This work reports the study of metal fragments from Roman pipes excavated from the archaeological site of Pompeii and currently preserved in the deposits of the National Archaeological Museum of Naples (MANN). The Roman pipe, called the tibia, is a reed wind musical instrument similar to the Greek aulos. It can be made of wood, bone, and/or metal. Materials consisting of metal Cu-based alloys were excavated from archaeological burial environments. This research aims to identify the composition of the alloys, characterize the corrosion patinas, and identify any ancient surface treatments on the fragments. Non-invasive and micro-invasive techniques were used to achieve this aim, i.e., optical microscopy, Raman spectroscopy, attenuated total reflectance Fourier-transform infrared spectrophotometry, scanning electron microscopy, and energy dispersive spectrometry. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of the materials and manufacturing techniques used for these instruments, as well as the degradation processes occurring over the centuries.

The subject of this study is a group of ninety stucco fragments from the Herculaneum Archeological Park, which were part of the decoration of the Tetrapylon’s barrel vault located in the Decumanus Maximus. The archaeologist Amedeo Maiuri, former superintendent of the site, had been displaying them in a cabinet within a nearby domus, as part of his project of an open air museum, while other parts of the stucco decoration were repositioned in situ, with large lacunas. Our project’s aim has been to develop a new exhibition solution, pursuing an accurate recovery of the overall volume of the decoration, meeting the requirements of reversibility and stability of conservation-restoration treatments, while allowing further updates through new findings. Considering the wide range of methods at our disposal, the most effective technical support in matching the fragments, and acquiring accurately the shape has shown to be the 3D scanning and modeling.

Some 90 Roman stucco fragments, coming from the Archaeological Park of Herculaneum, underwent in the conservation-restoration process within the Istituto Superiore per la Conservazione ed il Restauro (ISCR) laboratories in Matera. Before the conservation activity, the wide number of this manufacts brought us to design a data management system, suitable for stucco findings. Nowadays, the international approaches towards data management of this kind of artifacts is extremely heterogeneous and the absence of an unequivocal data sheet makes the cataloguing very complex and laborious. Our studies on the fragments allowed us to draw up a specific cataloguing instrument for this kind of material, carried out with a software structuring data collection in order to respond to different necessities, such as completeness and updatability, required by an efficient data management system.