🌋 Pompeii: What You Will Find

Most ancient cities fell apart slowly: the stone was carted off for other buildings, the timber rotted, the roofs came down. Not Pompeii. Pompeii ended in the course of one afternoon, and then nothing happened for eighteen hundred years.

What happened

On 24 August in the year 79 - or more likely some time that autumn, as a coin and the remains of autumn fruit now suggest - Vesuvius opened. First came a column of ash and pumice about thirty-three kilometres high, which rained down on the town for hours. Roofs began to buckle under the weight. Anyone who left at once survived.

During the night the column could no longer hold its own weight and collapsed. What followed is called a pyroclastic surge: a cloud of gas and ash at around three hundred degrees, rolling down the slope at over a hundred kilometres an hour. You cannot outrun it and you cannot hide from it. It killed instantly.

By morning it was over. Pompeii lay under four to six metres of ash, neighbouring Herculaneum under twenty metres of mud flow.

The whole thing was described by Pliny the Younger, who was eighteen at the time of the eruption, in letters to the historian Tacitus - though he wrote them a quarter of a century later - the oldest detailed eyewitness account of a volcanic eruption in history, and volcanologists still call this type of eruption plinian. His uncle, Pliny the Elder, commanded the fleet at Misenum, sailed to help, and died on the shore.

Why it is so well preserved

The ash killed Pompeii and preserved it in the same movement. It shut out the air, so almost nothing decayed. The excavations, which began in 1748, uncovered the town exactly as it looked the moment people left it: loaves in the ovens, dishes on the tables, cart ruts in the roadway, election slogans painted on the facades.

There are over eleven thousand inscriptions on the walls that nobody meant to last and that lasted anyway - messages, insults, love notes, advertisements for gladiators and a great deal of filth. It is the largest surviving body of ordinary, non-literary Latin in existence, and historians of the language get more out of it than out of most books.

The famous body casts were the idea of the archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli in 1863. He noticed that the hardened ash contained hollows where bodies had decomposed. He poured plaster into the cavities, chipped the ash away - and had the exact shape of a person in the position they died in, folds of clothing and expression included. There are more than a hundred. Among them a dog on a chain that could not break free.

What is worth seeing

The town had perhaps eleven to twenty thousand inhabitants and everything a town should have: a forum, two theatres, an amphitheatre for twenty thousand people (the oldest surviving stone amphitheatre in the world), baths, bakeries, bars with a counter and sunken jars for hot food, a brothel with frescoes that are said, though never proved, to have served as a price list, and public lavatories.

In the Villa of the Mysteries outside the walls is a fresco cycle more than ten metres long showing an initiation rite into the cult of Dionysus. Nobody is sure what exactly is going on in it. The colour known as Pompeian red is so saturated that it is still used as the name of a shade - and recent research suggests some of it was originally yellow and was turned red by volcanic gases.

Herculaneum is smaller and less visited, but better in several respects: the mud sealed it so completely that wood, furniture, doors, rope and food survived. And a library of papyrus scrolls - carbonised cylinders that for two hundred years could not be unrolled because they crumbled. Since 2023 artificial intelligence has been reading them from X-ray scans without anyone touching them. The first words read after two thousand years were about food and music.

What follows from it

Vesuvius has erupted more than thirty times since the year 79, most recently in 1944, when it destroyed the village of San Sebastiano and burned eighty-eight bombers of the United States Army Air Forces standing on the airfield below it.

Today about three million people live in the immediate surroundings of the volcano. It is the most densely populated volcanic area on earth. In the so-called red zone, which would have to be cleared in an eruption, there are seven hundred thousand of them, and the evacuation plan assumes they will have to be moved in seventy-two hours.

Pompeii is at once the best preserved Roman town and the best preserved demonstration of what happens when people settle where the soil is richest - because it is richest for precisely the reason that will one day kill them.