Thursday, July 8, 2010
 |
| A fresco from the Villa San Marco |
Today we went to the Villa Adriana and
the Villa San Marco at
Stabiae, then we went to Boscoreale to visit a
typical Roman
villa rustica, or working country
farmhouse, and its nearby museum. The Villa San Marco would have been
one of the types of seaside villas in the area where Pliny the Elder
died trying to rescue victims of the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79
A.D. He was also trying to study the eruption for observation
purposes. He reminds me in that respect of an ancient Jacques
Cousteau. The restoration work and reproductions there help set the
frescoes we saw at the Naples Museum in the context of a house. The
garden was large and breathtaking, with a huge
piscina (pool
or fishpond) and a
nymphaeum (decorative fountain) at the
back. The plantings in the garden are historically accurate, based on
root castings and DNA research done by archaeologists, accurate even
down to the size and placement of the plane trees. They really helped
give a sense of what the garden looked like as well as provided
welcome shade. Plane trees dot the Vesuvian Institute and the
surrounding streets as well. Even today they seem to be a popular
tree here.
 |
| The large piscina or fishpond |
The state of the garden interested me,
because the specialty of studying the plantings in the Roman gardens
was still young during my last visit to these kinds of sites in 1988.
At the Villa Adriana we actually observed archaeologists at work on
the garden there, working on the bare soil to make root castings of
both large and small plants. Much of the work is done by
undergraduates at the University of Maryland, many of whom come back
in their summers year after year to continue this work. The views of
the coastline from this villa must have been magnificent. The
ocean would have come right up to about where the apartment buildings
line the base of the slope where the villa stands, today. After the
eruption, the ocean receded so that it is about a kilometer away from
where it used to be.
 |
| Plaster casts of the garden at the Villa Adriana |
 |
| A bronze bust at Boscoreale |
Boscoreale is a fine example of a
villa
rustica, and very different from the luxury and urban villas
we have been visiting up to this point. The term
rustica now
has a more concrete meaning in my mind. I used to think of it as just
villa out in the country, but the minute I stepped into this
building I felt I was on a working farm. Its layout upon entry almost
reminds me of stepping into a friend's stables. The building has been
restored well, too, so that you can see even what the roofs would
have looked like. The nearby museum is full of the tools and
materials related to the kind of work and recreation what would have
gone on here, from fishhooks to a small mill for flour to information
on textiles and dyes, etc. There was also a special exhibit with some
of the castings of victims of the eruption.
 |
| A mill to grind grain into flour at Boscoreale |
 |
| Helle, a mosaic at the Villa San Marco |
The highlight of the evening was a
plenary session by Roger Macfarlane, a visiting scholar who works on
using computer technology to rescue and share the content of ancient
scrolls, particularly at the Villa of the Papyri. He showed us a
documentary about these efforts called Out of the Ashes. I
very much want to see if I can somehow find a copy of this for my
students. I took a little video of him of my own, too.
No comments:
Post a Comment