The bodies were used as props during Grand Tours
What draws 2.5 million tourists to Pompeii each year is the promise of a snapshot of real Roman life. With its immaculately preserved streets and villas; its brothel and its amphitheater, navigating the site—so we’re told—is the closest thing we have to step into a time machine. In reality, the fact that so many make the journey to the ancient site is credit to the deceptive abilities of those who manage it. And the best way to describe Pompeii, in truth, is as one elaborate illusion.
One of the earliest tricks played on tourists in the 18th and 19th centuries didn’t involve the town but the townsfolk. As luck would have it, royals, aristocrats and dignitaries who had come to gawp at the marvels of Pompeii would be blessed with the fortune of “discovering” Pompeii’s skeletons for themselves. More often than not, the shock of their discovery would give them the ideal springboard to launch into philosophical musings about the fragility of human existence or some other such subject. The English author Hester Lynch Piozzi parodied this perfectly after her visit to Pompeii in 1786 when she wrote:
“How dreadful are the thoughts which such a sight suggests! How horrible the certainty that such a scene might be all acted over again tomorrow; and that, who today are spectators, may become spectators to travellers of a succeeding century, who mistaking our bones for those of the Neapolitans, may carry them to their native country back again perhaps.”
The illusion didn’t stop with the Grand Tours, however. While almost everyone knows about the eruption that destroyed the town few people know about the devastation wreaked upon the site by Allied bombers during the Second World War. The truth is that, when US and British pilots bombed the area around Pompeii in 1943 in an attempt to dislodge German forces as part of Operation Avalanche, they destroyed vast swathes of the site, including the Large Forum and Amphitheater, which had to be entirely rebuilt.
So when you walk around Pompeii today, be aware that the roads below you, the walls around you and—in some buildings—the roofs above you are not from 2,000 years ago but from as little as 20. Such is the strength of the illusion that you can only admire how well they blend in.