Pompeii remains one of my favourite archaeological sites in Italy. Buried with its inhabitants under ash, dust and pebbles by an eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D., the city is one of Italy’s most famous sites, visited by million of tourists every year.
Sadly, this Unesco World Heritage site outside Naples went through a lot of problems recently: neglect caused some collapses last year with major damages to the Schola Armaturarum (often erroneously referred to as the House of Gladiators) and the House of the Moralist. Then, last Thursday, there were further collapses in the courtyard of the house of Loreio Tiburtino.
The site needs specialised maintenance workers and in October the European Union pledged nearly $150 million to help preserve and monitor it. Inspired by these events and hoping to raise awareness I came up with this new necklace that incorporates mainly two very basic materials, leather and bricks.
I originally had in mind something inspired by three of my favourite sites in Pompeii, that is the House of the Mysteries, the lupanare district or the “thermopolia” or public dining establishments (second image in this post) that served hot food and drinks, especially at lunch time since it was customary to have lunch outside the home (you can actually see quite a few thermopolia also in the town of Herculaneum, another wonderful Roman-era archaeological site not far from Naples).
Then, after thinking about the collapses, I changed idea and decided to stay focused on the actual structure of the buildings and move from modest walls to create something that looked rather unusual but employed poor materials, that is leather and bricks.
The tiny bricks I employed are supposed to recreate the structure of Pompeii's houses and streets and in particular the opus latericium, that is a building technique with a core of opus caementicium (= building technique in which the mortar was made up of a mixture of sand or crushed stones and lime) in which tiles or bricks of different sizes were laid in regular overlapping rows.
I must admit it took me quite a long time (and a lot of patience...) to get together the structure of the bricks and make sure the necklace still retained enough elasticity, but I can assure you I'm pretty happy with the final results as, despite looking like a street or a building in Pompeii, the design is actually very light and comfortable as I managed to equally distribute the weight, like in a perfect Roman house.
Despite the apocalyptic title of this post (and necklace...), I really hope something will be done in Pompeii and that this piece will raise awareness in those readers who will stumble upon this post and in the people who will see me wearing it.
Taking better care of our archaeological sites means to preserve our culture and history and that's vitally important.
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