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The Boston Dynamics’ canine robot, known as Spot, is now patrolling archaeological areas and structures at Pompeii in Italy, the Archaeological Park of Pompeii announced in a release on Monday. The agile robot is being used to identify structural and safety issues at Pompeii—an Ancient Roman city encased in volcanic ash following the 79 C.E. erupti...

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A leading expert on looted antiquities is calling for the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles to return a Roman fresco fragment to Italy, claiming he has evidence that links the piece to a notorious dealer. Prof Christos Tsirogiannis has a photograph of the same fresco fragment from the archive of Robert Hecht who died in 2012, having faced accusati...

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Mount Vesuvius in Italy is as deadly as it is beautiful. It is the volcano responsible for destroying (and preserving) Pompeii and Herculaneum (as well as Oplontis and Stabiae). Famously Mount Vesuvius erupted in its fire and fury in AD 79 in an eruption that ejected clouds of stones, ashes, volcanic gases to a height of 33 kilometers or 21 miles i...

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On a recent morning at the necropolis of Porta Sarno, just outside Pompeii’s eastern edge, Mattia Buondonno gingerly raised a protective tarp covering a tomb discovered last year. According to the inscription on the tomb’s pediment, its occupant was a freed slave named Marcus Venerius Secundio, who became rich and “organized performances in Greek a...

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In a few horrible hours, Pompeii was turned from a vibrant city into an ash-embalmed wasteland, smothered by a furious volcanic eruption in A.D. 79. Then in this century, the excavated Roman city appeared alarmingly close to a second death, assailed by decades of neglect, mismanagement and scant systematic maintenance of the heavily visited ruins....

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The Pompeii Archaeological Park will open an exhibition on April 14 dedicated to the sensuality and erotism of many frescoes and sculptures found in the houses of the ancient Roman city. "The issue of sensuality is omnipresent, but not in a scandalous or banal way," said Pompeii Archaeological Park Director Gabriel Zuchtriegel. "So we decided to pu...

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A thin band of smoke rises from the cone of Mt. Vesuvius, a subtle warning that this supervolcano is still very much alive. A few miles down the flanks in the ancient ruins of Pompeii, a group of 55 experts wearing white hazmat suits and yellow hard hats tap at what’s left of the buildings in this once vibrant city. They are installing sensors that...

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The House of Menander is one of the most spectacular of all of the many historical treasures of Pompeii. Owing its name to the Ancient Greek comedic playwright, it is one of the many splendid structures in the city by the sea that is renowned for the lavish lifestyle its residents enjoyed before the cataclysmic eruption of the nearby volcano Vesuvi...

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Imagine you have a jigsaw puzzle with 10,000 pieces but no picture on a box. In fact, you don’t even have the box—it was destroyed nearly 2,000 years ago. These puzzle pieces are fragments of frescoes in the ancient Roman city of Pompeii that were leveled or buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. Some pieces are missing, others are br...

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Would you like fries with that?” may not be as modern a phrase as we think. You’ve probably seen the recent headlines extolling the full excavation of a gloriously intact fast-food joint, or thermopolium, in Pompeii. Virtually undisturbed save for a little pilfering in the 17th century, the small food shop has remained as it was, a freeze-frame of...

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