I spent the morning at Pompeii today, exploring the ruins with MANY other tourists. I thought this was the ‘shoulder season’. I guess with a site like Pompeii there’s always lots of visitors. It’s still marvelous. I was able to see some new things this time, such as a villa that was just opened up in Regio I (one of Pompeii’s nine sectors or ‘Regii’), as well as the Forum Baths. Everyone loves the more famous mosaics and frescoes of Pompeii, but another pictorial and decorative art form was stucco relief sculpture, which decorated many of the baths and villas. Here’s an elegant figure in one the apodyterium (changing room) of one of the bath complexes. She lifts a knee to support a cornucopia, a symbol of fertility and plentitude. Perhaps she is Persephone. As in many of Pompeii’s decorations, there is an eroticism to the image, the figure is partially nude and seems to toss off her diaphanous dress.