Little Pompeii in Verona? No to ridiculous comparisons. The discovered complex had been known since 2004

The “discovery” of Verona ’s “little Pompeii” bounced in Italian and foreign newspapers these days, and called a “spectacular find” by Mayor Federico Sboarina? It is certainly a very important excavation, but it was started in 2004, and much of what the press reported had long been known to scholars (but also to journalists) for more than fifteen years, since the archaeological excavation under theformer Cinema Astra had started a long time ago and the area had subsequently been placed under constraint by the Verona Superintendency. The archaeological remains under the former cinema, located at No. 13 Via Oberdan, had been unearthed between the summer and fall of seventeen years ago during work on the construction of a basement under the slab of a building at No. 1. The excavations, reads the Superintendency’s historic-artistic report dated Nov. 7, 2007, “brought to light a series of structures of a residential character”: investigations, however, were suspended at the time.

The report contains several of the data reported these days. “In this area,” the 2007 document reads, “the various investigations carried out over the last 30 years have found the existence of an extra-Muran sector that was strongly urbanized in Roman times, and with a settlement fabric similar to the intramuran one. This is documented by numerous findings, some particularly important such as the one at 18 Cantore Street, which preserved several underground rooms, including a nymphaeum, decorated with an elegant pictorial apparatus, and the one at 15 Cantore Street/Oberdan Street 18, where were the remains of three large vaulted rooms, probably basement rooms.” The structures of via Oberdan 13, the report goes on to say, “aligned with the route of the great consular road and the second decumanus and probably open on both roads, are composed of a series of rooms, more than 20. Their planimetric organization is not very clear, since the generating element of the system (open area, corridor or other) has not been identified. They are preserved for an average height of more than 1 m and define rooms of various sizes, some of which are equipped with both floor and wall heating systems.”

So, the heating systems that the media are talking loudly about these days were already known, as were the pictorial decorations. “On some walls,” the report goes on to say, "there remain substantial remains of frescoes reminiscent of Style III paintings, while in 7 rooms signino floors bordered with bands of mosaic tesserae and containing central fields decorated with tesselles and crustae have been identified. The building must have had an upper floor, of which the collapse of room F is evidence. This floor had mosaic pavements.“ As for function, the 2007 report stated that ”the exact function of the facility, which seems to have had a residential use, is unknown, but it appears to have been too large as a private living structure, at least in relation to the average Veronese standard.“ As for the dating, this ”probably goes back to the very early imperial age, but many must have been the successive transformations, it seems, until the third century."

What, then, are the new elements that made people shout about the spectacular discovery? Certainly, this is an excavation of great significance for the reasons given in the report and mentioned above: for the state of preservation (the floor levels, for example, are perfectly preserved), for the presence of frescoes and heating systems that are also well preserved, and for the recent discovery of the wooden furnishings (in this case preserved not perfectly but still able to provide useful information to understand what happened in the structure). But in reality, nothing has emerged in recent days to justify the sensationalism that has accompanied the news, moreover first announced by some agencies at the beginning of the week and only yesterday deepened at a press conference. Quite simply, compared to the 2007 report, archaeologists from the Superintendence Office, having resumed their studies of the complex, have made discoveries that enable them to better clarify hypotheses about its function and the nature of the collapses that affected the rooms. A number of recent findings (collapsed remains, a charred wooden cabinet inside a room that has preserved intact the colors of the frescoed walls) have led scholars to speculate that it was a fire that sanctioned the end of the complex, which, according to one hypothesis, was deliberately set during the time of Emperor Gallienus, around 265 A.D., for defensive purposes, and would have affected all the city quarters near the walls. As for the function, the hypothesis (already aired years ago anyway) was raised that the structure might have been a hotel. In short: the real discovery was the identification of rooms with collapses clearly caused by fire.

Even, in 2010, the creation of an archaeological path to “admire columns and mosaics” was already hypothesized. And the superintendent of Verona, Vincenzo Tinè, returned to talk about the archaeological area, explaining in a report by the ArchaeoReporter newspaper what state the work is in now (in particular, the excavation, he said, is at 30 percent) and what is planned for the future: “So far,” Tinè said, “we have been able to pivot on the willingness of the owner who acquired the building and who willingly agreed to carry out all these preliminary excavations, which are functional to guide the renovation and redevelopment of the building. The excavation needs to be completed, it is now at 30 percent and no more: so all the rest of the excavation needs to be done and then the archaeological area needs to be set up. What has been done is to prepare the possibility of the archaeological area, then to place pillars and consolidation structures so that the future area will be solid.” To go ahead and prepare the archaeological area, however, will require substantial resources, as explained by Brunella Bruno, archaeological officer of the superintendence and director of the excavation: “It is a somewhat peculiar excavation: it involved the edges of the area precisely because it is not a survey that started from scientific evidence. We obviously hope that we can find suitable resources: we need a lot of them, also because this is an excavation that has to walk hand in hand with restoration.”

So it becomes a little clearer why the uproar and the comparisons with Pompeii. And it was precisely on the comparison with Pompeii that Tinè himself intervened, again in ArchaeoReporter’s report: “The perceptual and visual effect is Pompeian,” he said. “Now I do not want to make ridiculous comparisons, but here as in Pompeii, a destructive event, perhaps not natural and not accidental but determined by the will of Emperor Gallienus to clear a strip immediately outside the walls of Verona for safety reasons, resulted in an immediate, extensive destruction, without possibility of gradual degradation and with no possibility perhaps even of residents taking out furnishings, and thus has somewhat crystallized a situation that is the archaeological optimum. Typically, archaeologists make a living from misfortunes that seal up living situations: in this case, the misfortune of the extensive fire in late 3rd-century Verona allowed the preservation of evident that would otherwise be lost or deteriorate over time.”

Photo by the Verona Superintendency shows part of the excavation.

Little Pompeii in Verona? No to ridiculous comparisons. The discovered complex had been known since 2004

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