![]() ![]() Irlando points out a stone lintel balanced on a pair of slender Corinthian columns: Black blotches stain the lintel’s underside. Irlando enters the nearby Basilica, ancient Pompeii’s law court and a center of commerce, its lower-level colonnade fairly intact. “It makes me angry to see this,” Irlando, a genial 59-year-old with a mop of graying hair, tells me, peering over the barrier for a better look. Since then this entire section of Pompeii has been closed to the public, while a committee appointed by a local judge investigates the cause of the collapse. The arch of the Temple of Venus collapsed after heavy rains in 2014. “I almost had a heart attack,” the site’s archaeological director, Grete Stefani, later confided to me. The catastrophe renewed concern about one of the world’s greatest vestiges of antiquity. ![]() ![]() Five years ago, following several days of heavy rains, the 2,000-year-old structure collapsed into rubble, generating international headlines and embarrassing the government of then-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Just down the street lies what Turin’s newspaper La Stampa called Italy’s “shame”: the shattered remains of the Schola Armaturarum Juventus Pompeiani, a Roman gladiators’ headquarters with magnificent paintings depicting a series of Winged Victories-goddesses carrying weapons and shields. It marks the end of the road for visitors to this storied corner of ancient Rome. “Vietato L’Ingresso,” the sign says-entry forbidden. Abruptly, we reach an orange-mesh barricade. We pass stone houses richly decorated with interior mosaics and frescoes, and a two-millennial-old snack bar, or Thermopolium, where workmen long ago stopped for lunchtime pick-me-ups of cheese and honey. The architect and conservation activist gingerly makes his way over huge, uneven paving stones that once bore the weight of horse-drawn chariots. On a sweltering summer afternoon, Antonio Irlando leads me down the Via dell’Abbondanza, the main thoroughfare in first-century Pompeii. The famous archaeological treasure is falling into scandalous decline, even as its sister city Herculaneum is rising from the ashes. The view inside Pompeii’s old granary (Francesco Lastrucci) ![]()
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