![]() ![]() "Think about how it changed their lives to have glass in their houses." "She said glass is a magic material and look at what they were able to do with it," explains Jennifer Guild, the museum's manager of communications and curiosity. One of the Italian curators who viewed the exhibit before it opened posited that of all the objects on display, it's glass that's the most impressive. And because the Romans didn't hesitate to perform surgery, on display are many kinds of surgical tools, including a speculum. A marble sundial sits under a moving screen of the star-studded night sky. ![]() Many of the necessities of wine-making are on display, along with signs indicating the wine the Romans made was pretty awful, necessitating the addition of herbs to mask taste absorbed from the filthy amphoras in which it was stored. Devotees of decorative arts will marvel at an intricate and adjustable bronze candelabra nearly a yard high. Jewelry lovers can swoon over a gold serpentine bracelet or gold and pearl earrings that look stylishly contemporary despite their age. An art lover will find marble sculpture such as "Artemis (Diane) the Hunter" and framed frescoes of still-life scenes depicting fruit and fauna. Yet stepping out of the theater reveals Pompeii as the accomplished civilization that it had been. Watching people be engulfed feels claustrophobic and deeply disturbing. But before long, the volcano begins to erupt and viewers watch as smoke, ash and volcanic rock begin to overtake the city and its inhabitants. Without a bad vantage point, the circular theater allows visitors to get a sense of Pompeii's residents going about their daily lives on that fateful day in October 79 A.D. The immersive experience begins with a three-minute film shown in the round. The resulting collaboration, which took a month to install, balances aesthetics, history, playfulness and science for a must-see exhibit of 116 objects with entry points for almost everyone. "They tell so many stories of such texture and depth, allowing us to see the science and technology in everything they did."Ĭreated and produced by Tempora, a Brussels company, the multimedia exhibit's debut in Richmond kicks off a North American tour based on the scientific research of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli and the Museo Galileo Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza. "These artifacts have never left Europe before," says the museum's director, Rich Conti, who's known as its chief wonder officer. While most people's initial reaction to the mention of Pompeii has to do with the volcano's eruption, this exhibit looks at the surprisingly sophisticated lives of the people who were ultimately buried by volcanic ash. The Science Museum of Virginia 's fascinating new exhibit "Pompeii: the Immortal City" reveals all that and more by combining history, art and, of course, science to provide visitors with an in-depth and surprisingly intimate look at how Romans in the first century lived. It's hard to imagine which is the more unlikely revelation about the ancient city of Pompeii: that people used wooden cranes for construction or that they used bronze speculums for medical examinations. ![]()
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