Williams Family Summer I: Visiting the Pompeii exhibit at Cincinnati Museum Center

When historians go on vacation...

Photo by Tulin Yucel on Unsplash

Summer is in full swing, and there’s a lot going on—I’m sure the same is for you as well! So, we’ll continue mostly on track with the original Slow Read schedule (last week was Chapter 7! Next week, Chapter 8!), but instead of devoting two weeks to discussing each chapter, which is what I had planned originally, we will take one week per chapter, and use the in-between weeks for miscellaneous updates. We’ll creatively call this series: “Williams Family Summer”!

I know, I had to dig deep here.

This is the third summer in a row when I have a book due around the end of the summer. This latest is Christians Reading Pagans, under contract at Zondervan Academic! It’s going to be really fun—stay tuned for more about it later this summer. Right now, I’m racing to write the final three chapters (out of twenty) and conclusion. I hope to spend most of July revising before sending it off.

My deadline is August 1st, which suddenly seems not so long removed. Making matters more interesting from a logistics perspective, Dan also has a book deadline in August: he is writing a book for the University of Notre Dame Press on how different American Christians have thought theologically about abortion.

As part of his research for this book, earlier this week Dan had to spend a day in the archdiocese archive in Cincinnati, just under three hours from our home. Since I’ve been longing to see the Pompeii exhibit in the Cincinnati Museum Center, and it closes at the end of July, I decided this was our chance. Besides, Jonah (9 years old) has read a lot about Pompeii. The odds of us making it to Italy anytime soon are very low. But Cincinnati we can manage.

So, we made a mini vacation out of it: drove to Cincy on Sunday evening, ate lots of greasy pizza and chocolate-chip cookies (because vacation, and that’s what you do on vacation with kids, amirite?), then Monday morning we dropped Dan off at the archive and drove to the Museum Center, where we spent the day.

We had gotten tickets for both the Pompeii exhibit and the rest of the Museum Center—a massive building converted from a former train station. This was the correct decision to make, and if you have a full day to spend in Cincinnati, highly recommend!

The Pompeii Exhibition

Drama is key in this exhibit. It’s all about the pathos—you, dear twenty-first-century visitor know what happened to this city. But its inhabitants had no idea, when they got up one otherwise ordinary morning and started baking bread that they never had the chance to take out of the oven once it was done, that the city was just hours from being buried under sixteen feet of volcanic ash.

And so, visitors to this exhibit are greeted dramatically with doors opening outward, as though inviting them into a Roman home. The first part of the exhibit is arranged loosely by Roman house rooms or areas: you come into the atrium, you visit the peristyle garden and courtyard, and you see kitchen implements and food storage vessels.

I was impressed to see on display several artifacts marked as out of Italy for the first time—like a simple yet beautiful mosaic in black and white tile with a marine scene. Also on their first trip out of Italy: a small statue of a boy with a goose, and a fresco of little cupids, quite vivid in their coloring.

One of my personal favorites in this exhibit was a really adorable terracotta jug in the shape of a rooster.

Another fun object: a massive terracotta vessel with spiral grooves/shelves on the inside that was a domestic glirarium! I talk about those in chapter 2 of the Cultural Christians book—the food chapter. Dormice (more like squirrels than rats) were considered a trendy delicacy for a while in the first century AD, and some people kept them in jars ready to cook when fancy struck. The dormice would just exercise in the special grooved jars and stay healthy until, well, becoming dinner. Kind of like lobsters in supermarket tanks today. Or like hamsters on their wheel, minus the eating-them-for-dinner part.

As the exhibit progresses, we move from the domestic spaces to the public ones—baths, theater, forum. Also, a room to the side in the exhibit included the more mature content, so folks like me, with small kids, could bypass. Pompeii was known for its sex trade, although some of the most scandalous art was not exhibited in the brothels. Rather, it would have originally been decor for formal dining rooms (see Cultural Christians, chapter 3!).

Towards the end of the exhibit, there is a sensory room. It walks visitors through the eruption that destroyed the city with shaking ground effects, noise, and a video model of what it all might have looked like from one point in the city. The narrative goes through 24 hours from 8am on August 24, 79 AD, to the following morning, by when the city was completely buried.

At the end of the exhibit, there was the option to participate in a brief VR experience: a bird-eye flight over Pompeii, seeing the excavated ruins from above. Jonah was just tall enough to be allowed to do this and found it great fun.

Overall, I thought the exhibit was well done, with roughly even emphasis and coverage of daily life in Pompeii and the science angle focused on volcanic eruptions and archaeology.

If you are interested in learning more about Pompeii, I recommend these two books:

Mary Beard, The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found

Paul Zanker, Pompeii: Public and Private Life

The Rest of the Museum Center

We spent about two hours at the Pompeii exhibit. That left us with about four hours for lunch and other adventures. The kids LOVED the Children’s Museum. Dan had previously described children’s museums as glorified playgrounds, and this one was very much that.

Let me be clear: there’s nothing wrong with a very fancy glorified playground indoors on a 90+ degree day. The kids played and played and played.

We spent the final 1.5 hours of the day in the Cincinnati History Museum. I knew very little of this history, so we all learned a lot. I was impressed with all the sensory activities incorporated into the exhibit—the kids loved pushing various buttons to hear the sounds (street trams) and smell the smells (fish at the docks, leather being worked) of city life over the past century and a half.

So what is your summer looking like? Any museums or other activities you would recommend to others?

Last but not least, if you are stumped for ideas for low-cost and high-fun activities for summer, my friend

Dixie Dillon Lane

has put together this fantastic guide for families.