SING SING Il corpo di Pompei takes its title from the name long given, for reasons left unexplained, to a restricted group of rooms beneath the public galleries of Naples’s National Archaeological Museum. In these barred cells, objects from Pompeii and Herculaneum remain largely beyond the museum visitor’s view: bronze, glass, ceramic and terracotta vessels, handles, lamps, ornaments, statues—and even charred bread—preserve the texture of daily life interrupted by the eruption of 79 AD.
Luigi Spina photographs this concealed collection as both an architectural interior and a field of memory. The sequence begins at a rusty iron door, its layers of paint suggesting a threshold, then adjusts slowly to the dim corridor beyond. Shelves crowded with fragments and furnishings give way to carefully observed groupings; elsewhere, a white-clothed table gathers objects once used in the homes of people whose lives ended in catastrophe. The camera’s attention does not reduce these remains to archaeological inventory. It allows their surfaces, damage and proximity to one another to carry the weight of human use.
The book’s significance lies in this change of scale. Pompeii is commonly encountered through streets, villas and monumental ruins; Spina turns instead toward the museum’s hidden storage, where the material record is intimate, accumulated and physically close. The result is a photographic account of antiquity grounded in the ordinary, while remaining alert to the dramatic force of the disaster that preserved it. His wider practice, concerned with ancient cultural roots, art and faith, and the physical presence of classical sculpture, gives the project a sustained seriousness without making it illustrative.
Published by 5 Continents Editions in 2020, this Italian-English volume comprises 116 pages in a 28 × 28 cm format. For collectors, its appeal rests in the precision of its subject and the coherence of its photographic treatment: it makes an inaccessible museum interior legible through atmosphere, sequence and close attention to objects that are at once archaeological evidence and the remnants of lived experience.
