Vatican Necropolis Gives Up Secrets After Escaping Construction By Adam L. Freeman
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=a9rf3G03kTTU&refer=homeOct. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Visitors to the Vatican will be able to view its museums' latest addition: a 2,000-year-old pagan burial ground filled with mausoleums, scattered bones and headstones, including one that belonged to one of Nero's slaves.
The cemetery almost never saw the light of day in modern times. The Vatican announced its discovery almost four years ago after a truck was spotted hauling tombstones with Latin `inscriptions on the construction site for a parking lot.
``It's not easy to dig with all the wonderful things that are underground,'' said Cardinal Francesco Marchisano, head of the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology, in an interview.
The 500 square meters (5,380 square feet) of mostly pagan crypts will be opened to the public on Oct. 13 as part of the Vatican Museums' 500th anniversary. The necropolis is part of three other sections that in their entirety consist of about 1,000 square meters of graves.
It will be years before the conservation is completed, said Giandomenico Spinola, the archaeologist heading up the excavation. Until now, the work has cost about 400,000 euros ($508,000), financed by the Vatican Museums and Vatican City.
For the time being, visitors will look over the cemetery -- located just inside the Vatican walls -- from a walkway, as workers below pick through and preserve urns and headstones, some with brief Latin inscriptions about the lives of the dead.
Alcimus may have been Nero's slave, but according to his headstone his job was the rough equivalent of a set designer at the Theater of Pompey, once the world's largest theater.
Honey, I'm Home
Visitors will also view terra cotta tubes inserted in graves into which family members would pour food such as honey to nourish the dead. Some of the tombs, dated from the first century B.C. to the first century A.D., are decorated with faded floral designs, carvings and mosaics. Urns contain bones spared by the crematory flames with the texture of pumice.
Rich and poor alike were buried there, although in different fashions. The wealthy families kept decorated mausoleums. Individual graves belonged primarily to the poor, who where interred simply ``in a hole in the ground,'' Spinola said.
One tomb contains about 30 family members. There's evidence the last interred was a Christian. In all, there are 500 to 600 people buried in about 40 tombs, containing layers of generations, tracing pagan Rome to the birth of Christianity, Francesco Buranelli, director of the museums, said in an interview.
Marchisano says nothing was lost to the parking garage.
When the discovery was announced, archaeologists and art historians feared the Vatican would sacrifice the site to relieve its parking problem. Something similar happened leading up to the 2000 Jubilee, when the frescoed wall of a second-century Roman villa had to be removed by the Italian Culture Ministry to make room for a new car and bus parking garage.
You can't always stop the future to save the past, Spinola said. ``In archaeological work at the Vatican and in Rome you can save almost everything, but there always has to be a compromise.''
