Pompeii & Circumstance

Yesterday was not devoid of interest.

We'd offered to pick up some friends flying into CLT late last night, so Vicki came up with the idea of heading on down to Charlotte in the afternoon and spending a few hours at Discovery Place. They'd had a traveling exhibit there called A Day In Pompeii since June, we were both interested in seeing it, and it would only be running for a few more days - so Vicki bought the tickets, Marshall and I cleaned the truck, and off we went to the big city.

Discovery Place didn't impress me all that much, but it's a science museum aimed at kids, so I'm not their target audience anyway. Marshall seemed to enjoy it, but the whole place seemed pretty run down to me. For example, they had some pretty interesting animals, but their glass cages were so scratched up you could barely seem them. The place was built in the 80's, and it hasn't aged well.

The Pompeii exhibit, on the other hand, impressed me quite a bit. It wasn't just the quality of the artifacts, but the organizers had made a conscious effort to build the collection out of common, everyday things that were part of the lives of the citizens of Pompeii. As you walked through the exhibit, you really got a feeling for what kind of people they were. What they ate, where they lived, how they decorated their homes - there was even one wall covered with graffitti (with translations) that really drove home the point (for me, anyway) that these were real, earthy people.

So you proceed through the entire exhibit getting to know these people, and you don't encounter the horrific way so many of them died until the last room. They aren't technically dead bodies. The victims were buried in volcanic ash, and as the ash hardened and their bodies decomposed it left voids in the soil. By filling those voids with plaster (or more recently, resin) archeologists have created casts that are almost uncanny in the level of detail that's been preserved. Little things, like the way a man huddled against a wall was covering his mouth with a piece of cloth, or the way a husband was reaching out to protect his wife, have a powerful way of bringing out the humanity in the casts.

It was a great exhibit, and I really enjoyed it.
Then we went to Maggiano's and stuffed ourselves beyond all rhyme or reason.

Photo Links:
Discovery Place
Funerary statue from Pompeii.
Statue of Fortuna.
Bas-relief sculpture of Minerva.
Cast of a victim.
Cast of a victim.
Cast of a victim.
Cast of a victim.