The book Pompeii, a Roman city in 100 objects (Criticism, 2024) explains the place through a hundred very different elements, from the most noble and precious to the humble and vulgar, including a gold bracelet, statues, paintings, a gladiator helmet, a charred bread, a leaf of shave and a urinal. Each object gives rise to an entry on an aspect of the history and life of the city and the whole provides a very complete vision of Pompeii, its past, its present, its future and the archaeological and preservation challenges – of the ravages of tourism or climate change, among other threats—that it faces. A very enjoyable way to immerse yourself in the history of fire and ash (but not only) of Pompeii, the famous city devastated by the terrifying eruption of Vesuvius in the year 79.
The author is Rubén Montoya (Villanueva de Alcardete, 32 years old), from Toledo, doctor in Archaeology, historian and researcher, trained in Spain, the United Kingdom (with Penelope Allison, the great specialist in Roman houses and military bases) and Italy, and who He has spent countless days digging in Pompeii, for which he has felt an irreducible passion since he was a child. His book moves between the informative and the specialized in a very suggestive mix capable of interesting a wide audience. For the neophyte it is an excellent and very complete introduction (a everything you would have wanted to know about Pompeii), while for the more advanced reader it constitutes a wonderful summary, reminder and update, always with that hook of the selection of objects that makes the walk through the city and its history very entertaining.
Among the very interesting things that Montoya tells: the connection of Spartacus with the city; the debate about whether there were Christians in it (it is not confirmed, despite The last days of Pompeii); the fact that there are unexploded bombs left there from World War II and the danger they can represent (the Allied bombers caused enormous destruction in the archaeological area: not everything was done by the volcano); the fact that the city had its own patron saint, Pompeian Venus (curiously very modest); the possibility that any day the house that Cicero owned on the outskirts of the city (with his library!) will appear. Also curious is that we have an inscription from a tribune (Tito Suedius Clement) who also left a graphite in the colossi of Memnon in Egypt: another link between Pompeii and the country of the Nile beyond the famous temple of Isis. The author also explains that there are loving graffiti of inter-female relationships (throughout the book there is an effort to show the often invisible women of Pompeii, not only its inhabitants but also the archaeologists). Or that fast food bars (thermopolium), like Salvio’s, had a bad reputation and they could call you “cocksucker” and, consequently, it was easy to have an altercation, or that a series of phalluses painted on the walls and on the pavement seem to indicate the way to the brothels (where some graffiti reveals the name of clients such as Escordopordónico, which must be a nickname because, although it seems like the name of a Greek merchant from Asterix, it means “Mr. Garlic Flatulence”).
The first object selected is the ring with the head of a silenus that Charles III himself found in the excavations of Pompeii – at that time it was not yet certain that it was the city – in his years as king of Naples (he was known as “ the archaeologist king. It helps the author to explain the first investigations in the 18th century. A ballista projectile reminds us that Pompeii had a past, in which (89 BC) the Roman army had besieged it during the Social Wars, when the Pompeians (from Pompeii, not Pompey) had allied themselves with other Italic peoples against Rome. On the northwestern wall of the city, in the area of the House of the Vestals, the impacts of an attack that was “intense, tragic and destructive” can still be seen. As was the disastrous earthquake of the year 63, 16 before the eruption. In fact, part of the city was being restored when the eruption hit.
![Gladiator helmet made of bronze located in Pompeii and exhibited in the Louvre.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/OVQTR7FRUJGTBGOHNBP45K2DDY.jpg?auth=f8b59e0a483d4de8202b0d349c52968a8ac63bf7f5d230b343b7f0976c1f4ed8&width=414)
On the list of objects chosen by Montoya, there are some very iconic ones such as the plaster tracing of the poor dog from Orpheus’ house (and some of the casts of human victims), or the beautiful gladiator helmet. There is also an anchor, which refers to the river and maritime condition of the city and the search for its main port, or a car, to talk about Pompeian traffic (there was the equivalent of pedestrian zones), or the aforementioned urinal that leads to boarding the issue of waste and the 262 latrines found in Pompeii and a pressing question (and worth the word), given that there is usually only one in houses, were masters and slaves sharing it? The charred loaf of bread adds a note of everyday drama apart from remembering that 33 bakeries have been found in the city. Other elements of Montoya’s selection are the Indian statuette that proves the extensive network of commercial contacts in Pompeii, medical instruments (an outpatient clinic has been found in the city), dice or a bathtub.
![Visitors viewing the cast of a victim of the eruption in Pompeii.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/D5CC2KCTT5BI5C6PWSNV32XCQY.jpg?auth=5e526c2df17c13e89d8c5d158eeaed6552ea96bf9cdda7683737109922b3982f&width=414)
Montoya begins his book with an introduction in which he recounts his first initiatory visit to Pompeii in 2010, at the age of 19—after having already been irremediably abducted by the Roman ruins as a child in his neighbor Segóbriga—as a scholarship recipient in an archaeological project of the Complutense. He had earned it hard, since he had been cataloging objects based on photographs for a year. “It was like living a dream,” says the scholar, in whose youthful and enthusiastic face, dark from much time spent excavating outdoors, incongruously serene and intelligent gray eyes shine that seem to have been taken from a statue of Minerva. After that seminal meeting, Montoya says in an interview in the very Pompeian garden bar of the La Central bookstore in Barcelona’s Raval, he has returned to work again and again in the old and long-suffering city. “The common thread of the book is the objects returned to their context,” he explains. In fact, there are 99 entries in the book. “The book itself is object number one hundred,” he notes.
