ROAMIN'RUINS

摘要

One August day in 79 AD, Gaius Julius Polybius, a mover and shaker in Roman society, met his match when Mount Vesuvius erupted, heaping eight to ten feet of volcanic ash, cinder, and rock onto his spacious villa, obliterating it and the rest of the resort city of Pompeii. The Polybius house, and the town, lay silent for nearly 2000 years, until they were unearthed in recent centuries. Because Pompeii came to such a sudden end, it serves as a sort of time capsule that tells us much about the daily lives of the ancient Romans. Not only paintings and statues, but loaves of bread and household pets were preserved by the volcanic conditions that visited the town-eerie reminders of how quickly everyday life can come to an end. It was this idea of showing how things stood direcdy before the eruption that spurred researchers at the University of Tokyo and the Soprintendenza Archeologica di Pompei in charge of the site to create a virtual reconstruction of a Pompeiian house, and to allow visitors to "tour" the dwelling. Julius Polybius's house was chosen in part because it had been physically reconstructed inaccurately, mostly with an eye toward preserving it from atmospheric decay. By merging not only survey data from the site, but journal entries and sketches made at the time the house was excavated in the 1960s and 70s, researchers hoped to convey a more accurate idea of how the villa would have looked immediately before the volcano blew.