They are some scenes from real life that are mounted in Pompeii on a wall in the theater district, like the writings that we would find today along the walls of modern streets, but also on social media or in chats. These stories of passions, but also of insults and sporting incitements, which would have been lost forever, are resurfacing in Pompeii thanks to technology.
It happens in the passageway that connected the theater area with Via Stabiana. A wall excavated more than 230 years ago, in front of which millions of visitors pass every year and where the use of advanced research methods has yielded about 300 inscriptions, 200 of which have been known for some time and about eighty recently identified. The project, titled Bruits de couloir (“Gang voices”) it was created by Louis Autin and Éloïse Letellier-Taillefer of the Sorbonne University and Marie-Adeline Le Guennec of the University of Quebec in Montreal, in collaboration with the Archaeological Park of Pompeii. As reported in the E-Journal of the Pompeii Excavations, it was carried out in two campaigns, in 2022 and 2025. Thanks to this project it was possible to reread in its entirety the extensive evidence of graffiti present in this passage environment, through a multidisciplinary approach combining epigraphy, archaeology, philology and digital humanities.
Graffito “Erato amat…” | Courtesy of Pompeii Archaeological Park
“The technology – says the park’s director, Gabriel Zuchtriegel – it is the key that opens to us new rooms of the ancient world and we must tell the public about those rooms too. We are working on a project to protect and improve the writings, of which there are more than 10,000 throughout Pompeii, an immense heritage. Only the use of technology can guarantee a future for all these memories of life in Pompeii.”
The methodology applied uses a virtual grid, documents spatial and thematic relationships between the inscriptions and analyzes the walls of the corridor with RTI (Reflectance Transformation Imaging, a computational photography technique that acquires a series of images of an object under different lighting directions). In this way, elements that the naked eye cannot see are recorded and, more than two centuries after the excavation, new things continue to emerge. At the same time, this technique is fundamental for the digital preservation of a collection of testimonies that are themselves vulnerable.
The development of a 3D platform that integrates photogrammetry, RTI data and epigraphic metadata will lead to the creation of a new tool that allows you to view and annotate inscriptions. The Archaeological Park of Pompeii has planned the construction of a canopy of the corridor, to finally allow adequate protection of the plasters on which the inscriptions were engraved, to allow the preservation of this important complex of Pompeian epigraphic testimonies concentrated in a single environment, brought to light in 1794, and to encourage a future integrated visiting experience using the technologies developed by new research.
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