A City Unbottled
A review by Joy Connolly
Visit the ruins of Pompeii today, stroll to the famous "Villa of the Mysteries," and you will discover a room of enigmatic frescoes gleaming in the dim light, their crimsons and golds seeming as rich and resplendent as if they were painted yesterday. In a sense, they were: the walls of the room were heavily and repeatedly retouched, waxed and varnished with petroleum when they were discovered a century ago. The frescoes are typical of Pompeii's charms, the way its many relics seem to testify to the constancy of human invention and encourage us to forget the passage of time. Stroll around the site a little more, and you'll come across recognizable kitchenware, medical instruments and even graffiti: stickmen doodled in a doorway at the level of a child's eye, a naked Venus painted on a bake shop wall like a centerfold pinned up in a modern garage, the lament (or is it a boast?) "Atimetus got me pregnant." But as Mary Beard shows in The Fires of Vesuvius, her marvelous excavation of...
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