Discovering Pompeii: From Effects to Causes—From Surveying to the Reconstructions of Ballistae and Scorpiones”, Aversa, Italy, 27 February 2025.

For some contemporaries, it is incredible that “Travertine,” better known as Sarno limestone, together with Gray Tuff, could be moulded like butter under artillery fire. Yet Amedeo Maiuri, director of the excavations at Pompeii between 1924 and 1961, together with other collaborators and scholars, did not hesitate to identify the cavities found along the northern walls of the city as evidence of the blows inflicted by Sulla’s ballistae. It is essential to recognize and investigate the value of ballistic evidence to promote experimental archaeology that takes historical and military knowledge into account. This is a fundamental step in ensuring an adequate and informative museological narrative. Raising a framework of meanings to bring present expectations into dialogue with knowledge of the past is a contemporary necessity, as established by the ‘London Charter’ (2009) and the Seville Principles (2012), now shared by scientific communities that have long insisted on the advanced digitization of inherited heritage. Presenting the sources, illustrating the state of the art, and discussing the orientation of readings and interpretations is the practice that makes the work of analysis and inductive verification of results transparent. Imagining synergies that, through distinct paths, converge on the same objective is useful for organizing a model that digital language makes multifunctional. In the hope that favourable conditions for cooperation with the Archaeological Park of Pompeii will arise, SCORpioNIDI is moving toward the objectives funded in Italy by the Ministry of University and Scientific Research on a competitive basis. The seminar day, which this volume commemorates, was organized by inviting expert speakers and university-level listeners with the aim of sharing the results obtained to date and promoting debate on those in progress. I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to my colleagues who shared their passion for the subject, making their multidisciplinary skills and knowledge available. I would like to express my gratitude to Flavio Russo, historical consultant to the Army General Staff, who in the new millennium has brought to the attention of his contemporaries the value of ballistic impacts, focusing mainly on the analysis of the spheroidal ones found along the northern wall of Pompeii. On numerous professional and educational occasions, he encouraged me to continue my investigations, considering my specific knowledge and skills to be decisive for the development of the research. Survey tools and methods, which are anything but passive techniques, have in fact proven to be intellectual levers. The data acquired and critically reorganized in the representative space have guided communicative syntheses of objective data expressing contemporary expectations. Digital transcripts prove to be accelerators of traditional processes as they transform observers into actors in personalized and participatory paths.