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Before Allied forces reached Pompeii in September 1943, more than 170 bombs were dropped on the site. The Roman archaeological wonder that had been preserved by the destructive natural power of Vesuvius suddenly risked being razed by man. Several buildings were hit — if you look around the House of the Faun today, you’ll spot a piece of shrapnel still embedded in the atrium — and the site’s director Amedeo Maiuri sustained an injury to the leg.
Eleven directors later, Gabriel Zuchtriegel may not have to dodge bombs in his role, but there is still no shortage of threats facing Pompeii: fading frescoes, collapsing buildings, flooding, funding, looting and even the odd British tourist carving their initials on to buildings.
Oh, and threats to Zuchtriegel’s own position. The German-born archaeologist’s appointment in 2021 was met with resignations from members of the academic advisory board and a petition of protest signed by 140 professors and curators. Zuchtriegel ascribes this to tabloid coverage critical of his previous job at Paestum, an ancient Greek city in modern day Italy; it may also have been because of his nationality. Whatever the reason, The Buried City, a behind-the-scenes history of Pompeii, is his rebuttal.
Even before he arrived at the two-millennia-old site, Zuchtriegel clearly sought to distance himself from academia’s traditionalists. “I arrived at the Humboldt University in Berlin imagining that I’d be among people who shared my enthusiasm for antiquity,” he writes. “But if they did, most of them hid it really well.”
His first real project took the job title of “director” literally when he staged a performance of Aristophanes’ The Birds in the Roman theatre with local school pupils. “None had ever heard of Aristophanes. And no one had visited Pompeii of their own accord,” he says. “Others had to be persuaded not to turn up stoned to rehearsals.”
The Buried City is no conventional history of Pompeii — though Zuchtriegel covers the basics for the uninitiated. Rather, it is a justification for the kind of work carried out at the site and an opportunity to pose modern questions against a classical context: what is the role of an ancient ruin in the 21st century? How should we reckon with the sexual violence implicit in many of the frescoes? Should we refer to “slaves” or “enslaved people” when it comes to Roman history?
Shortly after he joined in 2021, three beds were excavated in the cramped quarters of a villa in the suburb of Civita Giuliana. Such is the preservative power of the ash that archaeologists were able to determine that on the day Vesuvius erupted in AD79, there was no time to make the beds in the room — the blankets were left scrunched on top — and that a bit of wood had been placed under a bedpost to stop the frame from wobbling.
This is what Zuchtriegel believes to be Pompeii’s superpower: “the opportunity to take a peek behind the official version of history” that is all too often written by the rich and powerful, to glimpse “people who only ever appear marginally in the texts of ancient writers and about whose bedrooms barely a word has been written”.
In Jamie Bulloch’s excellent translation, the part-history, part-memoir is spirited and genial, evoking the everyday life of a city that has miraculously stood the test of time. “Pompeii’s history is also a eulogy to forgetting,” writes Zuchtriegel. “[W]ithout forgetting there can be no rediscovery, without decay no recovery and preservation.” This is the miraculous contradiction at the heart of Pompeii: tragedy turned opportunity and life sprung from death in a city quite literally risen from the ashes.
The Buried City: Unearthing the Real Pompeii by Gabriel Zuchtriegel, translated by Jamie Bulloch, Hodder Press £22 256 pages
This article has been amended to clarify that the ancient Greek city of Paestum is located in modern day Italy
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