DENVER | She felt the earth tremble underfoot, and she heard the rumbles echoing from the imposing peak in the distance.
But Lupa wasn’t worried. As she hawked her wares in the public market of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii in late summer of 79 A.D., the lifelong resident of the metropolis dismissed the ominous signs coming from the nearby Mount Vesuvius. Those quakes and roars were simply messages from the gods, she insisted; the earthly marks of the immortals’ displeasure would be solved easily enough through the proper religious rituals.
“It is all right. In 10 days, we shall have the Vulcanalia,” she said, referring to the celebration dedicated to Vulcan, the ancient Roman god of fire. “We shall drink much wine and do much praying. These earth shakings shall stop. I think he is just demanding his due.”
That confidence would prove misplaced. On August 24 — the day after the city paid tribute to Vulcan through wine, prayer and abandon — Mount Vesuvius erupted, burying Pompeii in ash and killing thousands within a matter of hours. Of course, Lupa’s easygoing predictions didn’t come in the actual days before the destruction, but rather in the air conditioned halls of the “A Day in Pompeii” exhibit at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Actor Erin Prestia-Robins, decked in the garb of ancient Rome and steeped in the history of Pompeii, played her carefully constructed character for visitors to the exhibit, a show that features more than 250 artifacts salvaged from the city that sat under ash for hundreds of years.
According to exhibit educator Samanth Richards, Prestia-Robins and the other “historical enactors” add an immediacy to the collection of jewelry, religious statues, frescoes and other artifacts found at the ancient site southeast of Naples.
“We have a centurion from the Roman army, we have a gladiator, we have the wife of a senator to bring together pieces of Roman life,” Richards said. “They personalize the visitors’ experience and help personalize the exhibit. They really bring these objects to life.”
That task isn’t overly difficult, considering the quality of the objects on display. The eruption that buried Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum in 13 to 20 feet of volcanic ash and pumice in 79 A.D. served as the cities’ simultaneous destruction and preservation. Under those ashes, buildings, city blocks, household objects and even the frozen impressions left by those caught in the destruction remained intact and undisturbed for centuries. When the sites were discovered in 1700s, they quickly became one of the greatest archaeological finds of modern times. Pompeii and Herculaneum yielded a rare view into the everyday life of an ancient Roman — from jewelry to statues found at household shrines, excavators uncovered a wealth of perfectly preserved objects and cultural insights about a bygone empire.
“They’re preserved as if someone were using them yesterday, and yet they’re almost 2,000 years old,” Richards said. “That has to do with the volcanic preservation, and the fact that people didn’t have time to really prepare. They left their homes just like they were … We get to see an (unadulterated) view of Roman life.”
There’s the collection of gold jewelry, necklaces and earrings that would complement any modern outfit. Carbonized bread and figs offer insights into the dietary norms of Pompeii, a port city with an economy that depended largely on the production and sale of garum, a type of fish sauce that was a staple of the Roman diet. Preserved frescoes and water bypass valves offer views in to domestic and municipal architecture. In the “Religious Practices” section of the exhibit, the collection of bronze votive statuettes found in household shrines offers insight into the fluid and flexible religious pantheon in the ancient Roman world.
“A lot of people are familiar with the Roman pantheon, the main pantheon that we think of that includes Jupiter and Minerva,” Richards said. “But they also had gods and goddesses for doorknobs, and oil lamps, and cabinets.”
That diversity is clear in the small bronze figurines, pieces that look as if they could be a part of a modern chess set, statuettes that still stand out for their craft and expression. That kind of modern sensibility and knack for design comes up again and again in the exhibit. The lamp stands, fountain heads, braziers and mirrors all speak of a vibrant city and an accomplished culture, a bustling metropolis not so foreign to modern museumgoers.
“There were 20,000 in the city, and 90 percent of those people escaped. Only about 2,000 were unable to escape from Pompeii,” Richards said. “Technically, they had 17 years of warning. There were huge earthquakes … but they didn’t even have a word for ‘volcano.’ They didn’t even know what Mount Vesuvius was. They just thought it was this really cool mountain that had this incredibly fertile soil.”
That mountain destroyed the bustling city in a matter of hours, despite feasts dedicated to the gods and fervent prayers from residents. Casts originally created by pouring plaster into the spaces left in the volcanic ash at Pompeii reveal the final poses of men, women, children and even animals left behind as the city burned. Their tortured poses give life to words from Roman historian Pliny the Younger, who described a scene of desperation and chaos as the ash fell. Watching from a safe vantage across the Bay of Naples, the historian saw the sudden evaporation of a thriving city, the instant destruction of a major metropolis.
“You could hear the wails of women, the cries of children, the shouts of men,” Pliny the Younger wrote in a letter to the historian Tacitus years after the eruption. “Many raised their arms to the gods, others … declared that the gods were no longer and that this was the last night on earth.”
Centuries later, those pleas still seem to ring out in the household objects, paintings and other objects recovered from a city destroyed and preserved by the same volcanic ash and pumice.
“A Day in Pompeii”
Runs through Jan. 13 at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, 2001 Colorado Blvd. in Denver.
Tickets start at $26.
Information: www.dmns.org,
or call 303-370-6000.