Excavate or consolidate what is found
For Montoya, surprisingly, given what happened there, “Pompeii is a place where I am happy and feel safe.” It is a site, he says enthusiastically, “that transcends archaeology” and that “allows us to touch the past and reflect on the future.” He has the privilege of being able to sneak into Fabio Rufo’s house (his favorite) even at night and evoke his shadows. But he remembers that today it is possible to visit Pompeii virtually on the Internet, as it is completely digitized, house by house, room by room, and he encourages you to do so. He highlights that thanks to new technologies we are seeing things that the first travelers of the GRand Tourwho came to contemplate the mark left by a glass of wine on a marble table.
![Discovery of an imposing banquet hall, with elegant black walls and decorated with frescoes with mythological themes inspired by the Trojan War.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/BT2THLWJ7FGTFKIU6MLNRRC7FI.jpg?auth=46920c15840fac720ae2c8d65260f6461e22da696f358163b38cd0bc437803c9&width=414)
Of the Trojan-themed paintings recently found in a “black room” of a house on insula 10 of Regio IX, he considers them to be beautiful, but one more example of the wonders that Pompeii houses, of which a third remains to be excavated. , about 20 hectares, not counting the area outside the walls, where large elite villas can be found. “Pompeii will always give surprises,” he says, although there is debate about whether to continue excavating or limit ourselves to consolidation and study, reinterpreting what we have, with the use, for example, of AI.
The findings continue even from victims. Montoya emphasizes that we understand well the morphology of the eruption and the pyroclastic flows that destroyed Pompeii and nearby cities such as Herculaneum, Stabiae and Oplontis. He points to the theory that it happened in the fall and not in August. He remembers that there was no lava in Pompeii, although it is difficult for us not to associate the word with a volcanic eruption. “The level of pain and suffering that you perceive in Pompeii is moving, people saw how everything around them was burned, even the glass and bronze were melting.”
We tend, Montoya points out, to underestimate what the eruption was like. The overwhelming 30-kilometer incandescent column that rose over Vesuvius and collapsed on Pompeii, the shower of stones, the terrible atmospheric pyrotechnics. The hundred casts of the victims (including four animals: the dog, a pig and two horses) allow us to get closer to that reality. “Pain has something that attracts,” he emphasizes. It is surprising to know that it is estimated that only 10% of the people died in that horror. There was a flood of displaced people and refugees who had lost everything. We know of an inhabitant of Pompeii, Cornelius Fuscus, who ended his days in Dacia in charge of five legions in the war waged by Domitian.
The scholar’s favorite object is a gold bracelet in the shape of a coiled snake worn by a woman whose body appeared next to that of another and a girl, together they tried to take refuge in an inn, a caupona. The bracelet has an inscription on the inside, hidden from view, that reads “from the lord to his slave,” and alludes to a love relationship. “With that jewel she would look like a dominates, a lady, but she was probably one of the many slaves who worked as prostitutes. She is an exciting object that opens another dimension of Pompeian life.”
It is curious that among the 100 objects none of the famous phalluses and tintinabules (bells) with penises so ubiquitous in Pompeii and that supplied the Secret Cabinet of the Archaeological Museum of Naples. “I address the world of sexuality, of course (there is the bas-relief of Lucius Numinus’s bar with the woman, surely a prostitute, above the man), but I did not want to go fully into the penis on purpose; Not everything is penises in the Pompeian world, as some seem to be obsessed with. The image of the phallus was something common and everyday, in the houses, streets, statues and altars of Priapus, but it did not have the transgressive and scandalous meaning of today. “Sex was not taboo in Pompeii and the fact that its representations can surprise us says more about us than about the Romans.”
Montoya warns against some false commonplaces about Pompeii, such as thinking that it was a special place, for example particularly erotic, within the Roman world, or that it is a city frozen in time, “what is called the false Pompeian premise.” Because the eruption lasts 24 hours, but it buries a city in continuous change, which was transformed day by day, dynamic, busy. “It does not at all produce a still photo of immobility and stasis, but on the contrary.”
Regarding the relative lack of written documentation from the time of the disaster (of which the testimony of the Plinians is preserved), remember that there are references from historians, including a visit by the emperor Titus to ground zero of the catastrophe, and from the poets (such as Statius: “Where Vesuvius exploded with fury, pouring out storms of fire”). But, certainly, more information is missing about such an apocalypse. “It is something that has to do with the resilient attitude of human beings, looking forward. We have a good example in the pandemic, which we don’t even talk about anymore.”
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