On a bright morning in the shadow of Vesuvius, a burly shepherd with a woolen sweater pulled over his belly hissed, clicked, and herded his flock of sheep toward a grassy hillside next to the frescoed ruins of
Pompeii
.
He looked down at a house destroyed nearly 2,000 years ago by
a shower of volcanic rock
and tapped a sheep with his staff to make sure it didn't get too close and fall.
“It can happen,” said the pastor, Gaspare de Martino, with a shrug.
In recent years, the vast archaeological park of
Pompeii, an Italian city buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD
, has turned to high-tech options to keep the ruins exposed.
Old and cheap solution
A surveillance drone flies over the approximately 10,000
exhumed rooms
every month .
Artificial Intelligence programs analyze the aerial images in search of new cracks, fallen stones and other signs of erosion.
But to prevent the third of the park that remains hidden under pumice stone and meters of earth from being filled with thorny bushes, wild hedges and trees,
Pompeii has found a more appropriately ancient and cheap solution
: some hungry sheep.
The sheep prevent the thorny bushes from growing excessively.
Photo: NYT.
Without the sheep, "there would be a kind of jungle that would invade the archaeological structures and the site," explained Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the park.
He said he got the idea to bring the sheep in after watching them maintain
land above the North Sea dikes
.
Thus he became convinced that Pompeii's sheep would wipe out encroaching vegetation, destructive roots, and wild terrain that could once again hide the city under landslides.
"They stop the beginning of something," he said.
But Zuchtriegel recognized that his new landscaping project, which began late last year, was as much to do with rethinking Pompeii's immediate
marketing
future as it was with preserving its archaeological past.
The sheep, together with the newly planted vineyards, the orchards in the old atriums and the plans to produce local olive oil, are part of a
campaign to renew the image of the Pastoral Pompeii
, thus keeping it away from fire and heat. sulfur and bring it closer to locally produced food.
“I even dream of wool,” Zuchtriegel said in German-accented English as sheep bleated around him.
history repeats itself
Zuchtriegel is one of the so-called international "super directors" hired by Italy to modernize the great museums.
He may have visions of a Pompeii-branded farm producing milk, cheese, and lamb to serve in a new restaurant overlooking the site, and of
unique scarves and sweaters stacked in a gift shop
, but as he points out, sheep they are nothing new to Pompeii.
Pliny the Elder, the great naturalist of the ancient world, wrote in his encyclopedic
Natural History
that the region around Pompeii had "very beautiful sheep's fleeces."
He was less impressed with his brain
than he was, as he said that "the woolly sheep is the stupidest of animals."
The eruption of the Vesuvius volcano killed Pliny with "a foul and noxious vapor," as his nephew, Pliny the Younger, wrote in his own account of the disaster.
In the centuries that followed,
sheep returned and grazed on the land that had covered the city
, even after excavations began in the 18th century.
For generations, Gaspare de Martino's ancestors, including his grandfather and father, herded their herds onto the unexcavated grounds of the park.
It was only about 15 years ago that the park management told him to stay away from there.
The project manager.
Gabriel Zuchtriegel is an archaeologist trained at the University of Bonn.
Photo: NYT.
“We were here forever, but then the old director didn't let us in anymore,” De Martino said.
“He didn't like manure.
What was she supposed to do?
Pick up what my animals did?”
She hissed commands (“Ishuh, Ishuh”) to her two Belgian shepherd girls, Sara and Stellina, and leaned on her staff
as the sheep mowed the grass
, devoured the tall reeds, and leapt to pluck berries from the bushes.
"They eat all."
The night before, Vesuvius, which is still active, grunted near the crater with a small earthquake, although experts say it was not a dangerous quake.
De Martino, 40, was not overly concerned by this.
"When it blows, it blows," he said.
“You can't plan these things.
You can't say, 'Wait a second.'”
What worries him most is earning a living.
Between the competition of big agriculture and the difficulties to find fields for
his herd between busy streets
and a maze of private properties, he had to start driving trucks.
"How can you live with 151 sheep?" he asked.
She said Zuchtriegel's invitation to return to the undug fields was an opportunity to "grow up."
So far,
the sheep seem like a welcome addition
.
Tourists walking through the labyrinth of ancient stone-paved streets look up from their guides at the tinkle of sheep bells.
“How do you get up there?” one asked Zuchtriegel, who was
at the top of the slope
and shook his head.
"Forbidden?" The man replied, disappointed.
Zuchtriegel has tried to use the sheep to introduce autistic children to the park, because he thinks they provide
a more memorable and authentic Pompeian experience
than a lecture on the four styles of Pompeian wall art.
"Perhaps one day," said Zuchtriegel, "we will have a thousand sheep or other animals."
Maintenance workers stationed outside the Vesuvius Gate, near the fennel-dotted outdoor cattle barn, said the more animals cutting the grass, the better.
“If they didn't do it, we would have to do it ourselves,” said a grateful Pasquale Lombardi, 52.
View of the ruins of Pompeii.
Photo: NYT.
Another member of the maintenance team, Antonio Mariano Siepe, 31,
spoke of the potential of the sheep
, especially “with baked potatoes”.
The men went down the Via Vesuvius, which runs next to the House of Leda, just below the slope where the sheep grazed.
There they tried to strike up a conversation with Bárbara dell'Isola, 28,
a white-coated art restorer
(“What are you doing, Bárbara?”), who was working near the sultry fresco of the Spartan queen holding on her lap a Jupiter, disguised as a swan.
At first, Barbara thought that having the sheep working in the fields while she worked on the walls “was weird”.
"It seemed to me that
there was danger
, that some debris could fall on the walls," he said.
But then she realized that they “just eat”.
The initiative was the idea of the director of the archaeological park, as part of a new landscaping project.
Some of the park staff saw the return of the sheep as a kind of return of life to Pompeii, a place that is, perhaps more than any other,
synonymous with agonizing death
.
A friendly brown and white stray dog followed Maurizio Bartolini, Pompeii's gardener, as he walked into the fields.
He said the park's clean environment and lack of pollution had attracted more wildlife, including a few hoopoes,
an owl that took up residence on the aristocratic House of Pansa
, and many hedgehogs.
"The animals have returned to Pompeii," he noted.
Around one in the afternoon, de Martino sent his dog Sara to start herding the sheep, whose incessant noise as they uprooted the grass sounded like torrential rain.
The sheep filed noisily through the Vesuvius Gate and
down a dirt path that ran out of the park
, closely followed by the shepherd.
Giuseppe Mingo, 59, one of the maintenance workers,
watched them go by with the ruins behind him
and the volcano looming overhead.
“It's just like in the old days,” he said.
Translation: Elisa Carnelli
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