Pompeii

Few names in travel carry the weight of Pompeii. When Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, it sealed a thriving Roman town under metres of ash and pumice, preserving streets, houses and snack bars with an intimacy no ruin elsewhere can match. Above the excavations, the modern town grew around one of Italy’s great Marian shrines.

Why visit

Pompeii is not a monument but a city, some sixty-odd hectares of which about two-thirds have been uncovered, and walking its grid of stone streets is the closest thing to stepping into the first century. Bread ovens, painted dining rooms, vote-scarred walls, fountains still standing at kerbside: the texture of ordinary Roman life survives in a way that makes history physical. The plaster casts of the eruption’s victims, made from voids left in the hardened ash since the pioneering work of Giuseppe Fiorelli, remain among the most sobering objects in Europe. Excavation has never really stopped — new houses, a ceremonial chariot and frescoed rooms have entered the story within recent years — so even repeat visitors find the site changed. The town’s pontifical sanctuary, meanwhile, draws millions of pilgrims a year and gives Pompei its second, very different identity.

Character and history

Founded by Oscan speakers and later shaped by Greek, Etruscan and Samnite hands, Pompeii became a prosperous Roman municipality on the Sarno plain, its wealth built on wine, trade and the fertile volcanic soil. The eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 buried the city under four to six metres of ash; a long pumice fall let many escape before the pyroclastic flows arrived, but more than a thousand victims have been found, and research now places the catastrophe in the autumn rather than the summer. After its rediscovery, systematic digging began in 1748 under the Bourbon kings of Naples, and the city’s identity was fixed by an inscription in 1763. From that point Pompeii became essential to how Europe understood the ancient world, its houses and objects fuelling neoclassicism and, eventually, the modern discipline of archaeology. The site and its sister excavations were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1997. The modern comune, born in the nineteenth century around the shrine founded by the lawyer Bartolo Longo, has known the shadow of its buried neighbour ever since.

What to see

The Pompeii Archaeological Park (Pompeii excavations) is the destination proper. Enter at Porta Marina, Piazza Esedra or Piazza Anfiteatro and work outward: the Forum with its temple and law courts at the city’s heart; the amphitheatre of 70 BC at the far end; the Villa of the Mysteries just outside the walls, its crimson banquet frescoes among the great paintings of antiquity. Don’t miss the thermopolia — the Roman takeaways, nearly a hundred of them — or the Garden of the Fugitives, where casts of victims lie where they fell. The Antiquarium displays artefacts from the site, and newer openings such as the House of the Chaste Lovers show working bakeries and, remarkably, the skeleton of a mule in its stall. Entry now uses timed, name-registered tickets with a daily cap, so book ahead on the official site.

In the upper town, the Pontifical Shrine of the Blessed Virgin of the Holy Rosary of Pompei faces Piazza Bartolo Longo. Built around the faded painting of the Virgin that Longo installed in the valley in 1875, it grew into a vast basilica complex, raised to papal rank, whose image of Our Lady of the Rosary remains the focus of an international devotion — and of the whispered prayer known everywhere as the Supplica.

How to experience

Give the ruins a full day rather than an hour; a guided tour orientates you, but independent wandering rewards the patient. Pick two or three areas each morning and afternoon, rest in the shade of the pines, and finish with the casts and the Antiquarium. Return the next morning if you can — the ticket arrangements and site literature explain the options. Then change registers entirely: attend or at least witness the sanctuary, light a candle, and see the town as pilgrims do. Readers of literature may bring Pliny the Younger, whose letters to Tacitus give the eruption its eyewitness voice.

Practical planning

Pompei is served by two lines: the Circumvesuviana from Naples and Sorrento stops at Pompei Scavi, a short walk from the Porta Marina entrance, while the state railway stops closer to the amphitheatre side. Driving brings highway exits and paid parking but little advantage. Summer heat is severe on exposed stone — carry water, a hat and real shoes, and note that large bags are barred inside. Check pompeiisites.org before travelling for hours, timed-entry rules and which houses are currently open, and the sanctuary’s site (santuario.it) for service times. Combine the visit with a second archaeological site for a contrasting register — Herculaneum’s smaller, better-preserved town or the seaside villas of Oplontis / Torre Annunziata.

Nearby places

Herculaneum preserves a more compact but far better-preserved Vesuvian town; Oplontis / Torre Annunziata adds sumptuous seaside villas a few stops away by train; Stabiae / Castellammare di Stabia keeps the villa quarter where Pliny the Elder died; and the Sorrento Peninsula begins just beyond the ridge for travellers turning from ruins to coastline.