Parco Archeologico di Pompei (Scavi archeologici di Pompei)

No ancient site concentrates Roman daily life like Pompeii. Across roughly forty-four excavated hectares, streets, houses, baths and temples preserve the urban fabric buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 beneath ash and pumice.

Why it matters

When Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, ash and pumice sealed the Roman town of Pompeii so completely that bread left in ovens, painted election notices and the last movements of residents were preserved together. Roughly 44 hectares of that buried city have been laid open by digging that started in the mid-18th century; recognition followed in 1997, when the Archaeological Areas of Pompei, Herculaneum and Torre Annunziata entered the UNESCO World Heritage List — inscribed under criteria (iii), (iv) and (v) as exceptional testimony to a vanished civilisation and its urban way of life, and guarded by a 98-hectare property with a wide buffer zone.

The archaeological park is administered by Italy's Ministry of Culture. Its wider archaeological landscape includes suburban villas and neighbouring sites around the bay, among them Boscoreale, Oplontis and Stabiae.

What to notice

Walk the pavements rather than the plan. Stepping stones cross the streets, cart ruts run between them, and fountains, water towers and shop fronts line routes that were repaved across generations. The Forum anchors civic life at one end of town; the large amphitheatre at the other gave its name to the Piazza Anfiteatro entrance.

Look for the casts. Where voids left by buried bodies were filled with plaster, the forms of the eruption's victims survive as figures arrested mid-flight — the most sobering objects on the site, presented today with more interpretive care than in the past.

The Antiquarium gathers finds from the excavations. Outside the walls, the Villa of the Mysteries keeps its great continuous frieze, in which Dionysus appears with Ariadne, fauns and maenads around a rite scholars still debate: a villa of the 2nd century BC given its final shape between 80 and 70 BC, excavated in 1909–1910 and again in 1929–1930.

Context and history

Digging began in the mid-18th century and has continued, with interruptions, ever since, moving from tunnelling for portable treasure to the open-air method that cut whole insulae free of the ash above them. The technique most associated with Pompeii — casting the voids left by the dead in the hardened volcanic material — produced the figures visitors still pause over today.

The park's geographical and administrative scope widened in the twenty-first century to include the city excavations, suburban villas and neighbouring sites at Boscoreale, Oplontis and Stabiae. Conservation, research and temporary-display programmes continue across this archaeological landscape.