The cultural experiences continue ......

Pompeii exhibition at the Melbourne Museum

I continued my cultural and educational experiences today by visiting the Melbourne Museum to see the 'A Day in Pompeii' exhibition that is on show for the winter. I've been to the museum many times with school excursions - I think I could probably describe most of the Human Body exhibition in great detail and I've learnt a lot more about the TV show, 'Neighbours', at the museum (hey, I was teaching 10 year old girls!). My favourite part of the museum is definitely looking at Phar Lap, which brings back memories of my favourite high school assignment - a negotiated study of our choice and being a horse-mad teenager, guess which topic I chose?!

Exhibition buildings near the museum

Anyway, so today my purpose was to learn more about Pompeii. I will admit my cultural ignorance here again and tell you that the only 'Pompeii' I have heard of is the race horse Pompeii Ruler, who I can tell you has won over two million dollars in prize money (yes, I had to look that up!) and he looks very similar to my wonderful horse and companion, Dookie. So, given my lack of historical knowledge, I was in for a lot of learning today!

The city of Melbourne from the museum

The three most fascinating things that I discovered today were:

1) The huge archeology effort that has gone on for many years to discover, preserve and pass on the events of the 24th and 25th of August in 79AD. I can't even begin to imagine how painstaking it must have been to sift through all the remains, even hundreds of years later. I'm so amazed by the passion that these people must have and I guess we should all be grateful that these dedicated people work so hard to pass on such fascinating stories to us.

2) The beautiful frescos and mosaics that the people of ancient Pompeii adorned their houses with. The interiors of the homes were absolutely stunning and I loved the design of the houses, the inside/outside areas, much like what seems to be trendy in house design these days - the 'modern' look (I wonder if the designers knew that most homes in Pompeii were like this 2000 years ago?!). I love the idea of dining whilst you are sitting in a special chair reclined backwards - of course, this was reserved for those with a higher social status!

3) The volcano and the science behind the preservation of so many objects, including the mosaics and frescos that I admired. Apparently, the lava doesn't actually do the damage when a volcano erupts, it's the raining pumice stone, which does have a technical name that escapes me at the moment. Basically, this storm of pumice rock and ash rains down, filling buildings and preserving most things inside - all the bronze objects, frescos and mosaics were preserved. As the rock and ash harden, casts are made of the people who died during the event. A clever archeologist then decided to fill these cavities with plaster and create a series of incredibly eery casts of the dead, still in the positions they died. Many people have pulled their clothing up over their face to prevent the inhalation of the toxic fumes and ash from the volcano, and you can only begin to imagine how terrifying their last minutes would have been as they realised the proximity of their fate.

To finish on a lighter note, my day of culture continues as I sit down with a glass of red to enjoy a French movie, 'The Class', which was awarded Best Picture at the Cannes Film Festival last year.