Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town

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This meant that the less visually attractive evidence, such as human skeletal remains, were largely ignored. Here, acclaimed historian Mary Beard makes sense of the remains, painting an exhaustive portrait of an ancient town. When you arrive near the summit, you must pay an admission fee to continue your climb to the top (about €6. Beard opens by challenging the notion that Pompeii was simply a normal city simply 'frozen in time'. Two that feature women's names scratched on walls (graffiti) and drawings of women etched in or painted on Pompeian walls (by Erika Zimmermann Damer and Margaret L.

It was a place devoted to the pleasures of life, where statues of gods and phalluses were equally popular. Children, too, of Eve, forever building Edens – and kicking them apart in berserk fury because somehow it isn’t the same.Mary Beard] manages to show us at the same time that almost none of the things we have always assumed about the destruction of the city in 79 AD is quite true, and yet that in a larger sense most of them are true, some of them truer than we knew.

It blends historical fiction with the real-life eruption of Mount Vesuvius on 24 August 79 AD, which overwhelmed the town of Pompeii and its vicinity. Harris acknowledged in many interviews that the plot of his novel was inspired by Polanski's film Chinatown, and Polanski said it was precisely that similarity that had attracted him to Pompeii. Bettany Hughes' Venus and Aphrodite includes a wonderfully atmospheric chapter on Pompeii as the city of the goddess of Love. It is an anthology of essays that provide a range of topics and approaches to women who lived and worked in these small towns, now spectacularly preserved despite their sudden destruction by the eruption of Mt.

The book contains chapters that include Street Life, Earning a Living: Baker, Banker and Garum Maker (who ran the city), and The Pleasure of the Body: Food, Wine, Sex and Baths. If you want to know what really happened in the last days of the petrified city, Beard's meticulous reconstruction will fill you in, scraping away many of your preconceptions as it goes, while her evocative writing will transport you back. Not only is it written in the most engaging style, hooking you from the first page, it is also stuffed with detail.

Many people hold a number of misconceptions about the eruption in AD 79 (there wasn't any lava flow, for example) and the eventual discovery of the ruins. We have your Babylons and your Pompeiis, your Caesars and your chromium-plated (vital-ingredient impregnated) artifacts. On the way to the ticket office, you will pass a large display of plaster casts--the archaeological remains of some victims of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. In this collection, Brenda Longfellow and Molly Swetnam-Burland have gathered an outstanding group of scholars to give voice to both the elite and ordinary women living on the Bay of Naples before the eruption of Vesuvius. Mary Beard is a Fellow of the British Academy and was awarded an OBE in 2013 and a damehood in 2018 for services to classical scholarship.Only 17 years earlier Pompeii had been rocked by a catastrophic earthquake, from which it was still recovering. Robert Harris is the author of fifteen bestselling novels: the Cicero Trilogy - Imperium, Lustrum and Dictator - Fatherland, Enigma, Archangel, Pompeii, The Ghost, The Fear Index, An Officer and a Spy, which won four prizes including the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, Conclave, Munich, The Second Sleep, V2 and Act of Oblivion. It is best to visit the museum after Pompeii, since you will be amazed (having seen the ruined buildings) at what was salvaged from them. If anything disappoints about “The Fires of Vesuvius” it’s that the mostly black-and-white photographs fall well short of conveying the sensual assault that Beard so skillfully evokes in her text.