Inquiry into Pompeii, part 1. A world-famous park that does not dialogue with the territory

What is Pompeii? Pompeii is the most visited archaeological site in the world, it is the third most visited cultural site in Italy (after Colosseum and Uffizi), coming close to 4 million visitors in 2019. For Cultural Heritage Minister Dario Franceschini, it is a symbol of a story of redemption(Nov. 27, 2017), after being synonymous with negativity, collapses, hardship and wild strikes(July 4, 2017).

Pompeii is also the heart of the most ambitious and expensive project sought by Franceschini’s MiBACT: the Great Pompeii Project, costing some 105 million euros and funded by the European Union. But Pompeii is also much more. And at the conclusion of the Great Pompeii Project, with the 105 million spent and finished, this more we want to tell.

Pompeii Park, aerial view of the Basilica. Ph. Credit

Pompeii Park, Via dell’Abbondanza. Ph. Credit LoveItaly Non Profit

Modern Pompeii. Ph. Credit Norbert Nagel

At the gates of Pompeii

At the gates of Pompeii, the archaeological site capable of attracting tourists from all over the world, lies Pompeii, a municipality of 25,000 inhabitants, about a quarter of its surface area occupied by the archaeological area. This is where this three-part story begins. A town that is inextricably linked with the excavations that began in 1748, yet remained on a parallel track: the finds in the 18th century went to Naples, to what is now the National Archaeological Museum, but since then every project to create a civic museum in the town has foundered before it even took shape. the small antiquarium, now closed, is located within the site, quite distinct from the modern town.

As the interviewees, who will accompany us in this story, explain, the various directors, but also mayors, never really believed in the desirability of activating a cultural garrison that would unite the ancient and modern city. Between the two there is a furrow that already existed in the 1950s and has deepened. There has never been the ability to merge this site with international appeal with the surrounding area, explains Carlo, a fictitious name, an inhabitant of the area and a regular visitor to the excavations: the two worlds communicate little, except through an area that opens up just outside the excavations, an undergrowth of micro-economic activities, often illegal or on the edge of legality, that no one has ever managed to eradicate or organize, not even this directorate, which had tried. Activities that depend on the excavations but are not an integral part of them. For Marina Minniti, a tour guide born and raised in Pompeii, precisely the dialogue with the area has been lacking in these years of enormous growth in tourist flows: the site is still a spaceship in the middle of the city. Tourism in Pompeii has always been hit and run, he explains, with buses arriving in the day from Rome and cruises docking in Naples to bring groups to Pompeii and leave. Little was left on the ground. Of the visitors I accompanied last year, less than 5 percent stayed overnight in the Vesuvian area, all the others came on day trips from Naples or the Amalfi Coast. Minniti argues that local government, which is incapable of enhancing and publicizing the area’s wealth, is to blame. But, he explains, of the eight sites pertaining to the Pompeii Archaeological Park, only four can be visited-an issue we will return to in part three of theinquiry.

Laura Noviello is an archaeology student and young local activist who was able to activate a committee for the defense of the site at the times when there was only talk of collapses. Noviello explains that she began attending the site when she was 12 years old, thanks in part to the free access that minors enjoy. And since then I have frequented it almost every week, but often alone: almost none of my peers followed me. Many didn’t even know it was free. According to Noviello, too, these are two separate cities, separated for obvious reasons by physical gates, which, however, slowly over the decades have also become cultural boundaries: people here often, too often, do not feel that that ancient city is their own thing; the gates divide two worlds that do not communicate.

