to consume hot food and drink outdoors. The thermopoly consisted of a large counter in the shape of an “L”. In the room, with a second room at the back and an upper floor, the remains of two men were found. One of the two, about fifty, according to the hypothesis of the anthropologist Valeria Amoretti, was lying on a bed in the back room, the bones of the other – except for one foot – were instead found in a large vase, with all probabilities hidden there by excavators perhaps even from the seventeenth century who had investigated a part of this environment.

Two men in the store

The setting hints at the last moments that preceded the eruption: the store appears to have been “hastily closed and abandoned by the owners,” Osanna explains. But it is possible that “someone, perhaps the older man, stayed inside and died in the first phase of the eruption, crushed by the collapse of the attic.”

However, the bones found belong to two men. Who could be the second? According to the director of the park, it could be “a thief or a hungry fugitive, who entered to scrape something to eat and surprised by the burning fumes with the lid of the pot that he had just opened in his hand.”

Where is

The excavation is located in Regio V, in front of a large square on the corner between Vicolo dei Balconi and the Casa delle Nozze d’Argento. Already identified and partially excavated in 2019, from the thermopoly when the footprint left in the ash by one of the large wooden doors resurfaced at that time. In 2019 the first floor balcony was found, along with a first part of the counter, the one that overlooked the square, one of the most popular in Pompeii, with its beautiful marble fountain.

Perhaps to allude to the exterior monument, says Osanna, “that first part of the counter was decorated with a mythological theme, a Nereid riding an extraordinary hippocampus with a body transformed into a rainbow of colors.” But it was the subsequent excavations, which reached their climax in recent weeks, that returned the wealth of information that this antique shop will be able to add to the knowledge of history.

Studies

In Pompeii, the excavations did not stop for a day, not even closed. According to Osanna, the discovery represents “an incredible photograph of the day of the eruption” and a turning point for studies on the life, the uses, but especially the nutrition of the time. “It will be an Easter gift for visitors,” he says. Also applauded by the Minister of Cultural Heritage Dario Franceschini: “A virtuous example for the recovery of the country,” says the owner of the Mibact. .

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