When the book was published in Italy at the end of 2019, the Feltrinelli bookstore on Via Chiaia in Naples had a pile next to the cash register every morning that had been cleared in the evening.

The title “Pompei.

Il tempo ritrovato ”(Pompeii. The time found again), with which Massimo Osanna, director of the Archaeological Park since 2014, takes stock, addresses a public issue: The ancient ruined city on Vesuvius is a national monument, symbol of the country's cultural wealth and its vulnerability.

Andreas Rossmann

Freelance author in the features section.

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The response is already an expression of the new attitude towards Pompeii that Osanna stands for.

Set out to overcome the crisis that culminated in the collapse of the gladiatorial school in 2010, he has consolidated research and restoration, security and accessibility.

Above all, however, he established a new bond with Pompeii by sharpening attention to everyday finds: for street food and jewelry, for gardens that invade houses, for forms of living and urban spaces that are traces of “premodern” culture in many A few decades ago, regions of Italy determined how people were together.

They are present in the memory: "The dead city suddenly becomes extremely alive and present."

An ethnically diverse community

The “closeness of the past” also evokes drawings, sketches and sentences, so many of which have been carved into public and private walls that a prankster added, “I am amazed that you, wall, have not collapsed when you have You can endure so many stupid things on the part of the scribes. ”Osanna dedicates a chapter to graffiti -“ without fame ”, but not“ without history ”- in which he finds declarations of love, insults, comments, sexual innuendos, obscene sayings, electoral appeals and literary quotations (seventeen times the first verse of the "Aeneid") as well as the charcoal script found in 2018 in the Casa del Giordano discussed in detail, which in the controversial question of whether the eruption of Vesuvius happened on August 24th or October 24th, 79 AD later date. Connections to the present are also drawn by taberns,Wells and thermopolies, shops selling groceries and fast food: residues and waste suggest diet and eating habits - contexts of find that have long been neglected and convey an appearance of the city that contradicts classical idealization.

“Pompeii was founded towards the end of the seventh century BC. In the first chapter Osanna outlines the history of the city and uses the sanctuaries of Apollo and Minerva, the transformations and votive offerings to trace her eventful fate: Probably of Etruscan origin, Pompeii developed from the fourth to the second century BC. Through the immigration of Samnites to an ethnically diverse community and a place of hybrid cultures, the 80 BC. Roman colony and in 62 AD, seventeen years before the catastrophe, was hit by an earthquake.