Villa Update

The following post will take the form of a hypothetical interview between me and my mom, because she was once a journalist, and her last e-mail was full of questions about the villa.

A (for Alison!): What is the goal in recreating the paint motif on the walls. Will people come visit this stuff?

C: Well, the villa is being reconstructed with the goal of turning it, into the visitor's center for Amheida. Someday a long time from now, tourists and school groups will be able to visit the site, and in the villa/visitor's center they will see a few exciting finds (I think), a room that is unfinished so that they can understand the layers of brick and plaster, etc, that go into building a Roman villa, and the repainted rooms, furnished in the Roman style, to give them a feel for what it would've been like to live in the villa!

A: Do you try to use the exact type of paint that was originally used so that it is as true to history as possible?

No. The Romans used egg tempera, which is apparently just egg yolk mixed with pigments. (Pigments, here, meaning crumbly deposits left over from ancient springs. These are very easy to find around Amheida - we went on an hour-long walk a few days ago, and came across beautiful yellows, oranges, pinks, and reds. There is also purple and black readily available, and probably other colors I'm unaware of.)

If we were to use egg tempera, though, we're pretty sure that a colony of flies would grow up in the villa, and cover/eat the walls. Which would mean that our work would be ruined, it would be hard to continue, and life would be difficult in the villa. I'm not really sure how the Romans dealt with this. I will ask Dorotea... Someday...

A: Will anyone care that two kids in 2010 painted their names underneath the final paint layers and will someone thousands of years from now find it and wonder where it came from?

I don't know! I don't think we're really thinking that far in advance... But it's also pretty difficult to tell. We painted over that part of the wall an extra time, so it's pretty hard to see. I don't know whether it's possible to tell at all anymore. But we'll have to wait for several thousand years and see!