Last November – which in the current predicament seems like a lifetime away – my wife and I went to the Last Supper in Pompeii exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. The temporary exhibition, which closed on 12 January 2020, “include[d] about 300 objects loaned by Naples and Pompeii, many of which have never left Italy before” (Brown 2019). The exhibition gave us the unprecedented opportunity to see in person some of the most breathtaking remains ever discovered in the history of Roman archaeology.

However, during our visit we spotted a baffling passage in the caption of one terra sigillata pottery showcase (8.1).