My Science School

Scroll is a roll of paper or papyrus usually with official writing on it. The scroll is usually unrolled so that one page is exposed at a time. The remaining pages are usually rolled up to the left and right. In Roman usage, the scrolls were written latitudinally.

Between 1752 and 1754, about 1,800 blackened unreadable papyrus scrolls were recovered from the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum. The Villa of the Papyri belonged to the family of Julius Caesar, but the ownership of the scrolls per se is unknown.

These scrolls became known as the Herculaneum papyri or scrolls, the majority of which are today stored at the National Library, Naples. But a handful of them ended up in England and France, as gifts from Ferdinand, son of Charles III and King of Naples and Sicily. The Institut de France has six scrolls in its possession. Two of those scrolls, in hundreds of pieces after past attempts to open them, have been taken for the current study.

 

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Between 1752 and 1754, an excavation was carried out at the Herculaneum site in Italy. They recovered an astonishing collection of 1,800 scrolls from a house believed to have belonged to the family of Julius Caesar, the Roman dictator who was assassinated in 44BC.

A pair of unopened scrolls from the collection belonging to the Institut de France will be virtually unwrapped using sophisticated technology in the Diamond Light Force, the UK’s national synchrotron science facility, which houses a particle accelerator in which beams travel around a closed-loop path to produce light many times brighter than the sun.

But the digital scan is only the first step in the decoding process. There is a long way to go before a complete recreation of the text is ready.

Nearly 2,000 years ago, Pompeii and Herculaneum were busy wealthy Roman cities located in Campania region in southern Italy. But in 79 AD, the nearby Mount Vesuvius volcano erupted. The ensuing smoke and gas spread 32 km into the air. While the molten lava ravaged the city of Pompeii, a thick blanket of ash entombed the town of Herculaneum.

Herculaneum and Pompeii were basically lost and forgotten until they were rediscovered in 1709 and 1748, respectively.

 

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 The Sao Francisco De Assis Church

The Sao Francisco De Assis Church remains in use as a church and is considered to be the greatest masterpiece amongst all the buildings in the ensemble. It was designed in the form of a parabolic wave with reinforced concrete. The church is popular for its bold, unusual and striking forms, which also prevented it from being consecrated as the then Archbishop declared the church unfit for religious purposes. After many struggles, the church finally got its status in 1959.

The Pampulha Art Museum

Now an art museum, this building was functioned as a casino till April 1946. The casino ceased to exist as Gaspar Dutra, the former president of Brazil, prohibited gambling across the territory, it was converted into an art museum in 1957. The museum now boasts a collection of over 1,600 works including a collection of pieces by plastic artists and modernists.

The Ballroom

The Casa de Baile, known as the ballroom house, was inaugurated with the other buildings in 1943. However, in 1948, it ceased to function due to lack of visitors. Today, it houses the Centre of Reference in Urbanism, Architecture and Design. Situated on an artificial islet, it can be reached by crossing a bridge.

The Golf Yacht Club

The Golf Yacht Club has been turned into the Yacht Tennis Club today. Used as a place for entertainment and sports until the 1960s, it changed hands due to lack of funds. The original building was in the shape of a boat overlooking the lake. But over the years several modifications have been made.

The Kubitschek House

This was also designed in the 1940s along with the other buildings. It was intended to be the weekend residence of Juscelino Kubitschek. Today, it is a cultural space and a museum where objects from the time of the construction of the Pampulha Modern Ensemble have been collected.

 

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Juscelino Kubitschek, the former mayor of Belo Horizonte and former president of Brazil, wanted to develop an area around the artificial lake Pampulha in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais state. Therefore, around 1940, he commissioned the design of a set of buildings from renowned architect Oscar Niemeyer. Oscar was also responsible for the construction project of the current capital city of Brazil, Brasilia.

Oscar worked in collaboration with renowned engineer Joaquim Cardozo, and artists including Candido Portinari, to build a casino, a ballroom, a church, a golf yacht club and a hotel around the artificial lake. Except for the hotel, the cultural and leisure complex was inaugurated on May 16, 1943.

The team exploited the plastic potential (the moulding capability) of concrete, and integrated plastic arts (any art form which involves modelling or moulding in three dimensions) such as sculpture and ceramics in the buildings. Landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx reinforced the links between the buildings through designed gardens and a circuit of walkable spaces.

The Pampulha ensemble reflects the way principles of modern architecture evolved in the early 20th century from rigid constructivism and adapted organically to reflect local traditions, the Brazilian climate and natural surroundings.

The ensemble was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2016.

 

Picture Credit : Google