Abstract
Wall paintings decorated the majority of space in both Roman households and public buildings, depicting everything from the objects and scenes of daily life to vibrant vignettes of mythology, and there is no better corpus of preserved images than those found in the colorful Roman towns and villas on the Bay of Naples, buried and preserved by the 79 CE eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Today, these sites attract millions of visitors every year, simultaneously capturing the imagination of the world and endangering the remains of the day frozen in time. To properly address this, further study must be done into the materials that compose these walls, from the base levels of cement and plaster to the pigment adorning them in order to better understand the art form and how to protect it. This study begins with the general construction of walls, their plaster-layer preparation, and the sources for pigments and their subsequent application. Then, conservation approaches and techniques are described and examined. This project also incorporates scientific methodology into a case study of fragments of wall painting from the region from private collections, including portable X-Ray Fluorescence (pXRF), Fourier (FT-IR), and Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS), to extrapolate details about their composition and production. The case study shows a variety of material from the Bay of Naples and demonstrates the complexity of finding a standardized and effective way of protecting these sites as part of the world's cultural heritage. More research is required to determine the next course of action and it must be done carefully, but it is, in some ways, a race against time.