Noting how the ancient inhabitants of Pompeii put their cemeteries along the road for everyone to see, the great Italian archaeologist, Amedeo Maiuri, superintendent of the sites at Pompeii and Herculaneum for many years, commented that “…They were not melancholy. They wanted to be seen and remembered—after death. […]The important thing now is not to discover new objects. We have more than we know what to do with. What we must do now is…learn the daily life of the ordinary people.” (Cited in the New York Times, May 29, 1954 in “Pompeii Diggings Yield Necropolis” by Herbert L. Matthews.)

That interest in the personal lives of the ancients is what distinguished Maiuri as an archaeologist. It was his enthusiasm for the personal details and his zeal for incorporating that interest into the way his sites were displayed to the public is the reason you can today stand in the streets of excavated ancient Herculaneum and have the feeling that maybe the whole town has just stepped out for a moment and will be right back. Indeed, that kind of approach to antiquity was no doubt responsible for the fact that I was approached by a guide at Pompeii one time who asked in his best, furtive, “dirty postcards” voice if I wanted to see something “really special.” Of course! He showed me the now famous mural of a happy happy (sic) Pompeiian man smiling as he weighed his own oversized genitalia on a scale. At the time, the mural had been covered by a medicine cabinet affair on the wall, such that you had to unlock it to show it off. The guide refused to let my wife look at it. She was furious and would have called up Maiuri, himself, if he had still been alive.

Maiuri was born in Verola, near Frosinone, about half-way between Naples and Rome. He earned a degree in archaeology at the university of Naples and continued his studies at universities in Rome and Athens. He began his career in 1911 when he was appointed to an Italian archaeological mission to Crete. In 1914, he became head of an Italian archaeological mission in the Aegean sea. He led this expedition for ten years, doing important work on the island of Rhodes, where he also opened a new museum. In 1924 he became director of the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, the chief of excavations in Pompeii and Herculaneum, and superintendent of antiquities for the Campania region. Besides his well-known work in Pompeii and Herculaneum, he also worked on the Greek site at Paestum, rediscovered the fabled cave of the Sibyl of Cuma, and excavated the Villa Jovis on Capri. Indeed, on Capri, before Maiuri, as Mary C. Fitzpatrick points out in The Classical Journal, vol. 45 n. 2, November 1949, “Tiberius’ Villa Jovis on the Isle of Capri,” (pp. 66- 70),

“…certain vaulted ruins were believed to be all that remained of the splendid palace which once crowned the height, and that they were all that survived after the Corsair raids in the Middle Ages. However… Maiuri became convinced that such was not the case. Excavation fully justified his doubts, for it was discovered that what had long passed for the foundation of the palace was in reality its top floor and that…[there exist]…the remains of three lower floors built around four massive cisterns which formed the core of the palace structure…”

Additionally, Maiuri taught Latin and Greek at the university of Naples and was the author of some 300 publications. He retired in 1961.

As opposed to the modern sweat-shirt and blue-jeans diggers of newer archaeology, Maiuri was always impeccably dressed, even when bobbing in a row-boat in the waters off of Baia, above the sunken ruins of Portus Julius, home port of the western Imperial Fleet of Rome, even as he asked divers to go down again and check this and that street again, and maybe see if they could find the bakery! (Episode cited in L’Europeo. N. 15, 14 April 1963, “Lo stregone di Pompei” [The Wizard of Pompeii] by Gianni Roghi)

During WW2, he did his best to protect his treasures in the museum from all-comers, hiding some from Wehrmacht art thieves and vandals and sandbagging others to shelter them from Allied bomb blasts. Fortunately, bombs never hit the museum, though Maiuri harbored a grudge against US planes for bombing Pompeii itself when they thought Germans were using the ancient city as a munitions depot. (Apparently, they were not.)

Maiuri said that he didn’t want to be “just an archaeologist.” His Roman Painting (English edition, New York, pub. Skira, 1953) attests to that. He emphasized his view that Roman art was not just a debased copy of Greek art, something that many scholars had held for centuries. Maiuri show that the Campanian muralists of Herculaneum and Pompeii were enchanted by nature, that they had a flair for caricature, that they were original, direct, racy, emotional, and even funny. Maiuri wrote over a wide range of archaeology, history and art.