Just to begin to address this problem, Marina Minniti with some colleagues, created the Pompeii 365 committee. The committee began its activities by calling for the establishment of an annual ticket to enter the excavations, because among my fellow citizens, Minniti explains, there are those who have never entered Pompeii, but most have gone to the site only on a school trip or to bring friends on a visit. We found it inconceivable that for residents there were no facilities, no specific services . With effort they obtained 1,800 signatures, took them to the park management, and the ticket finally arrived in 2019: it costs 60 euros a year and is valid only for the Pompeii site, not for all park sites. Pompeii 365 had asked the Park’s management, however, not just for a ticket, but for a change in approach: the establishment of events designed for the local area and effective and continuous education (today Pompeii is not equipped with an educational department), with officials explaining to the public the work that takes place in the Park. As they explain on their facebook page, in response the management guaranteed a discount on the cost of the annual ticket for a promotional period of two months. It is not enough, people do not attend the archaeological site not only because of a question of tickets and costs, but because museums still present a sacred, awe-inspiring aura: we need to give people the tools to understand that heritage.

Dario Franceschini and Massimo Osanna

Tourists queuing to enter Pompeii (June 2016). Ph. Credit

Pompeii 365advertising poster.

The media boom in communication... that has not retained local audiences

These are problems that predate the establishment of the Archaeological Park, yet the millions from the Pompeii Grand Project have been unable to address. Yet at the communication level, the Park has arrived on another level. Massimo Osanna ’s leadership has been a surprise to everyone. He has physicalized the site, given Pompeii a recognizable face, something that had never happened before. As a non-Pompeianist, he managed to give the world the stupor pompeianus, what strikes those who don’t know Pompeii, from the jewels to the colors, Carlo explains further. A different kind of communication, one that has made purists turn up their noses, but one that has allowed Pompeii in recent years to systematically succeed in getting into all the national and international newspapers, from the New York Times to Le Monde. A media boom that probably also contributed to the growth in tourism between 2014 and 2019, with rates far higher than the national average in the archaeological area of Pompeii (while they were quite low in all the other sites pertaining to the Park). Still, this did not lead to loyalty among the Campanian and local public: when the site reopened in June, very few took advantage of the chance to visit it finally free of the masses of tourists. While as soon as the international tour operators returned in July, the Pompeii of large numbers was already back. Has the Park in recent years become, even more than before, attractive only to those who come from afar?

In fact, from the interviews conducted, the fact emerges that the Park in recent years has communicated Pompeii very effectively to those who do not know Pompeii, calculating on the extraordinary and the exceptional, even in the presence of things that in Pompeii are actually normal since the entire archaeological area is in itself an extraordinary unicum. Thus building that craving for the emotional shock, once-in-a-lifetime experience, which may have increased global interest but is unlikely to attract those who have Pompeii in their territory, like a neighbor they do not know. Unfortunately, reducing larcheology to a series of beautiful discoveries does not give the means to understand them, explains the aforementioned Laura Noviello. With such communication, which focuses exclusively (and not also) on the extraordinary and the emotional, it is difficult to build loyalty, to accustom the public to the idea that visiting an archaeological site can be something ordinary, which allows them to expand, rationally, their understanding and knowledge of the world. Make it feel like your own, everyday thing.

Noviello set up a Facebook page in 2014, still a minor, to tell the locals about Vesuvian larcheology, and she rejects the label of elitist that has repeatedly been attributed to her: no kidding. This kind of communication that wants to reach everyone, no matter what, ends up being even more elitist because it assumes that people cannot understand archaeological language. The museum should not just amaze you. I in my own small way, and without pretense of comparison with an institutional reality, try through communication to provide the means to independently understand the complexity and I see that when you really offer a key to understanding, you generate much more interest and involvement. Providing the means, the tools, the keys to make the site part of one’s existence, as is in the goals of the Pompeii 365 committee. Having fallen in love with Pompeii many years ago and set herself on the road to becoming an archaeologist, Noviello speaks firmly: Pompeii has been in the collective imagination since 1748, the year of its discovery, and the history of archaeology itself has gone hand in hand with that of the site. Sensationalism, often justified only by the amount of admissions and social interactions, now seems to be the only way to the communication of cultural heritage: but the result is a trivialization of often already known content, which would instead need in-depth study, and the risk of taking away space from peripheral sites that deserve more attention. Precisely the communication of archaeology will be the topic of the second part of this investigation.

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