New Britain Herald Newspaper, April 29, 1927, Page 31

&9 N cl T Magnificent Palaces Where Emperor Tiberius Lolled ¢ in Dissipated Luxury To Be Given Beautiful Reality Again and the Mysterious Cumaean Sibyl’s Long Hidden Secrets Revealed Henri Siemradsky’s celgbraked painting picturing one of the bacchanalian orgies that marked Emperor Tiberius's years of life on the island of Capri, where the splendid palaces he built for himself are soon to be restored TALY, of the azure skics and the purple seas, of romantic cities and glorious tradition, is one of the most beautiful spots on earth. To the trav- eler who scales the snow-capped peaks of the Italian Alps, or basks in the golden sunshine on the sands of the Ri viera, it seems about as beautiful as any place this side of Paradise could be. The tourist, the painter and the musi- clan are quite satisfied with “Sunny Italia” as it is, but the archaeologist, puttering around with his pick and his ovel and his magnifying glass, has long maintained that all too much of the country’s beauty and wonder lies huried or stands starkly in weather-beaten ruins. Evidently the Italian government has come to feel the same way about it, for they are now pushing ahead with plans to excavate and restore the most famous of ancient Latin cities on a more exten- sive scale than has ever been attempted before. P eii and Herculaneum, those sis- ter cities that belching Vesuvius blotted from sight in a single hour, will emerge from the dust and take on the appear- ance they had when they were the fa- vorite pleasure resorts of the wealthy citizens of ancient Rome. Ostia, the port of entry and the naval base of Rome when the Caesars ruled the world, and Cu- mae, another coastal city believed to be the earliest Greek settle- ment in Italy, will also be cleared of the cloying soil of centuries and re- built in the mag- nificent manner of days long gone. The island of Capri, which ~ises from the Bay of Naples like *“a sarco- phagus floating on the sea,” is famous for the vine-covered vestiges of twelve magnifi- cent palaces said to have been built by the profligate Emperor Ti- berius. The govern- ment'’s plan of restoration includes these remnants of a great era. The ruins of Pompeii, already world- famous, are remarkable and in because they are, as one writer has said, “a whole town filed away for refer- ence.” No clearer record of the man- ner of life of the ancient Romans has ever been found, for the inhabitants who could not escape from the deadly down- pour of ashes shot from the crater of Vesuvius in 79 A. D. were, literally, caught in their tracks. In one dwelling the remains of six- teen people were found huddled in the cellar, the master of the house still holding the doorkey in his bony hand. Pans of food being cooked when the great catastrophe came were found over the ashes of a fire that seemed hardly cold, although Pompeii was sent to ob- livion more than eighteen centuries ago. In another house a table at which a family had been eating was unearthed. There was a dish of cakes, a half-eaten loaf of bread, glasses with the dried remnant of wine in them, and a dish of Reconstruction of one of the five- story buildings that lined some of the principal streets in Ostia, the ancient port of Rome. Stores and offices occupied the ground floor, with living apartments above fruits that were to have been served about half of the buried city of Pompeii had been uncarthed, and ar- chaeologists are confident that the por- tions still untouched will yield greater art treasures and finer examples of ar- chitecture than are now exposed to view. To-day, the visitor to the historic site can see the broken skeleton of a great forum, fronted by what onee was an important group of public buildings, an amphitheater, baths, tradesmen’s shops and luxurious homes. On the walls of.these homes were found beautiful paintings and frescoes, and many of the stone floors are inlaid with mosaics made by master hands. A view of the restored Forum of Pompeii with Mount Vesuvius, the volcano that destroyed the origi i Political still plain to read, were dis covered on the walls of public buildings More than a tenth of Pompeii population, esti mated at 30,000 perished in the thick, gray shroud of death th. tled over the place with denness, posters, eno certain sud- for terrible and centuries even the location of the once community wa forgotten. It w not until early in the sixteenth century that an engineer, cutting water channel, came upon the ruins What wonders will be prosperous discovered in that large portion of Pompeii yet to be uncovered no one can say, but it is the opinion of students of antiquity that new revela. tions of long-lost beauty are at hand, and that these will be forever preserved by Ttaly’s plan for digging out : storing its historic cities Herculaneum, close by Pompeii, shared the fate that burst forth <o suddenly from the then green cone of Vesuvius. But instead of being buried beneath a great fall of stiffling as munity stiffened in death beneath a sea of mud that, in time, hardened to stone For a torrential rain added to the horror here and made of the ashes a plastic flood that swept through the streets and over the housetops. Unlike Pompeii, the location of Her- d re- s, this com- culaneum was never lost, and in 1719, Count Elbenf of Austria sunk a shaft to the city’s famous amphitheater. Sub- sequent diggings have brought forth relics much more valuable than anything found in Pompeii, although only a small part of the city has been excavated Because Herculaneum is locked in the grip of volcanic mud that is as hard as Copyriyl stone, and because two villages—Portici Resina built directly over the ruins, the work of excavation has been mu slower and much more expensive than the comparatively easy unearthing of Pompeii. The chief structures uncovered to date are the mphitheater, a part of the forum with its adjacent public buildings, two small tem some private houses and the villa of a wealthy resident. A great deal of attention is to be given Hercula