In February 2021, archaeologist Gabriel Zuchtriegel, born in Germany, was named as the new director of the Pompeii Arhaeological Park. His term of office has seen remarkable shifts, especially in terms of the public image of the park. There is now more a focus on fast academic posted new findings in combination with announcements of social media and posted the explosions of the press release online To strengthen exciting discoveries, for example, in addition to the traditional use of multi -part documentaries that are broadcast on the BBC And PBS to expand public involvement. Last year, sighed recognized that He sees the future of the site as outside the famous walls. Since 2023 he has pursued extension to excavation and tourist tickets that encourage more involvement in the nearby locations of Boscoreale, Longola, Torre Annunziata, Civita Giuliana and Castellammare di Stabia. But there is still a medium that sighs has been familiar to spread his story for the archaeological park: the book.
Earlier this month, the University of Chicago Press published the English version of Sighriegel’s The Buried City: Uphing the Real Pompeii. Translated from the original German by Jamie Bulloch, the book contains 53 color photos of the artifacts, daily life and fascinating new excavations that are performed in the city. Sighthiegel records anecdotes from his own life and the life of some of the 1,300 victims found in Pompeii since the excavations started in 1748 to ‘speak alive’ [the reader’s] Soul ”about the lasting allure of the site. But he also wants to explain what professional archaeologists as he motivates to devote their time, their bodies and their entire life to the field. He asks: why are we – and often why is he – interested in ancient times in the first place?
One of the most interesting components of writing sighs is that it gives us a look behind the curtain of the internal policy of running one of the most famous archaeological locations in the world. We get a glimpse of the decisions of the Pompeii communication staff and hear from heated emotions of sighs when, for example, one of the daily newspapers of Italy, Il fatto quotidianothrow the important 2021 Discovery of neighborhoods made to slave At Pompeii and the subsequent creation of plaster off guests of the room as merely a marketing trick from the archaeological park.
Refresingly, sighs focuses on the daily life of both the archaeologists and the staff who work on the site today and those who died there in the outburst of 79 CE due to accessible language. He brings readers into topics of contemporary academic debates, such as the size of the population of the city, and translates inscriptions and ungeedhed tablets. Sighing also jumps from material culture to religion, so that a famous graffito is brought in with “Sodom (a) gomora” and has the chance to notice the ambiguity of etching in terms of or refers to the Sodom and Gomorrah story in the Hebrew Bible. He notes that we have evidence for Jewish people in the city, but not clear evidence for Christians in Pompeii.
Although stories in the first person who are intertwined throughout the book are attempts to weave old and modern connecting threads over time and space, not every analogy is successful. The tight neighborhoods of the Chamber where slavish people lived in Civita Giuliana are awkward compared to the limited partners of refugees from East Prussia after the Second World War. He notes that these refugees were in the house of his ‘mothers in Regensburg’, but this is very different from slaved people who live in a limited space in the old Pompeii. Moreover, the many American academic excavations and excavators on the site, such as those associated with the University of Cincinnati, Cornell University and the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, largely left and completely deleted from the story, with focus that is mainly placed on Italian excavation. Although this is understandable as a way to defend the Italian cultural heritage, it is a strange choice for a book written and sold to the American public.
For everyday readers who buy it off the shelf, the book of Sighriegel is a unique, unprecedented opportunity to gain insight into a lucrative archaeological tourist company that brings in it € 20 million (~ $ 22.5 million) per year. But it also opens crucial windows to the site via illustrations and the afterword about the “new dig” in Pompeii – one that covers around 9,000 square meters – that goes beyond social media and documentaries. Perhaps even more important, The Buried City Brings a more humane and soulful version of Pompeii to life for the next generation of readers. This Pompeii focuses on the life of everyday Romans and restores the old animus (“Spirit”) on the walls, the forum and theater of the site. The book is part of a broader effort to increase public communication in general: a dedication to weave a more transparent and recognizable story in the story of an old city. Ultimately, it is also a way for a new director to add part of his own memoirs to that historic carpet.
The Buried City: Uphing the Real Pompeii (2025) by Gabriel Zuchtriegel is published by the University of Chicago Press And is available online and through independent booksellers.
