Preserved since the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, an Ancient Roman villa, located below Positano’s church of Santa Maria dell’Assunta, has recently opened to the public. Following two excavation initiatives, taking place between  2003 - 2006 and 2015 - 2016, the villa is now accessible to visitors who can descend to ten metres below the church and make their way through what was once the summer home of an elite Roman family.

References: Marco Merola, “A spectacular villa under Positano sees the light.” Available at https://www.archaeology.org/issues/226-1609/features/4758-romans-on-the-bay-of-naples

“The Roman Villa in Positano: An Archaeological Wonder at the Heart of the Amalfi Coast.” Available at http://www.italianways.com/villa-romana-in-positano-an-archaeological-wonder-at-the-heart-of-the-amalfi-coast/

“Positano’s Roman Villa.” Available at http://sirenusejournal.com/en/positano/positanos-roman-villa

Planet Pompeii Blog. Available at https://www.planetpompeii.com/en/blog/the-leisure-of-positano-reopens-the-villa-romana-of-the-amalfi-coast-with-its-wonderful-frescoes.html

Images: Images 1-3 and 5, © Roberto Salomone.

Image 4, © L’Espresso.

Over the Garden Wall, ça faisait longtemps!

“Whether the Andrea Gail rolls, pitch-poles, or gets driven down, she winds up, one way or another, in a position from which she cannot recover. Among marine architects this is known as the zero-moment point – the point of no return.” –Sebastian Junger, “The Perfect Storm”

Posts like this aren’t my usual fare, but there’s a lot of readers on Tumblr. So y’all might be interested – or, if not, you really should be.

On Monday, this went down:

That’s the bloodless, matter-of-fact, ho-hum business event way of describing it. Let me paint you a different picture.

On Monday morning, every single Barnes & Noble location – that’s 781 stores – told their full-time employees to pack up and leave. The eliminated positions were as follows: the head cashiers (those are the people responsible for handling the money), the receiving managers (the people responsible for bringing in product and making sure it goes where it should), the digital leads (the people responsible for solving Nook problems), the newsstand leads (the people responsible for distributing the magazines), and the bargain leads (the people responsible for keeping up the massive discount sections). A few of the larger stores were able to spare their head cashiers and their receiving managers, but not many.

Just about everyone lost between 3 and 7 employees. The unofficial numbers put the total around 1,800 people.

People.

We’re not talking post-holiday culling of seasonal workers. This was the Red Wedding. Every person laid off was a full-time employee. These were people for whom Barnes & Noble was a career. Most of them had given 5, 10, 20 years to the company. In most cases it was their sole source of income.

There was no warning.

But it gets worse.

Cashier: ??!?! Thank you! You’re the nicest person ever!

if you call someone to witness and they refused to show up, you are legally entitled to stand outside their house and scream, but only every third day

you can sell your son into slavery once or twice, but after the third time he doesn’t have to put up with that shit anymore

no wailing allowed at funerals

also you can only have ONE funeral per person, don’t get greedy

if your neighbor’s tree has a branch hanging into your yard, you can legally cut down the entire fucking tree

however, if some of your neighbor’s fruit from his dumb tree falls into your yard, he can legally come into your yard to snoop around get it

they are indeed real! they’re from the twelve tables, a roman law text so old that it’s hard for even people who are well-versed in latin to read by the text is archaic (also half of it is missing but whatever)

while we’re on the subject, here are some more good ones that i forgot to put in:

the penalty for writing a song slandering someone (it’s very specific on the song bit) is getting clubbed to death

if you hurt someone (or if you just sort of inconvenience them) through magic arts, the penalty for that is also death

however if you maim someone’s limb through normal limb-maiming processes you just sort of have to figure things out between yourselves

if there’s a road right next to your property, feel free to build a fence around it to prevent people from driving into it, but if you don’t build your own fence then tough shit

if you waste all your money you can legally be prevented from wasting even more of your money