Pompeii: is this the best they can do with €105m?

The emergency restoration – begun in 2013 – seems to have ground to a halt, with many of the lost city’s wonders hidden behind ugly fences. Call this a rescue?

What’s the point of loving Pompeii if we let it fall?

The ancient Roman city preserved in ash by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79 has never been more popular. The Neoclassical imitations and fashion for “Pompeiian red” that its beautiful art inspired when Pompeii first captured imaginations in the 18th century were enjoyed by an elite. Nowadays, Pompeii is pop culture, its totemic name resounding from blockbuster exhibitions to terrible disaster films to an episode of Dr Who. And at the site itself, the crowds keep coming.

Crisis has become the new normal at Pompeii

Related: Palmyra must not be fixed. History would never forgive us

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