A day in the life of the ancient Roman Empire was preserved for the ages on Aug. 24, 79 A.D. when Mt. Vesuvius erupted and smothered the bustling seaport of Pompeii beneath a 20-foot blanket of lava, volcanic ash and lapilli.
In the Garden of the Fugitives, a young man covers the face of his pregnant wife. Family groups huddle desperately, their bodies creating hollows in the lava flow from which perfect plaster casts would later be made.
“You get the expressions on their faces and the exact folds in the cloth of the clothing they were wearing,” said Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, director of the British School in Rome and an expert on Pompeii. “The entire place is an immeasurably precious resource.”
But Pompeii is in serious trouble. What Vesuvius preserved, bad archeology, Italian politics and the onslaught of modern tourism now threaten to destroy.
The site is a mess. Weeds and litter choke some of the excavated sites. Packs of stray dogs roam freely. So do packs of unsupervised Italian schoolchildren.
Ancient graffiti have been overwritten by modern graffiti. Left exposed to the elements, the walls of Pompeii’s villas are crumbling.
Frescoes that were brilliantly colored when they were first revealed a half-century ago have faded to oblivion.
“When I started, the decoration was much more vivid. Now it’s almost gone. In a few years there won’t be anything,” said Antonio Cardola, who has been guiding visitors around Pompeii for 30 years.
Back then, 64 of Pompeii’s 70 fully excavated houses were open to the public.
Today, nearly 800 houses have been exposed but only 17 are open.
Some have been closed because they are falling apart and pose a danger to visitors. Others are fenced off because Italian authorities simply do not have the staff to protect them from the swelling ranks of tourists.
Last year Pompeii drew 2 million visitors, a 40 percent increase in little more than four years.
Among tourist attractions in Italy, the ruin ranks second only to the Vatican museums.
With more and more visitors squeezing into an ever shrinking portion of the ancient city, once home to 15,000 inhabitants, the wear and tear on those parts of Pompeii still open will only accelerate.
Fueled by a lucrative black market in antiquities, theft is another major problem. The inadequately protected ruins of Pompeii have provided easy pickings over the years.
When the House of the Vettii was first excavated in the 1950s, archeologists discovered 12 bronze statues in the interior garden.
Today, only two remain.
Tourists add to the problem.
“They like to leave a little graffiti behind or take home a small souvenir–maybe a stone from a mosaic,” said Pietro Giovanni Guzzo, Pompeii’s superintendent. “But if you have 2 million visitors and if each one takes a stone, pretty soon there is no mosaic.”
Theft and vandalism aside, the great paradox of archeology is that you cannot discover without destroying.
As soon as an ancient object is uncovered from whatever had been preserving it for all those centuries–the earth, the sea, ice, the moist or dry darkness of a tomb–it immediately begins to degrade.
Much scientific energy has been focused on the problem of preserving ancient sites and artifacts.
Even with technological advances, the cardinal rule of modern archeology has always been to publish a careful record of all findings.
An object removed from the place where its was discovered immediately loses important “context” that helps explain its significance.
By publishing a detailed accounting of where and how it was found, an important measure of context can be preserved.
This year marks the 250th anniversary of the first scientific excavation at Pompeii, although much of what passed for archeology in the early days more closely resembled souvenir hunting.
But even in the last half-century, Pompeii has been rapaciously excavated without regard to publishing and without taking even minimal precautions to protect what has been unearthed.
In the 1950s and 1960s, reinforced concrete was used to buttress collapsing structures–an affront to the historical integrity of the site–and now the concrete is falling apart.
Wallace-Hadrill, who is on a newly formed advisory committee for Pompeii, has called for an immediate moratorium on new excavations until officials get a handle on what already has been dug up.
“We should not be digging up new stuff until we publish the old stuff. We haven’t bought the moral right,” he said.
A big part of Pompeii’s recent problems stems from poor administration and corruption.
“One person goes, a new person comes. There has been too much discontinuity. A lot of this reflects post-war Italian politics. You have a left-wing superintendent, then a right- wing superintendent,” Wallace-Hadrill said.
Strapped for operating funds, some superintendents have felt compelled to cast methodical research aside and go for flashy finds in order to pull in tourists.
Others have used Pompeii to line their pockets.
One previous superintendent is under investigation for billing the Ministry of Culture for excavations that never took place.
From an administrative standpoint, Pompeii appears to be on more secure footing these days.
Guzzo, the new superintendent, is an archeologist widely respected among his peers. He recently shook things up at the site by insisting that guards actually show up for work.
Inadequate funding remains Pompeii’s biggest problem.
In a country blessed with a disproportionately large helping of Western civilization’s cultural assets, too much of a good thing can be a curse. Italy simply doesn’t have the cash for the upkeep.
Pompeii got a boost recently when Rome agreed to grant it a kind of financial autonomy, allowing it to keep all of its gate receipts instead of turning the money back to the Ministry of Culture to subsidize other historical sites.
This should triple Pompeii’s annual income.
Even so, the $9 million to $12 million Guzzo expects to take in this year is still far short of the $285 million he says is needed to stop the deterioration.
“We would like to offer a better experience to visitors, but right now I have to say that our first priority is the conservation of the site,” said Guzzo, who recently persuaded the European Union to fund a new study of excavations that were made between the mid-19th Century and the 1950s.
The Ministry of Culture is looking into other ways of boosting revenues, including corporate sponsorship for all or part of the Pompeii site.
Private companies could “adopt” a villa or perhaps an entire neighborhood. In exchange for underwriting its upkeep, they could display their brand name.
Fiat, Italy’s largest company, and Confindustria, the powerful Italian employers’ association, have expressed interest, but leading scholars have objected to the “privatization” of the nation’s cultural heritage.
Wallace-Hadrill suggested– only half in jest–a Disney approach.
“A ticket at the gate gives you admission to five houses. Anything above that, you pay at the door–almost like Disneyland rides. Disney would know how to make money on a park that drew 2 million visitors a year.”
