SEND IN THE SHEEP
Woolly animals help save Pompeii’s ruins by eating invasive vegetation
POMPEII, Italy — On a bright morning in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, a stout shepherd whistled and steered his flock of sheep to a grassy slope above Pompeii’s frescoed ruins. He glanced a few feet down at a house destroyed nearly 2,000 years ago under a fiery rain of volcanic rock and tapped a grazing ewe with his crook to make sure it didn’t get too close and take a tumble.
“It can happen,” the shepherd, Gaspare de Martino, said with a shrug.
In recent years, the vast archaeological park of Pompeii, a city buried alive by the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79, has turned to high-tech options to maintain its excavated ruins. A surveillance drone makes a monthly flight over the site’s roughly 10,000 exhumed rooms. Artificial intelligence programs analyze aerial images for new cracks, fallen stones and other signs of erosion. But to prevent the third of the park that remains hidden under pumice and meters of earth from becoming overgrown with thorn bushes, wild hedges and trees, Pompeii has found a more appropriately ancient, and inexpensive, solution in hungry sheep.
Without the sheep, “you’d have some kind of jungle that would invade the archaeological structures and the site,” said Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the park’s director. He said that he came up with the idea of bringing in sheep after seeing them maintain the land on top of dikes in the North Sea, and said that the Pompeii sheep chomp on invasive vegetation, roots and wild terrains that could lead to the city’s reburial under landslides.
But Zuchtriegel acknowledged that this recent project was as much about reimagining Pompeii’s immediate marketing future as it was about preserving its archaeological past. For a city closely associated with clouds of ash and incinerating gusts of heat from one of the most horrific natural disasters in recorded history, the sheep — along with newly planted vineyards, orchards in ancient atriums and plans for local olive oil — are part of a Pompeii Pastoral rebranding campaign to move away from fire and brimstone, and toward farm-to-table.
“I even dream,” Zuchtriegel said as the sheep bleated around him, “of wool.”
Zuchtriegel is one of the so-called super directors recruited internationally by Italy to modernize major museums. He may have visions of a Pompeiibranded farm producing milk, cheese and lamb to be served at a new restaurant overlooking the site and of exclusive scarves and sweaters stacked in a gift shop, but as he points out, the sheep themselves are nothing new for Pompeii.
Pliny the Elder, the ancient world’s great naturalist, wrote in “Natural History” that the region around Pompeii had “fleeces of sheep so handsome.” He was less impressed with their brains, asserting that “the fleecy sheep is the stupidest of animals.”
The volcano’s eruption killed Pliny with “some gross and noxious vapor,” as his nephew, Pliny the Younger, wrote in his own account of the disaster.
In the ensuing centuries, sheep returned and grazed on the earth above the buried city, even after excavation began in the 18th century.
For generations, the ancestors of de Martino led their flock to the park’s unexcavated grounds. Only about 15 years ago, he said, did the park management tell him to take a hike.
“We were here forever, but then the old director didn’t let us in anymore,” de Martino said. “They didn’t like the dung. What was I supposed to do, pick up after them?”
He hissed commands — “Ishuh, Ishuh” — at his two Belgian Shepherds and leaned on his crook as the sheep mowed the grass and devoured tall reeds. “They’ll eat anything.”
The night before, Vesuvius, which is still an active volcano, grumbled near its crater with a small earthquake, though experts say not dangerously. De Martino, 40, shook off any concern. “When it explodes, it explodes,” he said. “You can’t plan these things. You can’t say, ‘Hold on a sec.’ ”
He expressed more concern about making a living. Between the competition from big agriculture, and the difficulties of finding fields for his flock around busy streets and a maze of private property, he said he had to transition into truck driving.
He said Zuchtriegel’s invitation to return to the unexcavated fields was an opportunity to “get bigger.”
So far, the sheep seem to be a welcome addition. Tourists walking on the labyrinth of ancient roads looked up from their guidebooks at the sound of clanging sheep bells. “How do I get up there?” one called to Zuchtriegel, who shook his head no. “Prohibited?” the man called back, disappointed.
Zuchtriegel has sought to use the sheep to introduce autistic children to the park, believing it creates a more memorable, and authentic, Pompeii experience than a lecture about the four styles of Pompeii wall art. “Maybe one day,” Zuchtriegel said, “we’ll have a thousand sheep or other animals.”
The maintenance workers who are stationed by the Vesuvius Gate near the livestock’s outdoor stall, said the more lawn-mowing animals, the merrier.
“If they didn’t do it, we’d have to,” Pasquale Lombardi, 52, said, thankfully. Another member of the maintenance crew, Antonio Mariano Siepe, 31, spoke about the potential of the sheep, especially “with roasted potatoes.”
Some of the park’s staff saw the return of the sheep as a kind of return of life to Pompeii, a place synonymous with agonizing death.
A friendly brown-andwhite stray dog followed Maurizio Bartolini, Pompeii’s gardener, as he walked to the fields. He said the park’s clean environment and lack of pollution had drawn more wild animals, including hoopoe birds and lots of hedgehogs.
“The animals have come back to Pompeii,” he said.