ATLANTA – At the end of August 79, some 1,927 years ago, craftsmen were busy working on stucco reliefs of strapped athletes and scantily draped goddesses meant to decorate the private thermal baths in one of the lavish mansions lining the Bay of Naples, Italy.
When Mount Vesuvius erupted and started covering nearby Pompeii, the men fled Villa Petraro, leaving behind the half-finished stuccos, which remained covered in ash and pumice until the 1950s.
Systematic digging of the site would wait another 50 years, when the University of Maryland and the Italian culture office joined efforts to study Stabiae.
Thanks to that international partnership called Restoring Ancient Stabiae, some of the stuccos, frescoes, sculptures and everyday objects from five villas that had never left Italy are now touring the United States, allowing a glimpse into the high life of ancient Rome’s elite.
“When you walk into those villas, you think gods lived there – and that’s exactly what the owners wanted,” said Thomas Howe, co-curator of the “In Stabiano” exhibit that goes on view today in Atlanta.
“It’s a totally different site from Pompeii and Herculaneum, which were provincial towns. Stabiae was Malibu. The Bay of Naples was the capital of Rome in the summer months.”
The Roman ruling elite built clusters of majestic villas, some of which were nearly 200,000 square feet, near Naples from the first century B.C. until the eruption. Emperors had their palaces on Capri island across the bay, while Stabiae notables included a friend of Cicero and Pliny the Elder, one of the few who died in the eruption there.
The villas were as much fun palaces as they were grand showpieces of the owner’s political status for the entourage he entertained there.
“These were immensely wealthy and immensely powerful people,” said Jasper Gaunt, curator of the show at the Michael Carlos Museum at Emory University. “It was four or five generations of unlimited cash.”
The exhibit includes a small section of the composite tile floor from the Villa San Marco, perhaps the most regal of all, for which the owner requested porphyry from Egypt and green marble from Greece.
But it’s the frescoes that best show off how the Roman world was “nowhere so luxurious” as at Stabiae, in Howe’s words.
A couple of thousand years have done nothing to dim their mineral-based colors – saffron, mint green, turquoise blue – or the fluid spontaneity of the impressionistic stroke in the flowing drapery and expressive grimaces of the mythological figures.
The most famous depicts Flora, the goddess of all that blooms. It was detached from the women’s quarters of Villa Arianna in 1759, when an expedition sponsored by Naples’ King Charles of Bourbon found the building, removed some of the frescoes by lifting about two inches of mortar, and reburied it.
Stepping lightly on the green surface, Flora turns to a flowering bush to pluck a stem with white blossom and gather it in the cornucopia she’s carrying, while the folds of her tunic are ruffled by a breeze.
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