Pompeii

Pompeii is the most complete picture we have of an ordinary Roman town, and it owes that to the catastrophe that ended it. In AD 79 Vesuvius, about 8 km away, erupted for two days. First came some eighteen hours of falling pumice, which let many of the inhabitants flee; then surges of superheated gas and ash swept through the streets and killed those who had stayed. Recent research places the disaster in late October rather than the traditional date in August. Across the bay at Misenum, the young Pliny watched the eruption and later described it in two letters that are still the founding eyewitness account of a volcanic event.

The city was a prosperous place of perhaps eleven or twelve thousand people, already scarred by the severe earthquake of 5 February AD 62, and some buildings were still under repair when the ash fell. Its walls enclose around 66 hectares, of which about two-thirds have been excavated since systematic digging began in 1748. What survives is astonishing in its ordinariness: paved streets, houses, shops, bakeries, temples and the forum, and graffiti scratched on walls inside and out, which preserve the colloquial Latin that literary texts ignore. Via dell'Abbondanza is the main street, and at the edge of the town stands the amphitheatre, built around 70 BC, soon after Pompeii came under Roman rule.

The most affecting sight is also the most technical. In the 1860s the archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli realised that the bodies of the dead had left hollows in the hardened ash, and he poured plaster into them. The casts that resulted, some of which remain where they were found in the Garden of the Fugitives, record the last postures of men, women, children and animals with an intimacy no inscription can match. The grand town houses, such as the House of the Faun, and villas outside the walls such as the Villa of the Mysteries show how richly the wealthy decorated their homes.

Excavation has not stopped. New digs since 2018 have uncovered, among much else, harnessed horses at a villa outside the town and, in 2024, a banqueting hall painted with scenes from the Trojan War. The site has been on the UNESCO World Heritage list since 1997.

Getting there

The ruins lie at the edge of the modern town of Pompei, about 1 km from its centre, south-east of Naples. The nearest airport is Naples International Airport (NAP), about 23 km away. The Circumvesuviana railway from Naples (Piazza Garibaldi) toward Sorrento stops at Pompei Scavi–Villa dei Misteri in about 35 minutes, and the Porta Marina entrance is a few steps from the platform.