Pompei, near Naples, Italy
Pompei · pom-PAY
A Roman town of eleven thousand people, buried in a day and a night in the year 79 under five metres of ash. The streets, the shops, the paint on the walls and the bread in the ovens were still there when the diggers reached them seventeen hundred years later.
Photo: Carsten Steger, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
You are walking uphill on a road of black stone blocks, worn into two grooves by wheels. The pavement on either side is as high as your knee. Ahead, the road passes through a gate and becomes a street, with doorways, shop counters and a fountain at the corner. There are no roofs. At the end of the street, filling the sky, is a mountain with a broken top.
The mountain is Vesuvius. It destroyed the town in the autumn of AD 79. In that same year, in the Eastern Han (AD 25–220) capital Luoyang, the emperor called his scholars to the White Tiger Hall to settle the meaning of the classics, and the general Ban Chao was holding the Silk Road oases for China.
One ticket covers the town inside the walls. The villas outside the north-west gate need the larger ticket.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| The town inside the walls | Pompeii Express, 20 euros |
| The amphitheatre | Included |
| The Garden of the Fugitives | Included |
| The House of the Faun and other houses | Included; some houses open by rota |
| The Villa of the Mysteries and Villa of Diomedes | Pompeii Plus, 25 euros |
| The Antiquarium (site museum) | Included |
| Boscoreale, Oplontis and Stabiae | Three-day ticket, 30 euros |
Pompeii was an ordinary place. It was a market town and river port on the Bay of Naples, living on wine, olive oil and fish sauce. It had a main square, two theatres, an arena, public baths, about thirty-five bakeries and a hundred and fifty bars.
Nobody knew the mountain was a volcano. It had been quiet for longer than anyone could remember, and vines grew to the top.
When it burst, most people ran, and most of those who ran early lived. About two thousand stayed, or went back, or could not leave. The ash that killed them also kept the town exactly as it was. Nothing else like it has come down from the ancient world.
"It was buried by lava." No lava reached the town. First small stones of pumice fell for eighteen hours and broke the roofs. Then waves of hot gas and ash came down the mountain faster than a horse can run.
"The bodies are turned to stone." The bodies decayed and left hollows in the hardened ash. Since 1863 the diggers have filled the hollows with plaster. What you see are casts, with the bones inside.
"It happened on 24 August." That date comes from copies of a letter. In 2018 a note in charcoal was found on a wall, dated in the middle of October. The fruit and the warm clothes found in the ash also point to autumn.
"Everything has been dug up." A third of the town is still under the fields, kept for later generations. New rooms are opened every year.
"The best things are here." The finest paintings, mosaics and silver were taken to the museum in Naples. What stands in the houses is often a copy.
The stops cross the town from west to east and then go out by the north-west gate.
The gate has two arches: a narrow one for people and a wide one for animals and carts. The slope is steep because the town stands on the end of an old lava flow, forty metres above the plain.
In AD 79 the sea came almost to the foot of this hill. The eruption pushed the coast two kilometres away.
The long open square was the centre of the town. No carts were allowed in: look for the upright stones that blocked the entrances. Round it stood the town hall, the law court, the cloth market, the food market, and at the north end the temple of Jupiter, with the mountain exactly behind it.
Much of it was a building site in AD 79. An earthquake had wrecked the town seventeen years before, and the builders had not finished.
The sheds along the west side were the grain market. They now hold shelves of wine jars, and some of the casts.
Leave the forum by the long straight street to the east. The big blocks standing in the roadway are stepping stones. The streets were also the drains, and ran with rain and dirty water; the stones let people cross with dry feet. They are set so that a cart's wheels pass between them.
At the crossings are stone troughs, each with a carved face that the water came out of. Most houses had no water of their own. Look at the rim of the trough beside the spout: it is worn into a dip by hands leaning there, one after another, for a hundred years.
The walls on this street are covered with red painted letters. They are election notices: "The fruit sellers ask you to vote for Holconius Priscus."
The L-shaped counters with round holes in the top are bars. Each hole is the mouth of a big clay jar set into the counter, which held dry food: beans, nuts, grain. Hot food and wine were served over the top. Most people in Pompeii had no kitchen and ate here.
