2023-05-31 18:34:01
You cross the threshold, you put on the virtual reality glasses and, alehop, suddenly you are Marcus Atilius A free Roman, a gladiator who voluntarily enlisted to pay off the large family debts and a legend in the Pompeii arena. In your first fight you made Hilarius, Nero’s gladiator, bite the dust, and you ended a streak of 13 consecutive victories. The same with Lucius Raecius Felix, who has fought twelve fights without defeat.
Your deeds feed murals and mosaics. Your name resounds in Via dell ́Abbondanza and the Terme di Stabia. In the market, the gym and, of course, in the amphitheatre. Especially in the amphitheatre. You jump into the arena for the last time, you wield the sword or the trident next to a gigantic elephant and, suddenly the Vesuvius.Screams, fire and destruction. Tons of lava to annihilate life and preserve memory under layers and layers of ash. The eruption, live and direct and in overwhelming virtual reality.
Thus, with Mount Vesuvius spitting lava and fire, the immersive experience that crowns ‘Pompeii. The last gladiator’, exhibition that recovers in the Royal Shipyards of the Maritime Museum of Barcelona the myth and history of the city between gladiators, virtual reality and 150 original pieces from the Museum of Archeology of Naples.
«The gladiator is the common thread; who shows us the rich life that existed in Pompeii”, says Roberto Pantè, artistic director of an exhibition that alternates holograms, scenographic reconstructions and sculptures that are two thousand years old. «It is a unique, experiential experience. There are movies, scenery, dialogues, emotions, music… Everything from a well-studied perspective. Nothing is accidental, ”defends Pantè.
original and rare pieces
The metaverse, a space dedicated to the immersive experience of Marcus Atilius, is a true viguería and, according to its managers, “the most extensive shared multisensory journey”, but there is more. There are, for example, the remains of one of the frescoes that decorated the portico of the Theater or a gigantic piece of bronze that was used as a support for the brazier in the baths. “These are very rare original pieces,” underlines Raffaele Iovine, scientific director of the exhibition.
The eruption of Vesuvius, seen through virtual reality
Rare and stellar, like those statues of wounded warriors on the farnese collection who have left Italy for the first time. Next to them, a wide assortment of amphoras, small frescoes, jugs, pots, cauldrons and plates show what Vesuvius wiped out on the map on October 24, 79. Daily life in a recreation of Via dell’Abbondanza, with its fast food outlets and their display of domestic archaeological remains escorting the visitor in the first meters of the exhibition hall.
The gladiator, remembers Paté, is the show’s guide, but not the only protagonist: during the tour, the theater asks for passage through a set of frescoes and comic masks and the baths, the nerve center of social life, perform of presence by work and grace of a multimedia reproduction and ancient hydraulic valves. State-of-the-art technology and ancient history, twinned in an exhibition that opens in Barcelona what is expected to be a long international journey.
The exhibition brings together frescoes, sculptures and high technology
With the volcanic eruption as an inevitable backdrop, ‘Pompeii. The last gladiator’ recreates other key spaces of the Roman city such as the Casernas de los gladiadores or the Necropolis. It is there where the animal frescoes (a leopard; a panther with a thyrsus) share the limelight with a splendid collection of bronze helmets, swords, daggers and knee pads. The day to day of the gladiator, entangled in the daily life of a city buried by ash and now recovered between gladiators and immersive technology.
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