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FREE TRIP TO POMPEII (VIRTUALLY) Michael Warden ‘18 mapped soon so that you can take a virtual tour of a part of Pompeii before the eruption. Everybody knows about the most important So if you can’t make it to Pompeii and you natural disaster in Pompeii, Italy, the eruption have some free time, I highly recommend of Mt. Vesuvius watching the tour of in 79 AD. Few the house at the link people know below, it is very in- about the sec- teresting! ond most im- portant natural disaster in the Pompeii area, a huge earth- quake in 1980. This earth- An Image created by the 3D mapping software quake caused https:// the ruins to begin deteriorating at a much www.youtube.com/watch? faster rate and even destroyed some of the v=ETd7pszxhnc#action=share ruins. Ever since then there has been a push to find a way to preserve the ruins of Pompeii and the surrounding area forever. Finally, in 2000, the Swedish Pompeii Project was start- ed. Their goal was to combine existing data with scans of the city to be able to create ac- curate 3-D digital models of the city, and, us- ing descriptions of architecture from the time, fill in the gaps left by the ruins to see Pompeii as it was before the eruption about 2000 years ago. They have finally begun making strides and have completed the full scan of the mas- sive and elaborate house of Caecilius Iucun- dus, a wealthy Pompeiian man. This is just the first step in reconstructing Pompeii for posteri- Members of the mapping project set ty, and the entire block on which Caecilius’ up their equipment house is located is planned to be digitally Vox Latina 2016-2017 Volume 1 Page 6