The Rediscovery of Pompeii
The Eruption and the Burial
On the morning of 24 August 79 AD — or possibly 24 October, given a recent reinterpretation of a charcoal inscription found during excavations — Vesuvius erupted with a violence that transformed the landscape of Campania and preserved two Roman towns in conditions unmatched anywhere in the ancient world. Pompeii, a prosperous commercial city of roughly 11,000 people at the foot of the volcano, was buried under several metres of volcanic debris. Herculaneum, a smaller and wealthier resort town to the west, was overwhelmed by pyroclastic surges of superheated gas and ash that carbonised organic material — including papyrus scrolls, wooden furniture, and human bodies — in the fraction of a second.
Pliny the Younger, stationed at Misenum on the Bay of Naples with his uncle, the natural historian Pliny the Elder, watched the eruption and later wrote two letters describing it to the historian Tacitus. His account remains one of antiquity's most vivid eyewitness documents: the column of erupted material 'like a pine tree', the darkness at midday, the ash falling on the ships, the death of his uncle during a rescue attempt on the shore at Stabiae. It is one of the few cases where an ancient text can be read alongside the physical evidence it describes.
Burial and Forgetting
Both cities were partially looted in the immediate aftermath of the eruption — tunnels cut by survivors or later salvagers are visible in some Pompeian buildings — but they were quickly buried too deeply for systematic recovery and were, within a few generations, effectively forgotten. The Roman road system and the agricultural landscape above them continued to function. The name 'Civitas' survived in the local topography, preserved in a field name, though its ancient significance was not understood.
Medieval sources occasionally mention sulphurous activity in the area, and some Renaissance writers speculated about buried structures in the region. The architect Domenico Fontana, constructing an aqueduct channel in the 1590s, cut through part of Pompeii and exposed walls with inscriptions — but apparently drew no conclusion about what he had found. The systematic excavation that would eventually expose the city to the world did not begin for another century and a half.
The Bourbon Excavations
The first deliberate excavation of Herculaneum began in 1709, when an Austrian prince, Emmanuel Maurice, Duke of Elbeuf, sank shafts into the site to recover antiquities for his villa at Portici. Workers struck the stage of the ancient theatre, and the duke removed several fine marble statues. Systematic royal excavation under the Bourbon kings of Naples began at Herculaneum in 1738 and at Pompeii in 1748 — the latter site's name was recovered from inscriptions found during these first digs, confirming for the first time that the buried city was the ancient Pompeii.
The early excavations were conducted essentially as treasure hunts. Tunnels were driven through the volcanic deposits seeking spectacular objects; less impressive material was discarded or reburied; architectural context was rarely recorded. The finest objects went to the royal museum at Portici, the nucleus of what is now the National Archaeological Museum of Naples — one of the most important collections of Roman art in the world. Public access to the site was tightly controlled and visitors required royal permission.
Fiorelli and Modern Method
The transformation of Pompeii from an extraction site into a systematic archaeological project began under Giuseppe Fiorelli, who was appointed director of excavations in 1860 and served until 1875. Fiorelli introduced practices that were revolutionary for their time: he divided the city into nine regions (regiones), each subdivided into insulae (city blocks) and individual doorways, creating a reference system still used today. He trained a professional workforce rather than using casual labourers. He insisted that excavation proceed horizontally across the city rather than by driving tunnels to specific points, preserving the spatial relationships between buildings and finds.
Fiorelli's most famous innovation was the casting technique. He observed that the volcanic debris contained voids where organic material — including human bodies, wooden furniture, and food — had decomposed over the centuries, leaving cavities in the hardened ash that precisely preserved the shape of what had once been there. By pouring liquid plaster into these cavities through small openings, he could create casts that revealed, in three dimensions, the final moments of Pompeii's inhabitants. The resulting figures — curled in their death agonies, covering their faces with their cloaks, or lying simply where they fell — became among the most powerful and disturbing archaeological objects ever produced.
A Snapshot of Roman Urban Life
Pompeii's importance to Roman archaeology lies not in its exceptional quality — it was a middling Italian city, not a capital — but in the completeness of its preservation. Because the site was sealed at a single moment in time, it offers access to aspects of Roman everyday life that are otherwise invisible: the colours of wall paintings, the contents of storerooms, the menus chalked on thermopolium counters, the graffiti scratched on walls recording election endorsements, lovers' declarations, insults, and literary quotations. More than 11,000 graffiti have been catalogued at Pompeii, constituting one of the largest bodies of everyday Latin writing to survive from antiquity.
The urban fabric itself is instructive. Pompeii has a Forum, temples, an amphitheatre built around 70 BC (among the earliest permanent stone amphitheatres in the Roman world), two theatres, bathhouses, a palaestra, and blocks of residential and commercial architecture that show the mixing of domestic and commercial life characteristic of Roman urbanism. The same building might have a fine atrium with mythological paintings and a ground-floor shop opening directly onto the street. Wealthy houses incorporated elaborate garden peristyles, fountain systems, and dining rooms decorated with painted programmes of considerable sophistication.
The Ongoing Excavation
Pompeii is unique among major archaeological sites in being a living excavation — new discoveries continue to emerge. The Grande Progetto Pompeii, launched around 2012 with significant European Union funding, has combined conservation of existing structures with new excavation in the Regio V area. Excavations since 2018 have produced remarkable finds: a thermopolium with organic food remains still identifiable after two millennia, an intact fresco of a lararium (household shrine) painting, a ceremonial chariot of exceptional preservation, and the skeletal remains of a master and slave caught fleeing together in a suburban villa at the moment of the eruption.
Each new season adds detail to the portrait of a city whose life was interrupted rather than gradually abandoned — a place where the bread was left in the oven and the wine stood in its amphora and the children's toys lay on the floor when Vesuvius ended the afternoon of 24 August 79. Open the map to locate Pompeii within the wider Bay of Naples landscape and find the constellation of sites — Herculaneum, Stabiae, Oplontis — preserved alongside it.