The Villa dei Papiri: Then and Now (organized by the American Friends of Herculaneum)

Among the legions of bronze and marble statuary and the mountains of charred papyrus scrolls recovered during the Bourbon excavations in the Villa dei Papiri emerged a humble yet practical object: a silver-plated bronze, portable sundial in the shape of a ham. Though the Encyclopédie scooped the Accademia Ercolanese by publishing the first widely circulated description of the sundial in 1757, the Accademia responded in 1762 by featuring it as the first small find subjected to their rigorous analysis in the preface to their third volume of Le Antichità di Ercolano.