This paper is concerned with reassessing the importance of the destruction of the house of Cicero in the light of recent investigations into housing in the Roman world. In recent years, the quantity and quality of such investigations have intensified but Cicero's house remains somewhat unpopular – despite excavations on the Palatine slopes which have revealed more details of the houses occupied by Cicero and his Late Republican neighbours.3 The saga of Cicero and his house had not been dealt with for several decades until the presidential address of Susan Treggiari in the 1998 Transactions of the American Philological Association. Her paper, however, is not so much concerned with the actual relationship between private and public in the house of Cicero as Cicero's private and public attempts to come to terms with his grief over the death of his daughter Tullia.
The cry ‘what to do with the Crystal Palace’ continues to reverberate long after the Palace’s fiery demise. Whilst local heritage groups continue to cherish it, its memory has been jeopardised by authorities, both bureaucratic (who have failed to implement a coherent conservation plan for the site) and academic (who have largely refused to engage with building or exhibition). The result, the mental dismantling of the Sydenham Palace from nineteenth-century histories, has been explained by scholarly aversion to reconstruction/inauthenticity and play/populist entertainment, the very aspects which defined it. This chapter explore a small part of the Palace, the Pompeian Court, through our own digital visualisation, housed in Second Life, a popular multi-user online virtual world. By choosing such a venue, we have favoured the pursuit not of absolute authenticity but of virtual presence, offering a space in which visitors to the model, through their avatars, might circulate the space, interact with each other and the exhibits.
This JISC funded project involves building a virtual 3D model in Second Life, a multiuser online world, of the Pompeian Court, a life-size model of a Pompeian house built in the Crystal Palace in 1854. We wish to examine how the social and educational experiences and reconstructive possibilities offered by the virtual environment compare with those of the original Court. By examining these themes with reference to the archival material of the Palace and preliminary evaluation of our model with user groups in the education and heritage sectors, we aim to reassess the potential of visualisations of the past.
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