Visitors travel back centuries to a moment frozen in time at Union Station exhibit

The volcanic eruption was calamitous, but the aftermath was serene.

Tons of ash and pumice from Mount Vesuvius smothered the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, but they also preserved in silence the details of everyday life in a rich port city in an ascendant Roman empire. It was A.D. 79, and the Colosseum in Rome was nearing completion.

An exhibit opening Friday at Union Station provides a look into that moment in time. Pompeii: The Exhibition contains nearly 200 artifacts on loan from the Naples National Archaeological Museum in Italy.

Pompeii was rediscovered in the 18th century, and the town and its secrets have been gradually revealed ever since.

“It’s the only archeological site still active where, for literally one moment in time, we have a snapshot of what life was like on that day, at that second,” Cynthia Brown, vice president of Exhibitions International, said recently while overseeing the installation.

Objects in the exhibit include frescoes and mosaics. It has kitchenware as well as gladiator equipment and jewelry. Statuary includes the god Apollo and the notorious emperor Caligula. There are even preserved morsels of food, such as charred raisins and pears.

This exhibit is a new collection of items that have not traveled together before. Many of the items have never been exhibited in the United States, and some of them have never been outside of Italy. A team of three conservators from the Naples museum came to Kansas City for the installation. They worked with Jackie Hoff, registrar for Exhibitions International and former director of the Science Museum of Minnesota. They studied and photographed each piece before it was mounted and placed in a display case.

“These are really, really old and very precious things,” Hoff said. “We just want to make sure that everything is stable and safe in order that we can show the public.”

Union Station officials took the unusual step of co-producing the Pompeii exhibit.

“It means we have skin in the game,” said station spokesman Michael Tritt. “As a producer, you’re investing in the show.”

The exhibit takes visitors through the villa of a wealthy family, which contains several objects recovered from the same house in Pompeii. The path continues through the marketplace and the forum.

“People are just innately interested in how other people lived in other times,” said Brown. “That’s one of the ways this exhibition really succeeds. You’re looking at how a family would have lived in Pompeii in 79 A.D., but you’re looking at people all across the spectrum, from tradesmen to the elite to politicians.”

There is even a brothel, which is in an optional side gallery.

The exhibit’s wow moment is billed as a “4-D eruption theater” that simulates the volcano experience with noise, video, fog and a moving floor. Brown said the effect has even been enhanced from previous venues at the request of Union Station.

But the most poignant display is quiet: a half-dozen plaster casts of real people — and a dog. They were created by filling cavities left by the people and animals in their last moment as they were asphyxiated by heat and gas and buried under the ash. They didn’t understand what was happening, and then it was too late.

“It’s one thing to separate the archeology and actual objects,” said Brown, “but then you realize these are stories of real people just leading regular lives.”

This story was originally published November 17, 2016 at 3:06 PM with the headline "Visitors travel back centuries to a moment frozen in time at Union Station exhibit."