1. Street The street: an event or act that leads to another. Unfurling in all directions, the artery of A to Z, the street is the perpetual transit of process and thought made concrete. How we move, and who we meet. Pompeii’s main artery was Via dell’Abbondanza (Street of Abundance), which is one way of qualifying the diverse chaos of street life, hosting every form of commerce and habitation, and a population that was a multitude of ethnicities, languages, and social statuses. Shopfronts framed the “jaws” or “throat” of the domus, the entrance corridor that was made for pedestrians to spy down, giving them a glimpse of an alternative, interior street, a tongue stretching back through every room until it hits the wall of the garden. The person passing along becomes a voyeur, an instant audience member. Their gaze is engaged in a deliberate staging of space, paintings, and objects, even the inhabitants themselves. All is choreographed to make a theater out of the house, and spectators of everyone else. As it was then, so it is now: the street is marked by weather, decay, and grime. The abstraction of Time leaving her traces across every surface, from brick to tree to awning, in fierce competition with human graffiti, the existential registration of existence: “I was here.” Pompeii counts over five thousand such surviving marks, the majority of which are simply name tags. Yet in the ancient world, graffiti was a respected, interactive form of writing. It runs the gamut from political campaign to confession (“Atimetus got me pregnant,” “I screwed the barmaid,” “Cruel Lalagus, why do you not love me?”), wishful thinking (“Health to you, Victoria, and wherever you are may you sneeze sweetly”), and poetic provenance (“Aemilius Celer signed this on his own by the light of the moon”). —AK
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