Handout photos made available by Parco Archeologico of Pompeii shows two bodies, master and slave: they are the almost intact bodies of two men, a forty-year-old wrapped in a warm wool cloak and his young slave already bent by the fatigues of life, in Pompeii, Italy.
“A truly exceptional discovery” commented the enthusiastic director Massimo Osanna, who has also headed the general management since September 2020 of public museums.
For the first time after more than 150 years from the first use of the technique it was possible not only to create perfectly successful casts of the victims, but also to investigate and document with new technologies the things they had with them in the moment in which they were hit and killed by the boiling vapors of the eruption “.
The last attempt was made in the 1990s, sadly without any great success. But this time the experiment succeeded perfectly. “It also worked for what the pair were carrying, which proved to be a piece of woolen fabric, perhaps another cloak, perhaps a blanket”.
And preliminary studies seem to have already identified the moment of the end, on the second day of the eruption, the morning of October 25 (according to a recent new proposed dating), of that fateful day in 79 AD. There remains the riddle of the men’s identity.
