Word: resina
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Hardening into rock, the lava became Herculaneum's unmarked tomb. The town's very location was lost until 1709, when monks in Resina, a city superimposed by chance on Herculaneum's grave, uncovered some marble theater seats while sinking a well. Other diggers plundered Herculaneum of everything their tunnels exposed. "It is one of the tragic ironies of human endeavor," writes Deiss, "that the suffocating mud did less damage to Herculaneum than the earliest excavators...
...came to inaugurate what may well prove the most important excavation of the present age. Steaming along the bay of Naples to Resina, the Savoia, cast anchor, and His Majesty disembarked at this modern hive of macaroni workers who dwell unconcerned above the buried ruins of Herculaneum, perhaps to be described as "the Newport of Imperial Rome." The city was obliterated by the same eruption of Vesuvius which engulfed Pompeii (1,848 years ago). Thirty feet of rock-hard lava cover the palaces of Herculaneum; but with the coming of His Majesty last week, rock drills began to purr...
| 1 |