The ancient beach of Herculaneum has reopened to the public, the first within an archaeological park. At the inauguration, which took place this morning in the Herculaneum archaeological park, the Minister of Culture, Gennaro Sangiuliano, spoke, guided in the visit by the Park Director Francesco Sirano.
The reorganization of the ancient beach comes to the conclusion of a multi-year journey of multidisciplinary research, archaeological excavation, restoration, engineering and architecture activities. The ancient Herculaneum, a seaside city, destroyed by the Vesuvian eruption of 79 AD, comes back to life with the final arrangement, on the wave of a design donated by the Packard Humanities Institute as part of the public-private partnership called “Herculaneum Conservation Project” for return an image as close as possible to what it looked like before the eruption.
From today, visitors can walk freely across the entire surface and immerse themselves in the magic of the city lapped by the sea.
The new structure of the entire area of the ancient beach, financed within the coordinated CIS Vesuvio Pompei Napoli managed by the Greater Pompeii Unit, will lead in the short term to the enrichment of the experience of visiting the Park and in the medium term to the reunification of the main archaeological area with the Villa dei Papiri, thus designing a broad cultural action plan for the coming years and for the future of the Park.
In recent decades this area has been progressively affected by corrosion and decay, caused by a mixture of natural factors linked to the conveyance of rainwater and rising water, which had transformed the beach into a sort of marsh, with associated dangers of flooding and impacts on the heritage conservation. Given the complexity of the problems to be addressed, a multidisciplinary approach was adopted to restore the beach to its safety and usability, with the creation of a walkable area and the enhancement of the sea front of the ancient city, with the offer of a completely renewed to the visitor of the ancient Herculaneum.
“This site has been hugely redeveloped and is becoming a gem. We are within one of the most important archaeological areas in the world with Pompeii, Oplontis and Herculaneum and we are also working hard in terms of resources. In the budget law we have allocated new resources for excavations. Furthermore, we have foreseen that a museum center will have to be created in the Spolettificio di Torre Annunziata and we think that all this could also represent a great opportunity for socio-economic development for our territories – stated the Minister of Culture, Gennaro Sangiuliano – The archaeological park of Ercolano it is a great historical memory and the value of history, as Benedetto Croce said, is always a contemporary fact. History is a sort of toolbox where we find the tools with which to interpret the present and prefigure the future in a ‘Vichian’ way”, added the Minister.
The Director of the Archaeological Park Francesco Sirano added: “The ancient beach is an extraordinary and unique place in the world. To preserve it for the future we have reduced the risk of continuous flooding and the dangers to the stability of the excavation fronts and the sea front of the ancient city, reviewing it today like the ancient Romans. Let’s restore the landscape of 79 AD and let everyone walk on the beach again. If we turn our heads to where the sea once was, we become modern explorers of the immense blanket of volcanic flows that covered the city in a few hours and we cannot help ourselves from sharing almost the sense of total annihilation of our human condition in the face of the evidence of cataclysm of 79 AD We are on the site where archaeological research has highlighted evidence that more than 300 desperate people tried in vain to be saved thanks to a real civil protection operation directed by the admiral and illustrious Roman scholar Pliny the Elder. This project now allows us to combine the extreme historical archaeological interest with the topographical and urban planning one since it is now possible to appreciate in an area of more than 3000 m2, in a close-up way, and I would say almost as protagonists, the only front sea of a Roman city almost entirely preserved. The research begun in the 1980s brought to light a unique anthropological sample represented by over 300 victims of the eruption, mostly refugees in some warehouses linked to the landing. After some interventions in the 1990s, thanks to the public-private partnership with the Packard Humanities Institute (PHI), the area was included within a strategy aimed at excavations, research, conservation and use according to innovative approaches based on multidisciplinarity of the planned interventions and with extraordinary results such as the discovery of the polychrome wooden ceiling of the main hall of the house of the Relief of Telefo. In the spring of 2021, work resumed in this very important sector of the archaeological area, with a complex and ambitious project that aims to redesign and enhance the ancient Herculaneum coast, returning it to enhanced use and a more immediate understanding of the settlement dynamics and burial of the site. Interesting data emerged from the first works, with the discovery of thousands of wooden finds, mostly belonging to the roofs of buildings torn up and thrown onto the beach by the violence of the pyroclastic flows of 79 AD as well as many fragments of tiles and tiles and some fragments of marble and of marble columns”.
You can receive IlCorrierino.it news directly on WhatsApp. stores the number 334 919 32 78 and send the message “OK news” to proceed
19-06-2024 16:44:00 © ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
