The print North vs. South features an elaborate fresco of an animal hunt painted on the north wall of an interior pleasure garden (vividarium) in the House of Ceii. A decorative border surrounding the main field of the painting creates the impression that the scenes of a lion chasing a bull and dogs bringing down wild boars are glimpsed through a window. What attracted Petracca to this painting as an image resonant with interpretive possibilities for his artistic purposes was its depiction of violence, something stereotypically associated with southern Europeans. Often rehearsed in school are the violent events in the Roman Colosseum, where humans were thrown to the lions and gladiators often fought to the death. Across one corner of this fresco, Petracca wrapped a turn-of-the-century text he discovered by Edward Lowry, commenting on the undesirability of Italian immigrants from “the southern portion of the peninsula” over those from the north who make better (less violent) citizens.

In a manner similar to North vs. South, Petracca superimposed the text of a derogatory Guinea Pig joke someone had emailed him upon an exterior terrace wall in the House of Octavius Quartio (also known as the House of Loreius Tiburtinus). To create the illusion of the text being physically on the wall, Petracca showed it in the same perspective as the wall and also converted the font to one known as Herculaneum which is stylistically fitting. Entitled Pompeii Piggies, this print shows the marked contrast between the gauche portrait of the Italian American thugs in the joke and the refinement of the Southern Italian home upon which it is overlaid: the east end of an upper terrace overlooking the house’s elaborate southern exposure garden. The terrace had once been furnished with two parallel couches (biclinium) which were placed on either side of a channel (euripus). The fresco on the north wall shows deer while the partially occluded fresco on the east wall depicts Narcissus at the source, admiring his face in the water. A nearby grotto contained a fountain that sprayed water into the channel—not your typical setting for piggies.

Petracca’s trip to Sicily didn’t yield much about his father’s early life. However, the side trip to Pompeii awarded him an entirely new level of awareness and pride about Southern Italian culture. As a testament to that discovery, this new body of work uses the imagery of Pompeii as a metaphor for the artistic and intellectual contributions of Italians everywhere, most specifically in America where the negative stereotypes—the tags—richly deserve to be stripped away.

1 The text on these statistics derives from “Italian American Stereotypes in U.S. Advertising” prepared by The Order of Sons of Italy in America/www.OSIA.org (202/547-2900).
2 Adrian Wootton,“Interview: Roberto Benigni,” The Guardian, Saturday, November 7, 1998 (http://zakka.dk/euroscreenwriters/interviews/roberto_benigni_512.htm).
3 The text is from Edward Lowry, “Americans in the Raw” from The World’s
Work, 1902.
4 The essential text on Pompeian painting I consulted while preparing this essay was Giuseppina Cerulli Irelli et al, La Peinture de Pompei, 2 vols., Paris, Editions Hazan, 1993.