the program now because it w probably, the pleasure resort of the Little did its builders dream that its location close by Mount Vesuvius on the beautiful Bay of have been and under way luxurious rich Romans of the day. most es would spell its doom. ise of the danger of undermin- ing the villages now built directly above the buried ruins, it is likely that much of the Herculuneum, as yet unearthed, will be housed in a great subterranean 2, once the port of Rome and the base for the nation’s great fleet of naval vessels, w for long deserted by man sea alike, for the diment thal e Tiber in many has en brought down pushed the shoreline of the rt far out to sea. tia are no nd H neum, although they are very different an those at Pompeii a in charvacter. The port of Rome was no place to wh lazy summer , but a Its a away the bustling scene of activity. cture reflected this atmos- phere of efliciency. Its main street was a continuation of the road to Rome and my ings were doc d warchouses where came the nec es and the luxuries for the citizens of tk ¥ world capital of the ancient > ruins liere are of extraordinary e they show that the rtment irtance, b of Ostia lived in aj very like those found in the larg- d most progressive cities of the lern world. shipp wealthy in har merchants, who grew ling the great ar of material that came to Rome over the seas, lived in flats of mellow red brick, o Features, lne v of its build-. Tourist in the ruins of Pompeii ex- amining the stone containers in which Roman cooks of 2,000 years ago kept soups and other foods hot until time to serve on the master's buildings notable for their graceful arches and balconies and the convenience W’ of interior arrange- ment. i ' These had no great entrance halls and inner courts as did the houses of Pom- peii, but were suites of rooms in three and four-story apartment houses, each floor reached by a separate entrance and lighted by numerous windows facing the street and looking out on courts or gar- dens in the rear. The similarity of these structures to the best of present-day apartment houses has amazed antiquarians and ar- chitects, who are keenly interested in the forthcoming unearthing and rebuild- ing of this most famous seaport of the ancient Latin world. Some excavation has been done in Ostia in the centuries that have rolled by since the crash of the Roman Empire, and important buildings, besides the wharves, warchouses and flats, have been brought to light. Chief among these are a fine theater, a barra for the city’s police and firemen, graceful temples to Ceres and other Roman deities, and lux- urious baths. In addition to these, archaeologists have uncovered a forum, a eapitolium dedicated to Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, and a bazaar built around a courtyard paved with blocks of lava. Only about one-quarter of the city has excavated, so it is certain that Ostia will contribute priceless evidence of the ancient beauty that Italy now plans to unearth and reconstruct. Cumae, an ancient city on the coast of Campania, is another port included in the list of places that Italy plans to dig out of the dust and rebuild after the manner of the old Romans. Although not so well known as Pom- peii and Herculaneum, Cumae was once sa rich and powerful that it built several seaports, which it controlled, and ried on an extensive trade with the interior. Toward the close of the days of the tepublic it became the municipal capital of the district in which the Roman nobles had their seacoast villas and con- tinued to exist as “a quict pls to the last days of the emp Magnificent examples of both Greek and Roman art have been Yound here, particularly in the part of the town known as the Acropolis. It is beneath the Acropolis that the mysterious sub- " down table terranean caverns, or grottos, were dis- covered, among them the famous grotto of the historic Cumacan Sibyl. This mythical being was one of the women famous in Greek and Roman legend for their prophetic power sup- posed to have been given them by Apollo. The cavern in which she is sap- posed to have lived and dealt out wisdom has many sealed doors that have never been cut into. One of the first moves in the work of restoring Cumae will be to explore the underground vaults to which these doors give entrance. It has long been the dream of ar- chacologists to see the many ruins on the island of Capri carefully uncovered and investigated, for here on this rugged gem set down in the Bay of Naples, the Emperor Tiberius is supposed to have had no less than twelve luxurious villas where he and his favorite courtiers came from Rome to indulge in orgies of wine, woman and song. The most magnificent of these palaces seems to have been the Villa Jovis, named for the great god Jove. The crumbled and overgrown pile of marble which marks the spot where this kingly dwelling once stood indicates that it was a luxurious structure comparable with the finest palaces in Rome and Tivoli It was built precariously on the very crest of a precipice that shot straight up from the sea. Beside it is the ruin of a great lighthouse, said to be one of the largest in antiquity. A huge equestrian statue of the vain and sensual Tiberius is supposed to be buried in the ruins. If the words of old Roman historians are true, this statue is of gold, and the Emperor's eyes are huge diamonds. Another of the magnificent villas on Capri, the so-called Palace by the Sea, was supposed to have been the favorite home of Tiberius, or perhaps Augustus, during the colder months of the year. Still other bleached and vine-covered s of ruins mark the location of lesser villas, where Tiberius probably in- stalled his patrician friends, and a ring of crumbled walls above a spot known as the “Blue Grotto” is thought to be the remains of a palace where royalty was pleased to bathe in magnificent seclusion, Of course, it took years and years to build these palaces, as it did the strue- tures in Pompeii, Herculaneum, Ostia and Cumae, and the program that the Italian government has laid out to fur.