You chose: pompei

At Pompeii, medical researchers and archaeologists are studying the new CAT scans of the skeletal remains of no less than 30 individuals who died in the eruption of 79 AD. And at the majestic villa where the Emperor Augustus died at nearby Somma Vesuviana, archaeologists from Naples and Tokyo continue to make important discoveries.

Italy's Easter basket is filled with treasures, but they come with problems, and even the basket is fraying. Underlying the problems is, as this reporter has written repeatedly, the abundance of the Italian cultural heritage. Nowhere is this more visible than at Pompeii, whose years of moral and physical lapses are taken by some outsiders, perhaps erroneously, as a sad metaphor for the country itself. But there are good eggs in that basket too.

ROME – The good news is that during the three days of the European Christmas holiday—Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and St. Silvester’s on Dec. 26—some 64,000 people visited Italy’s thirty most important cultural sites, 17% more than last year. Even on Christmas Day the sites—they included Rome’s Castel Sant’Angelo, Turin’s Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, the Pinacoteca di Brera art gallery in Milan, the Reggio castle at Caserta—were kept open, and entry was free. The bad news is that, as part of Premier Mario Monti’s budget package, restoration funding for churches, museums, archaeological sites and libraries will be slashed by $73.4 million. The reasoning is understandable: something has to go, and that amount, taken from the charity donations that are part of the annual income tax payment (“otto per mille”), is normally devolved toward restoration projects. Instead, this year’s money will be used to try to ease the situation in Italy’s drastically overcrowded prisons.