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• Italian Marble use at Pompeii
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ITALIAN MARBLE USE AT POMPEII

I have been interested in Pompeii since my year as a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy (1991-92). That year I was going to write the comprehensive history of the Roman trade in imported italian marble (it didn't take me long to realize that that history wasn't ready to be written--David Peacock's work in Egypt has changed our ideas on many fronts and made vast new sources of information available).

One of my chapters was going to deal with marble use in domestic contexts, and so going to Pompeii was the obvious next step. Talking with friends beforehand, I frequently heard the comment, "but there isn't any marble at Pompeii to speak of." But it turns out that this is what is so fascinating about Pompeii and so revealing of contemporary taste. If a luxury item becomes inexpensive and widespread, it ceases to be a luxury and becomes a commodity (witness the decline of mobile phones as status items). At Pompeii, almost no one could afford to cover walls with incrustation of plaques of solid italian marble, so recourse was had to painted imitation marble (finto marmo). Only the very rich could afford to make entire floors of marble (room M and the exedra adjoining the atrium of the Hosue of Fabius Rufus, for instance), so the merely wealthy had to make do with an central emblema of opus sectile, and so on down the scale. This stratification tells us a great deal about what was sought after and what was accessible and to whom. In 1991-2 I ended up making five or six trips to Pompeii. Part of the appeal was not scientific: the Soprintendenza alle Antichita di Pompei had streamlined itself and was granting permits quickly by fax. On site, a minimum of red tape brought a maximum of cooperation and access. This has continued and even improved under the "new" Superintendent, prof. Guzzo. When I was working in Turkey in the 1980s, the permit process began in November for the next summer, and when you arrived, you never knew what new obstacle would have to be confronted.

In the 1990s I worked along on painted imitation marble (paper at the Boston ASMOSIA conference) and wrote a general chapter on marble use for a volume edited by John Dobbins and Pedar Foss (Pompeii and the ancient settlements under Vesuvius), which was to be partly an homage to Francis Kelsey on the 100 anniversary (1999) of his translation of Mau's great book on Pompeii but is still unpublished five years later.