A Day in Pompeii exhibition

[LadyShea]

We saw this exhibit a few weeks ago at the Gulf Coast Exploreum in Mobile, where it is scheduled until June 3, and then it moves to the Science Museum of Minnesota from June 27 to January 6. It is a stunning collection. I urge anyone who can get to either to do so as I can't find any other dates or locations.

It includes jewelry, bronze and marble statues and figurines, frescoes, household items of all kinds, coins and most importantly the casts of some of the victims made from pouring plaster into the hollows formed by the ash.

[livius drusus]

It sounds amazing, LadyShea. According to this article (http://www.al.com/travel/birminghamnews/index.ssf?/base/entertainment/1168769919138840.xml&coll=2&thispage=1), the director of the Gulf Coast Exporeum is pretty much the sole reason y'all got plaster casts. He persuaded the Soprintendenza Archeologica di Pompei to ramp up the coolness of what is normally a small, less glamorous exhibit.

Sullivan said the first exhibition offered to his museum was "Pompeii: Stories from an Eruption." This large, classy exhibit with some 500 artifacts, in fact will be coming to Birmingham in the fall. But it didn't fit the Exploreum's schedule: It couldn't come in the early part of the year and it couldn't stay long enough.

So Sullivan asked the Soprintendenza Archeologica di Pompei, which oversees the site in Italy and supervises such exhibitions, what else was available. That's when he was told there was a second, smaller touring exhibition, called "A Day in Pompeii."

"But we wanted more," said Sullivan. In particular, he wanted more body casts and frescoes.

He began negotiating with the agency and then partnered with three other science museums around the country, enabling him to substantially increase the budget for the exhibition.

"Mobile is a pretty small place," he said. "But by putting the exhibition in four major museums over a two-year period, they became much more interested."

Sullivan went to Italy to see what was available and began selecting objects to add to the basic exhibition. There are now eight body casts - which were created by making molds of the spaces left in the solidified ash after the bodies within had decayed away.

Among them are a couple, a man trying to cover his mouth with a cloth, a pregnant woman, a slave and a dog.

There are more frescoes, as well, including one never before exhibited outside Italy.

I saw the small version at the Smithsonian a few years back and it was, well, small. You should send Michael Sullivan a note to thank him for going above and beyond for local museums. They get skipped a lot, so good on him for working out a deal to benefit the people who don't usually have access to such special exhibits. :thumbup:

[LadyShea]

I will send him a note. We felt fortunate to see such a thing in Alabama, as usually we would have to travel to find cool stuff like this. It's still not a huge exhibit, but fascinating. The casts are really impactful. I just stared at them, sat down on a bench and stared.

[Watser?]

I was in Pompeii a long time ago. I remember those casts, but there was other, more mundane stuff that brought it to life. Like a mosaic that had a picture of a dog and the words Cave Canem (watch out for the dog).

[Ymir's blood]

I read today at Wikipedia that graffiti referring to the poet Ovid was found at Pompeii. It didn't mention what the message was, but it does tend to remove the lives of the citizens from the realm of the abstract.

[Javaman]

Just an excuse to try a Google Earth (http://earth.google.com/) attachment (requires Google Earth installed on your computer):

[Ymir's blood]

Interesting. It's hard to tell it from a modern city but what is that glowing white streak?