I have been interested in Pompeii since my year as a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy (1991-92). That year I was going to write the comprehensive history of the Roman trade in imported marble (it didn't take me long to realize that that history wasn't ready to be written--David Peacock's work in Egypt has changed our ideas on many fronts and made vast new sources of information available).

One of my chapters was going to deal with marble use in domestic contexts, and so going to Pompeii was the obvious next step. Talking with friends beforehand, I frequently heard the comment, "but there isn't any marble at Pompeii to speak of." But it turns out that this is what is so fascinating about Pompeii and so revealing of contemporary taste. If a luxury item becomes inexpensive and widespread, it ceases to be a luxury and becomes a commodity (witness the decline of mobile phones as status items). At Pompeii, almost no one could afford to cover walls with incrustation of plaques of solid marble, so recourse was had to painted imitation marble (finto marmo). Only the very rich could afford to make entire floors of marble (room M and the exedra adjoining the atrium of the Hosue of Fabius Rufus, for instance), so the merely wealthy had to make do with an central emblema of opus sectile, and so on down the scale. This stratification tells us a great deal about what was sought after and what was accessible and to whom.
In 1991-2 I ended up making five or six trips to Pompeii. Part of the appeal was not scientific: the Soprintendenza alle Antichita di Pompei had streamlined itself and was granting permits quickly by fax. On site, a minimum of red tape brought a maximum of cooperation and access. This has continued and even improved under the "new" Superintendent, prof. Guzzo. When I was working in Turkey in the 1980s, the permit process began in November for the next summer, and when you arrived, you never knew what new obstacle would have to be confronted.

In the 1990s I worked along on painted imitation marble (paper at the Boston ASMOSIA conference) and wrote a general chapter on marble use for a volume edited by John Dobbins and Pedar Foss (Pompeii and the ancient settlements under Vesuvius), which was to be partly an homage to Francis Kelsey on the 100 anniversary (1999) of his translation of Mau's great book on Pompeii but is still unpublished five years later.

In 1999 I returned to an idea from 1992 about the House of the Vettii (now published; see the web presentation). I had been struck by the large assemblage of basins and fountains in white marble in the peristyle garden and wondered how many varieties were present and why. With the maturation of techniques of scientific analysis and identification it was now possible to take samples (with the support and encouragement of the Superintendency, which is sponsoring its own systematic investigation of marble house by house). In collaboration with Lorenzo Lazzarini (IUAV, Venice), a number of marble varieties were in fact identified, as well as three grays. My basic idea (read the grant proposal to the American Philosophical Society, to whom many thanks) that the Vettii were trying to impress by amassing many kinds of white marble was generally supported, but specific results, such as the unexpected prominence of Paros 2 marble, were also welcome. As part of the Vettii project samples were also taken from the garden triclinium of the Casa del Bracciale d'oro, but since the results took a longer route to reach me than the ones from the Vettii garden, they will be published separately (in the proceedings of the VIIth ASMOSIA conference held on Thasos in September of 2003). Here Paros 2 again turned up where from the translucency and color I had expected Parian lychnites. Thasian dolomitic marble, Pentelic and Luna were also used in this one small context. Again, the owner must have been trying to impress with this range of marbles: it would surely have been easier and cheaper to make the whole triclinium from Luna or perhaps Pentelic. In 2004 I will be prospecting for similar groupings of white marble objects to sample (in a separate phase) and carrying out another project which has been in the back of my mind even longer than the Vettii basins. This concerns the striking marble-paved countertops of Pompeii's many streetside fastfood shops, or bars. Bars had a bad reputation in Roman law as places where dissolute people gathered late into the night and were served by loose women. Installing marble countertops must have been, at least in part, an effort to offset that reputation. But the Sleazy Bars Project (the name was irresistible despite Steven Ellis' persuasive case that the bars could hardly have deserved the worst said about them and in fact were a necessity for mobile urban populations) is trying to extract specific evidence about the marble trade from the counters. If you are interested, read the grant proposal to the University of Akron's Faculty Research Committee, whose support has been critical, and stay tuned for updates later in the summer.