Pompeii Sustainable Preservation Project

Mount Vesuvius from Stabiae

The Classics program at UNH (where I work) has a close relationship with the Sustainability Institute, the mission of which is to create sustainable institutions that preserve important cultural traditions while ensuring that these traditions can continue through resource management, broadly conceived. The Sustainability Institute at UNH has the distinction of acknowledging the importance of the Humanities in this process. What, after all, are we sustaining but human culture and what we believe in? I have always been fascinated with the difficulties conducting the study of the past while not affecting the lives of those living today. How can we negotiate the twin aims of preserving the past and ensuring our continued thriving in the future?

Speaking of Sustainability, this past week it was announced that a consortium of German scholars and engineers are coming to the rescue of Pompeii's crumbling infrastructure, well, at least in part. The Technische Universität München (Munich) is teaming up with Fraunhofer di Stoccarda (the leading applied-research institute in Germany) and ICCROM (International Centre for the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property), to create the Pompeii Sustainable Preservation Project, a ten-year initiative to create a sustainable archaeological park. Part of the motivation comes from the recent big news of building and wall collapses, but the leader of the restoration section of Fraunhofer, Ralf Kilian, noted that ten years earlier he already felt that Pompeii's ruins were in bad shape. One of the principal goals of the PPSP (I feel like I'm whispering something secret when I write that acronym) is to create a major center for studying how to preserve an ancient site; further collaboration in this area comes from a group of universities from all over Europe (Oxford, Lmu Munich, DAI, Università Pisa). They are bringing with them an influx of 10 million Euros.

The twin goals of this project—to conserve Pompeii's buildings and to improve conservation methods through research—are to be applauded. In a blog in July I noted that Pompeii would do well to look to its sister town Herculaneum as a model for preserving the past. The initial phase of the PPSP will focus on a single insula (city block). Of primary importance will be improving drainage; lack thereof was the major cause of the fall of the Schola Armaturarum in November 2010. Work starts summer 2014. In 2015, a summer field school for conservation work is envisioned, one that can hold up to 510 students.

The project, however, does come as a sort of slap in the face of the Italian ministry of culture. Massimo Bray, the minister of Mibac, rearticulated Italy's commitment to preserving its own heritage, but, as one article put it, the Germans' capacity to get things done would cast in high relief the vast delays normally seen in Italian bureaucracies.

Read a little more here (in English) and here (in Italian).

Weekly Tidbits

Pompeii Online: Soon you won't have to leave your couch to visit Pompeii and the other sites covered in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. Click this website, which has cool plans, pictures, and other items of interest. Only trouble? So far, it's only in Italian. Let's hope the English section is up and running soon.

If you're going to Rome in September, you should know that there are protests over the pedestrianization of the Via dei Fori Imperiali scheduled for 12–14 September. Article (in Italian) here.

A farmer plowing his fields came across several tombs in the area near Caserta (Piana di Monte Verna) and found a bowl made of impasto ware that dates to the Bronze Age. Archaeologists over the next days will be working to figure out the exact context of these finds. This Italian article gives an overview.