What it was
Pompeii was a Roman provincial town on the southern shore of the Bay of Naples, about 14 miles southeast of modern Naples and approximately five miles south of Mount Vesuvius. Its origins go back to the eighth or seventh century BC as a settlement of the Oscan-speaking Italic peoples of the region. It became a Roman colony in 80 BC after the Social War, when the Roman general Sulla settled a population of his veterans there. By 79 AD it was a fully Roman provincial town with a population of approximately 11,000 to 12,000.
The town’s economy was based on wine, olive oil, fish processing (the local production of garum, a fermented fish sauce that was a staple of Roman cuisine, was substantial), and textile manufacturing. Pompeii had a regional reputation as a moderately prosperous provincial trading town, comparable to dozens of similar towns elsewhere in the Roman Mediterranean. It was not Rome and it was not Alexandria; it was a respectable middle-rank Roman town with a forum, two theatres, two amphitheatres (one of them the oldest stone amphitheatre in the Roman world, built around 70 BC), public baths, brothels, several large temples, and substantial private housing.
How it was destroyed
Mount Vesuvius erupted on approximately 24 October 79 AD. (The traditional date of 24 August, derived from a corrupt manuscript reading of Pliny the Younger’s letters, has been revised by modern archaeology; an October date is now consensus.) The eruption produced two distinct phases. The first phase, lasting from approximately 1 PM on the first day until midnight, was a vertical Plinian column that dropped approximately five feet of pumice on Pompeii in twelve hours. Many roofs collapsed under the load through the evening; most of the population evacuated successfully during this phase.
The second phase began after midnight. The eruption column became unstable and collapsed periodically, producing pyroclastic density currents — superheated gas-and-ash clouds moving at approximately 100 miles per hour. The largest of these currents reached Pompeii at approximately 7 AM on the second day at ground temperatures of approximately 250–300°C. Everyone remaining in the city was killed within seconds by heat shock. The current then deposited several additional feet of ash on top of the existing pumice layer. The town was buried to a depth of approximately 20 feet by the end of the second day.
The full eyewitness narrative of the eruption survives in two letters by Pliny the Younger, who watched the event from the naval base at Misenum on the far side of the bay. His uncle, Pliny the Elder, was killed at Stabiae during a naval rescue attempt.
How it was preserved
The depth and rapidity of the burial preserved Pompeii in extraordinary detail. The pumice and ash layer sealed the town from oxygen, decomposition, and most subsequent disturbance for approximately 16 centuries. When systematic excavation began in 1748, the recovered material included:
- Approximately 2,000 victim bodies, of which Giuseppe Fiorelli’s 1860s plaster-injection technique recovered the precise final postures (the “body casts”).
- Wall paintings in three of the four Pompeian artistic styles, including the major dining-room friezes of the Villa of the Mysteries.
- Inscriptions: approximately 1,500 inscribed texts in stone, plus thousands of graffiti (informally scratched wall texts), constituting the largest single body of vernacular Latin writing from the ancient world.
- Carbonized wooden doors, shutters, beams, furniture, and food (preserved bread, eggs, walnuts, dates, and other organic material).
- The complete urban plan of a Roman provincial town with all its public buildings, private houses, shops, brothels, baths, and roadways.
The rediscovery
The buried town was largely forgotten between the 6th century AD and 1748. Local agricultural use of the volcanic soil over the buried site preserved it without further damage. A Spanish military engineer, Rocque Joaquín de Alcubierre, began systematic excavation in 1748 on the orders of the Bourbon kings of Naples, primarily in search of statues and art for the royal collection.
The 18th-century excavations were tunnel-and-extract operations with substantial collateral damage to wall paintings. The modern excavation methodology dates from the appointment of Giuseppe Fiorelli as director in 1863. Fiorelli introduced systematic stratigraphic excavation, in-situ conservation, careful numbering and recording, and the plaster-injection technique that recovered the famous body-cast postures.
Excavations have continued continuously since 1863. Approximately two-thirds of the ancient city has now been excavated. The remaining third is preserved as a reserve for future archaeology with improved techniques. New work in the western and northern excavation zones from approximately 2018 onward has produced almost continuous discoveries, including the dated charcoal inscription that allowed the eruption date to be revised from August to October.
Why it matters
Pompeii is the most thoroughly preserved example of normal Roman urban life. Most Roman cities surviving above ground (Rome itself, Ostia, Aquileia) have been continuously occupied and rebuilt for the past two thousand years; their Roman layer is fragmented and partial. Pompeii’s Roman layer is intact. The town as it existed on the afternoon of 24 October 79 AD — with its shops still open, its loaves still in the ovens, its election graffiti still on the walls, its surveys and accounts still on tablets — is the closest modern access to the actual life of the ancient Mediterranean.
The site sits within a wider archaeological zone that includes the better-preserved (and more difficult to excavate) town of Herculaneum on the western flank of Vesuvius, the villas of Stabiae and Oplontis, and the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, the only substantially preserved classical library. Together these sites constitute the largest preserved archaeological record of Roman daily life from any period.
Vesuvius itself has remained active. The most recent eruption was in March 1944. The modern population at potential risk of a recurrence — the Neapolitan urban area — exceeds 3 million people.