Il tempo dei giardini di Pompei,/Experiencing time in the gardens of Pompeii

Gilles Clement poetically defined gardens as “time observatories”, where landscape architects can experiment with landscape transformations on a smaller scale and get information for future projects. Even Pompeii can be imagined as a huge mineral garden, where observing time becomes possible. Since the earliest archaeological excavations, promoted by the Bourbons in the first half of the XVIII century, this site has offered archaeologists, scientists and travellers the opportunity to explore previously unknown time sequences and time scales by entering into the everyday life of a city that disappeared in the first century A.D. and then remained silent and still for a long season of dormancy. In 79 A.D. Vesuvius awoke and covered Pompeii in layers of ash and incandescent lapillus. Then, burning clouds swept away what still emerged from the sediments of pyroclasts. The city, its inhabitants and its memory were erased for almost 1700 years. More than two and half centuries of archaeological research has brought back to light a great area of the city, containing traces of the lives of its inhabitants. A cultural and scientific heirloom that makes Pompeii unique and certainly one of the most famous archaeological sites in the world.