After 2,000 years, a rare blue shrine has been unearthed in Pompeii

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Reported by NBC News:

POMPEII, Italy — Buried and unseen for nearly 2,000 years, a sacred room has been unearthed at Pompeii with painted blue walls, a rare and expensive color in the Roman city.

Describing it as a “very unusual thing for Pompeii,” the site’s director Gabriel Zuchtriegel told NBC News on a tour of the newly excavated site that blue “was the most expensive color” because it was difficult to make.

“You had to import it from Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean and beyond. So it was expensive, and if you wanted to have something in blue, you had to pay more,” he said. Red, yellow and black were much easier to produce because natural materials like stone and sand were widely available, he added.

The startling finding was first revealed to NBC News on Tuesday.

It comes from block No. 10 of Pompeii’s ninth section, a never-before excavated area of the town destroyed in the eruption of the Vesuvius volcano in 79 A.D.

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