Los Angeles is one of three American cities where you can enjoy the Pompeii exhibit and it is the only one on the West Coast! Since I am leading three separate fieldtrip groups to see the exhibit, I decided to preview the Pompeii exhibit. Here's what you can anticipate and some items to look for at the Pompeii exhibit.
Located on the 3rd floor of the California Science Center, the Pompeii exhibit takes up a whole section of the floor opposite the High Wire Bicycle location. If you come on my fieldtrips on June 6 and June 11, please meet at the pre-arranged time for the Pompeii exhibit at the area near the restrooms where there are benches to sit and wait for our timed entry into the exhibit. We do not need to join the IMAX lines as we gather as a group to the left of the IMAX building door and enter together. We will also get a timed reservation for the Endeavor shuttle exhibit if you would like to see it. You are allowed to take photographs without flash at the Pompeii exhibit :)
Upon entry to the first room, there is a brief screen introduction to Pompeii just before the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius on August 24, 79, before you enter the first exhibit room. It has almost same feel as going into an attraction at a themed park when you are pleasantly surprised by what you see when the door opens into the first exhibit room. Free audio guides are available (upon request on weekends). To listen in English, you press 591 and then the green GO button to activate the English version. You will need to press 101 to about 118 and then green GO button for audio guide when you see the headphone signs on the exhibit cases. It is not always easy to spot those numbers :)
Except for the final post-eruption room where you see the resin casts of human forms (but no human remains of any kind are in these copies), the whole multi-room exhibit displays the artifacts and frescoes found in Pompeii with various themes featuring artifacts found when Pompeii was excavated. Some items exhibited are statues of political and religious significance recovered from Pompeii, a beautiful mosaic table, a safe, a commercial balance, pottery jars that were used for transporting wine, olive oil and the highly-prized salted fermented fish sauce they call garum, jewelry, medical, cooking, fishing, gardening and farming tools used in that period, decorated metal and ceramic dishes, and the gladiator's symbolically-decorated protective gear explored from the beautifully portrayed backdrop of various rooms typically found in Roman villas of the time of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. In almost every room, there is a video screen showing visuals of what one could expect a public bath or public forum to be like. Statues and decorative items are placed in front of mural background that gives a physical context to imagine how they are found. You get a good sense of what Pompeii residents ate, their "fast-food"eating out places, and imagine drinking watered-down wine or fish-sauce spiced food, the bread they eat, and what home kitchens looked like.
Parental guidance is expected for a "brothel" room which has a video and a painting/fresco of a copulating couple that could be something you might not want a young child to see, and this room can by completely bypassed.
Before entering the final exhibit room, you will enjoy a short simulated computerized time-lapsed images of what could have happened to a residential building from eruption to 24 hours later. This is where you will be surprised by the floor shaking and "smoke" (simulated fog) ... and you then go into the final room where the body resin casts are exhibited. As you exit the final exhibit before the gift shop, there is a large area where children can do some hands-on activities such as building an archway :) If, for any reason, you wish to skip this sensory experience, there is a bypass door that leads directly to the final exhibit room.
The exhibit's artifacts are well presented with enough details to keep one well informed about Roman life almost 2000 years ago. It is fascinating how much little have changed in two thousand years and how contemporary some of these artifacts feel. Vivid digital video portrayals of how Pompeii homes might have used the artifacts and how the wealthy Pompeiians might have their homes decorated and lived do a great job of engaging the visitors, young and old. Unless, of course, you are also an encyclopedic learner like me who always wants to know more. This multi-media Pompeii exhibit renews one's appreciation of how absolutely marvelous that we have Getty Villa in Los Angeles to continuously engage us in learning more about Roman and Greek antiquity. Getty Villa provides much much more about Greek and Roman cultures that should not be missed and should be a follow-up to this exhibit if you have not been to the Getty Villa. If you ask Getty docents or security guards in the first atrium at the main building where the rectangular shallow mosaic pool is, they will tell you that that "sky-window" is indeed constructed to be open to rainfall so as to let rain collect in the pool, but for security reasons, that sky window is covered. One of the screen visuals at the Pompeii exhibit shows how rain is collected for household use.
Both Getty Villa and this Pompeii exhibit are great places to run a Latin vocabulary scavenger hunt! In this exhibit, challenge yourself (without first checking the internet!!) and your children to identify what these Latin words refer to: lararium, oscillum, forum, impluvium, cartibulum, lampadophoros, thermopolia, cauponae, amphora, labrum, apodyterium, tepidarium and frigidarium or even Greek word paradeisos found in one of the explanation for a fresco of Garden Scene .. that is a hint already. Or make a guess first using what we know of Latin and Greek roots in English :) Or find out what garum is made from? Or the original meaning of a symposium? (For this last one, you will need to visit Getty Villa.)
The IMAX movie, Forces of Nature, is a perfect complementary experience as it brings you, in the way that only IMAX productions can, perilously near and over a volcano, imaginatively into a earthquake fault, and also in the path of a tornado. I have seen many NOVA programs on natural disasters, and this is still worth seeing for the sensory effects that only IMAX screens offer.
Learn more about Pompeii online from the archived text links from "Last Days of Pompeii" exhibition at Getty Villa at this link: http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/pompeii/index.html
You can click on the left each page of the exhibit
Exhibitions
and also download the list of Pompeii-related works at the Getty here for your next visit to Getty Villa: http://news.getty.edu/images/9036/pompeii_objects.pdf
Remember that you can request a free audioguide for the Getty Villa with a driver's license as collateral :) At the Getty Villa, you can see a herb garden and grounds of a Roman country villa based on the Villa dei Papiri at nearby Herculaneum which was also buried by the same volcanic eruption.
Don't miss this Tedx Talk by the curator of the Getty Villa's exhibit on Pompeii, Ken Lapatin, about the artistic representations of Pompeii, reflecting on how we know about Pompeii today and how Pompeii is represented in the popular imagination is really far more complicated than if we were to assume that those portrayals of Pompeii reflect reality at the time. He tells us that what you see now in Pompeii too is highly reconstructed as Allied bombings destroyed much of Pompeii. For example, the resin casts that we see at the Pompeii exhibit at CSC and at museum exhibits about Pompeii are several times removed from the actual human bodies that were originally in them. This talk is really worth listening to, and I hope some of you saw this Pompeii exhibit at the Getty Villa last year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ45AWOSGMk
and listen to what he tells about this painting from the imagination of the artist about Pompeii. You can see this image on the wall in the Pompeii exhibit's section about gladiators.
Ken Lapatin also referred to a LACMA exhibit about Pompeii that I missed, but I found this wonderfully detailed essay about Pompeii and the Roman Villa at this link:
http://www.lacma.org/eduprograms/EvesforEds/PompeiiandtheRomanVillaEssay.pdf
To read more academic writings about the rediscovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum, register to access this article online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41210458
To read about eye-witness account of the eruption of Pompeii, read about Pliny the Younger's writings and letters to Pliny the Elder.
http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/pompeii.htm
http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/pompeii/a/PlinyPompeii.htm
Please contact me at reallykf@gmail.com if you wish to join my last two FamilyFunLearningFieldtrips (FFLF) on Friday, June 6 and Wednesday, June 11, 2014, meeting at 11am for the Forces of Nature IMAX film, or meeting at 12noon for the Lemurs of Madagascar IMAX, and entering the Pompeii exhibit at 1.30pm. I have also made a timed reservation for Endeavor shuttle exhibit at 3.15pm.
