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It says much about this year that the discovery of two bodies in the wreckage of a disaster zone counts as akin to good news. But here we are, nearing the end of what is the darkest year that almost all of us can recall, and a rare strand of positivity has emerged from, of all places, Pompeii.
That’s right. Pompeii. A city that was choked to death by a volcano – but, which, compared to the Exploding Clown Car of Doom that is 2020, is all sunlight, honey and luxury biscuits. In case you missed it amid the weekend’s various titbits about lockdowns, R-rates and presidential elections, I’m referring to the announcement that the winner of 79AD’s Someone Has It Worse Than You Award has “unveiled” two “new” victims of the ashen rain that swallowed it whole.
They are thought to be a twentysomething slave, and his older master. Both have been brought back to “life” using the archaeological site’s much-vaunted technique of making plaster moulds of cavities left in the earth by long-decomposed corpses.
Park director Massimo Osanna has called them “truly exceptional”. In saying this, he isn’t making light of what must surely have been their terrified last moments. Nor am I. And anyway, the men have been dead for 1,941 years. If, somehow, they feel anything about this development, it must be a relief that they have, very belatedly indeed, been spotted in the soil.
The ghost-outlines of their vanished forms were finally uncovered during a dig in a previously unexcavated section of the site. But this is good news. These findings have happened because, with Pompeii closed for Covid, its administrators have been able to devote time to projects that would have gone unattended.
The post-virus world will notice a host of small benefits of the pausing of society – restored paintings or tweaked menus. They will not make up for the woes of the last year – but they make 2021 even more worth waiting for. Assuming, in Pompeii’s case, Vesuvius has nothing evil and imminent in mind. That would be so 2020.
A new discovery in tourist-free Pompeii is proof that this pandemic has its upsides
With the archaeological site closed due to Covid, experts have devoted time to new excavations instead