the other pompeii ordinary lives in the shadow of vesuvius a cura di silvia martina bertesago, gabriel zuchtriegel

in one of the most visited sites in the world, and also one of the best preserved of all antiquity, there is a tendency to tell an incomplete story of a minority of the city’s inhabitants, systematically forgetting, for a series of reasons (scholarly tradition, force of habit, the difficulty of obtaining data, etc.), the lives of the majority of people who lived there. even the visit to the site … often becomes an uneven experience: one crosses the city, flitting from one important domus to another, from one public building to another, absent-mindedly passing by and ignoring the myriad ill-defined spaces, lacking in distinctive features, which nevertheless exist and complete the urban fabric. and yet the people who lived and worked there, similarly forgotten, constituted the social fabric of pompeii in the first century AD, the vast majority of the population. this exhibition is therefore dedicated to reviving the memory of this forgotten majority, an attempt to use empathy and, to an extent, the imagination, carried out by digging into the indistinct mass of people whom we define generically as members of the lower echelons of society, in order to extricate individuals and their stories, sifting through residential units in search of those silent places that have come back to life.

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