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The frescoes, stuccos and sculptures that populate "In Stabiano: Exploring the Ancient Seaside Villas of the Roman Elite," the new exhibit at Emory University's Michael C. Carlos Museum, are remarkable in many ways.

They survived one of earth's legendary cataclysms, the eruption on Aug. 24, 79 A.D., of Mount Vesuvius, which buried a swath of southern Italy in 30 feet of cinder, ash and mud. Together, they offer a tantalizing picture of the elaborate villas built by ancient Rome's rich and famous — mammoth structures as large as 250,000 square feet lavishly decorated with wall paintings and reliefs.

Photos by LOUIE FAVORITE/Staff (ENLARGE)
Carlos Museum curator Jasper Gaunt says exhibits like "In Stabiano" open a way for Italy to share its resources.
(ENLARGE)
Jasper Gaunt discusses the re-created dining room of an ancient Roman villa with seventh graders from William Hubbard Middle School in Forsyth. The exhibit shows artifacts from the ancient city of Stabiae.
(ENLARGE)
The frescoes "Mask of Tragedy" (above) and "Flora" (below) survived the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. The exhibit is the result of international cooperation involving an innovative public-private Italian-American organization.
LOUIE FAVORITE/AJC Staff (ENLARGE)
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EXHIBIT "In Stabiano: Exploring the Ancient Seaside Villas of the Roman Elite." Through Oct. 22. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays; noon-5 p.m. Sundays. $7, suggested admission. Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University.

But this stunning show — which includes the ethereal "Flora," one of ancient Rome's greatest surviving frescoes — is equally significant for what it represents in the present day: the fruits of a first-of-its-kind model of international cooperation in the contentious field of antiquities. The Restoring Ancient Stabiae Foundation is an innovative public-private, Italian-American organization that is overseeing an equally innovative restoration of the ancient cliffside resort town portrayed in the Carlos exhibit.

The foundation is a ray of light in a field long plagued by controversies pitting the Italian government against American dealers, museums and collectors.

For 30 years, the Italian government has laid siege to American museums in relentless pursuit of illegally exported antiquities. In recent years, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Boston Museum of Fine Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum in California have all relinquished objects, and Getty curator Marion True is on trial in Rome, as is her dealer.

These museums and individuals are, it is widely acknowledged, hardly the only ones to have ignored Italian antiquities laws. They are the high-profile vehicle through which the Italian government has served notice to dealers, collectors and institutions that buying or selling unlawfully acquired works is no longer business as usual.

"We are entering a new world in terms of archaeology and museums," says archaeologist Thomas Noble Howe, coordinator general of the RAS Foundation.

For Jasper Gaunt, Carlos' curator of ancient Greek and Roman art, exhibitions like "In Stabiano" are a promising vehicle for Italy to share its resources in this new era.

"The goal is to bring great work to Atlanta," he says. "You can buy or borrow. If you can borrow 'Flora,' why buy?"

Disastrous effects

People have been carrying off booty from Italian archaeological sites since ancient times. Locals filched marble for building materials. Fortune hunters took objects to resell. Bourbon King Charles III of Naples treated Stabiae like his personal shopping mall in the 18th century, ordering minions to pry frescoes off the walls to decorate his palace.

Over the centuries, and still today, the effects of such pilferage can be disastrous. Thieves often destroy sites they ransack. Middlemen often break and sell objects in pieces to make them less traceable. In addition, archaeologists contend that the specific site of a find is critical to understanding the objects and their place in art history.

In 1970, UNESCO, a United Nations agency, established a convention that prohibited commerce in illegally excavated material. Objects were required to have a clear history of ownership back to 1970. But not all governments or institutions honor that date. The Carlos observes a 1983 cutoff — the year the United States signed onto the agreement — while other American museums have set their own rules.

"People [have] ignored the law because of a feeling that the laws were, frankly, stupid," says Gaunt. "There has been legislation on exporting antiquities since the 18th century, and none of it has ever worked because it takes no account of human nature."

Gaunt says the Italian government considers any find, whether it is a common piece of pottery or a masterpiece, the property of the state, whose museums are bulging with objects that never make it out of the storerooms.

"Let's say you are digging in your garden," he explains. "If you find something, you are supposed to hand it in. If you do, you get no compensation and your garden becomes an archaeological site. You alienate the private sector. Everything goes underground."

Dream realized

The Stabiae restoration effort appears to offer a promising solution to this impasse.

Although some of the 150-acre site was unearthed in the 18th century along with the more famous sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum, the less accessible Stabiae was covered up again and forgotten until the 1950s, when a determined local high school principal persuaded the school janitor and an unemployed car mechanic to help him find it.

Enter Leonardo Varone, who grew up looking at objects the principal and his cohorts had found and put on display in the basement of his high school in Castellammare di Stabia, the modern city nearby.

"I had this dream of doing something for my city," says Varone, an architect and planner with Ehrenkrantz Eckstut & Kuhn in Washington. "I wanted to follow in the principal's footsteps to recover an important part of the past and to use it to revitalize economic and cultural development."

That dream, which he explored in his 1998 master's thesis at the University of Maryland, called for the development of an archaeological park that would encompass not only the more fully excavated site but also such amenities as a visitor center, exhibition space, a rail link to nearby Pompeii and a promenade along the cliff that takes advantage of the spectacular view of the Bay of Naples.

The hope is that besides protecting the priceless treasures, the project will be a catalyst for tourism, much the way the Guggenheim Museum has been for Bilbao, Spain. Visitors would stay longer in the region and leave their euros and dollars behind, which would, in turn, encourage more development.

Italian officials embraced the proposal, which was developed into a 10-year, $180 million master plan in 2001. Pledges, government grants and private donations have made it possible to start construction on the visitor center and a facility to house visiting students and scholars. It will be, according to Howe, Italy's first international study center south of Rome.

New opportunities

Interestingly, the Carlos initiated a similar concept back in 1988. The Emory University Museum International Loan Project brought two exhibitions of Roman antiquities from the bulging storeoom of the Museo Nazionale Romano in exchange for sponsoring research on, or restoration of, works in the Museo collection.

Gaunt has more such ideas for his institution.

"Stabiae has acres and acres of unconserved wall paintings. Why not send a group [of them] here to be conserved and exhibited? We could keep them for five years, send them home and get another batch. If you take a 20- to 30-years' view of it, both sides are ahead."

He talked informally about sending Emory students to assist on digs, but he has ideas that go beyond the antiquities box.

"We have material they don't have," he notes. "Pre-Columbian art, African art —why not send that?"

Still, despite the new opportunities presented by the Stabiae project, both Gaunt and Howe firmly believe that Italy's antiquities ownership laws should be less rigid. In Great Britain, he points out, landowners can keep finds if the government doesn't want them. He and Gaunt also share the opinion that provenance cutoff dates should be rolling rather than fixed.

The recent repatriations of objects and the trials of collectors have had a big effect, Gaunt says. "The market has shrunk enormously. There are fewer dealers, which is a good thing. Auction houses are more circumspect. Documented objects are more expensive."

But Gaunt is not about to give up acquiring objects for the Carlos collection. In June, for example, he bought an important sculpture of Aphrodite.

"I still love the hunt," he says, "and there is plenty to hunt for."