Pompeii, an ancient Roman city that was buried in A.D. 79 by ash-fall from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and re-discovered in the 16th century, continues to yield up astonishing new secrets. Archaeologists excavating through the ash in the ancient city have uncovered a room painted in an unusual color for the time and place.
Bright blue frescoes depicting each of the four seasons represented by a female figure and accompanied by pastoral and agricultural imagery. Based on how rare blue pigment was in the ancient world, and how it was reserved for important places, the team that discovered the room posits that it may have been used to store sacred objects or to perform pagan rituals. It also, the study noted, matched the pattern of rooms that are known to be designated for “private religious rites.”
The room was discovered as part of a long-term excavation expedition that has, so far, uncovered 1,070 houses and 13,000 rooms in the ancient Italian city, preserved in stunning condition under the ash for the past two thousand years.
The discovery was made while, during the excavation of a building’s second floor, archaeologists found a tunnel that led to a vestibule, and into a garden that had once been filled with vines and fruit trees, and then to the blue room, which archaeologists have named Room 32.
Pompeii sits fourteen miles to the southeast of the modern city of Naples. Like its contemporary twin, it was once a busy hub of commerce and culture. At the time of its destruction on the twenty-fourth of August in A.D. 79 it housed fifteen thousand residents. The first parts of the ruins were first excavated in 1748, and even now the city is revealing new things about the lives of the people who lived there, and the civilization they belonged to.
Gennaro Sangiuliano, Italy’s Minister of Culture, visited the dig on Tuesday, describing Pompeii as a half-explored treasure chest.
