Ancient Roman House to Modern Museum: Doubling the Horizons of Immersion Through Exhibitions

Many museum exhibitions today use Roman houses as the framework for their gallery design, recreating Roman rooms for visitors to walk through. Before Roman houses took on this role in modern curatorial contexts, their ancient inhabitants also used a range of strategies to put the past on display in these spaces. In this chapter I use the Pompei e Santorini: L’eternità in un giorno held in Rome in 2019-20 to explore how this modern exhibition design strategy creates a double immersion for its audiences, both as modern visitors to the ancient Roman past and as modern visitors experiencing Roman strategies of immersion in the past recreated anew.