Pizza & Pompeii
29 June 2023
This week a monumental discovery was announced in Pompeii: pizza. While it can't possibly have had tomato sauce (there was a millennia and a half until tomatoes were first imported from South America), it certainly has something red and tomato-looking and something cheese-looking, too. And a pineappke next to it! Which is also native to South America and introduced a millennia and a half after the 79 AD eruption of Vesuvius destroyed Pompeii. So was trans-Atlantic trade happening 2000 years ago, or is this a hoax even the New York Times fell for? It also looks much more like a Renaissance painting of fruit from Amsterdam than a Roman era painting. Buuuuuuuuut even the Pompeii park site is reporting the story. And I've learned to be surprised by Pompeii since my visit there a month ago.
While visiting the Pompeii archeological city last month I of course picked up a book, one Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town by Mary Beard. The book is full of surprises among the details of human life in 79 AD. I was both surprised by the advanced things they had at hand, and the sheer volume of detail we have. The copius writings, records, painted art, and graffiti have no parallel in the work in terms of preservation. Sadly after 250 years of excavation much has been lost and is only preserved in illustrations. And Beard repeated references the destruction wrought by Allied bombing during WWII. As a companion to a visit this book is excellent, although one wonders how Beard can say that it's perhaps too long to walk from the Forum to the Ampitheater. I crisscrossed the town half a dozen times during my visit. And there's fortunately plenty of the town left to excavate by more advanced methods in the future as this week's unveiling of the pizza fresco demonstrates.
