Pompeii, the Casa dei Vettii reopens to the public after 20 years
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Mythological scenes, erotic paintings, storytelling through images. A riot of nature and culture to tickle the senses and the intellect, with a kaleidoscope of colors and images from which today as then it is difficult to take your eyes off. And then the garden, crowded with statues, fountains, fragrant bushes, water features. Closed to the public for almost twenty years, here it is in all its rediscovered splendor, the Casa dei Vettii, one of the best known and most celebrated jewels of Pompeii, fascinating for its history and for the refinement of its rooms, the paintings studied throughout the world.
A restoration with many «stop and go»
«A symbolic house, a Sistine chapel in Pompeii», underlines the director of the park Gabriel Zuchtriegel on the day of the inauguration with the minister of culture Gennaro Sangiuliano. The excavations that brought it to light date back to the end of the 19th century, but the restoration that is presented today also has distant roots, studied since the mid-1990s, when the heavy concrete roofs built in the 1950s began to show their transience and convinced the superintendent of the time to partially close it for fear of collapse. Launched for the first time in 2002 and then resumed in 2016, the construction site has involved dozens of different professionals over the years, from archaeologists and restorers to architects, from structural engineers to gardening experts.
The difficulty of the works
Truly a great challenge, «in the panorama of cultural heritage one of the most complex and demanding construction sites of the last few decades», underlines Zuchtriegel. Because there was the structural problem of the roofs, made even more fragile by the Irpinia earthquake. But even the extraordinary paintings were in danger due to a restoration done in the past, with a layer of wax that should have made them shine and which instead had made them opaque, dusty, in some cases illegible. «Removing that wax was a scary job, but also very satisfying», the restorers now say, because it brought incredible details to light.
The Garden of Priapus
Restored and rearranged, the garden surrounded by the columns of the peristyle has also returned to shine, where the water pipes and small fountains have been restored. And where the statues have returned, albeit in copies because it was decided to protect the originals by leaving them indoors in other exhibition spaces in the park. Among these is the very special Priapus who in this garden, two thousand years ago, amazed guests with his jets of water. Located in the wealthiest part of the city just in front of another sumptuous house, that of the golden Cupids, the Casa dei Vettii belonged to the brothers Aulo Vettio Restituto and Aulo Vettio Conviva, freedmen who became rich with the wine trade, wealthy to the point of enter the Pompeian society with all the honors, so much so that one of them was part of the college of the Augustali.
The history of the “property”
Purchased the house, which existed from the second century. BC and which with its 1100 square meters was equivalent to an average cut in the luxury of the time, the two had it restored without sparing expense, resorting to the most qualified workers in the city. In all the rooms of their fabulous home they wanted refined paintings executed with the eclecticism and magnificence of the so-called “fourth style”, the one that was in fashion precisely in the first half of the 1st century. AD In the various rooms around the first atrium or facing the peristyle, mythological and even erotic scenes abound, accompanied by a myriad of details, among all a sort of festoon with cupids engaged in the preparation of a banquet, which the restoration has practically brought to light , making every infinitesimal detail readable.
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