A bakery is easy to find: look for mills of black lava shaped like hourglasses, as tall as a man, and a brick oven like a pizza oven behind them. Slaves or donkeys walked round the mills. In one oven the diggers found eighty-one loaves, round and scored into eight wedges, put in to bake on the last morning.
This is the largest house in the town, filling a whole block: 3,000 square metres, two halls, two gardens. It was two hundred years old when the town died. In the rain-water pool of the first hall a small bronze figure dances with his head thrown back.
On the floor between the two gardens is a picture made of a million and a half tiny stones. Alexander the Great, bareheaded, charges from the left. The king of Persia, in his chariot, turns to flee. It copies a Greek painting made soon after the battle, which is lost. The floor you see is a copy; the real one hangs on a wall in Naples.
At the far east end of the town is the oldest stone arena that survives anywhere, built about 70 BC, a century and a half before the Colosseum. It held twenty thousand, nearly twice the population. People came from the whole countryside.
In AD 59 a fight broke out in the stands between the locals and visitors from the next town. Many were killed. The Senate in Rome closed the arena for ten years. A painting of the riot was found on a house wall.
In October 1971 the English band Pink Floyd played here for four days to empty seats, for a film.
About one in the afternoon the top of the mountain blew off. A column of ash and stone rose thirty kilometres and spread out, a watcher across the bay wrote, like an umbrella pine. The sky went black. Pumice fell on the town at fifteen centimetres an hour.
Those who left in those hours, wading through it with pillows tied on their heads, mostly lived. By the next morning the column had collapsed. A wave of gas and ash, hotter than an oven, crossed the town in a few minutes and killed everyone still in it.
In a vineyard near the south wall thirteen people were found together: men, women and children, lying where they fell as they ran for the gate. Their casts are kept there, under glass.
Go out by the north-west gate and down the road of tombs. Ten minutes on is a large farmhouse with a wine press. In one room, life-size figures stand against a red wall on all four sides: a woman reading, a boy, a winged figure with a whip, a girl kneeling with her head in another's lap, a woman dancing naked with cymbals.
It was painted about 60 BC. It seems to show a young woman being received into the secret worship of the wine god. Since the worship was secret, nobody wrote down what it meant.
| Year | Here | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| about 600 BC | A town grows up on the lava spur | China's Spring and Autumn period; Confucius is born fifty years later |
| 80 BC | Rome plants a colony of old soldiers here | Western Han (206 BC–AD 9) China (202 BC–AD 8); the historian Sima Qian died a few years earlier |
| AD 62 | An earthquake wrecks the town | Eastern Han China (25–220); Nero rules in Rome |
| AD 79 | Vesuvius buries the town | The White Tiger Hall conference in Luoyang; the Colosseum opens in Rome the next year |
| 1748 | Digging begins | Qing China, the Qianlong reign; Montesquieu publishes The Spirit of the Laws |
| 1863 | The first plaster casts are made | The Tongzhi reign in China; the battle of Gettysburg in America |
| 1944 | Vesuvius erupts for the last time so far | The Second World War; Allied bombs had fallen on the ruins the year before |
| 2018 | A charcoal note moves the date to October | New digging begins in a part of the town untouched for a century |
Films from official channels, played from YouTube. Nothing is loaded until you press play.
These are stories people tell about this place. They are legends, not history, and each one says where it comes from.
A Roman sentry was found standing at his post by one of the gates, spear in hand. He had not been relieved, and he had not run.
Source: A tale of nineteenth-century guides, painted by Edward Poynter in 1865; the niche was a tomb and no soldier was found in it
Pompeii was destroyed for its wickedness, like the cities in the Bible. Someone who lived through the first hours scratched "Sodom and Gomorrah" on a wall.
Source: The words were found on a house wall in 1862; who wrote them, and when, is unknown
The priests of Isis were at dinner when the sky went dark. One stayed to save the temple treasure, and was found in the street with a sack of coins and the holy vessels beside him.
Source: Told from the finds of 1765–1766; the novel The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) made it famous
Later, people who live here will be able to add the stories they grew up with, and say which of these they have heard.
Last checked 2026-11-12. The archaeological park's own site (pompeiisites.org), tickets and timetables as shown in November 2026.
Checked 2026-11-12
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