🇮🇹 Italy · Southern Italy (Campania)
Few places in the world make an impression like Pompeii. It is not just any ruin: it is an entire Roman city, with its streets, its houses, its shops, its baths and its temples, frozen at the instant of its destruction. In AD 79, the eruption of Vesuvius buried Pompeii under metres of ash and pumice, killing its inhabitants but preserving the city like nowhere else. Walking its cobbled streets today, going into a house with intact frescoes or seeing the ruts left by cartwheels in the stone is a time-travel experience with no equal.
Pompeii is enormous and exhausting, and you have to come prepared: you walk for hours in the sun, on uneven stones and with little shade. But the reward is unique. Here are the great Forum with Vesuvius behind it, the luxurious houses of the patricians such as the House of the Faun, the Lupanar with its frescoes, the oldest surviving amphitheatre and, outside the walls, the Villa of the Mysteries with its famous red frescoes. And above all there are the plaster casts of the victims: harrowing figures that keep the posture of their final moment and that should be looked at with respect, not as a macabre curiosity.
This guide helps you plan the visit sensibly: which ticket to buy and why it is worth booking, how much walking there really is, how to get there from Naples or Sorrento while dealing with the uncomfortable Circumvesuviana, and why it is worth combining Pompeii with Herculaneum, Vesuvius and the Archaeological Museum in Naples. Pompeii is not just stones: it is Roman life from two thousand years ago, cut short and brought back into the light. The full story of the city and the eruption is on our history page.
Pompeii was not born Roman. It was founded around the 7th-6th centuries BC by the Oscans, an Italic people, at a crossroads beside the river Sarno, and passed through Greek and Etruscan influence before falling under Samnite rule. In 89 BC, after the Social War, it was taken by the Roman general Lucius Cornelius Sulla and turned into a Roman colony, the Colonia Cornelia Veneria Pompeianorum. It prospered as a thriving trading town in rich Campania, with some 10,000 to 15,000 inhabitants, until in AD 62 (or 63) a strong earthquake badly damaged it. It was still being rebuilt when, in AD 79, Vesuvius erupted catastrophically and buried it under metres of ash and pumice. The traditional date is 24 August, according to Pliny the Younger's letter, but recent finds suggest it may have been in October. The city lay forgotten for centuries until its rediscovery in 1748, under King Charles of Bourbon. In the 19th century, the archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli devised the plaster cast technique that gave the victims back their faces. Excavations continue today. It is all on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The south of Magna Graecia and Vesuvius: Naples, capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies; Pompeii, buried by the volcano; Amalfi, a maritime republic; Capri and a legendary coast, in the region marked by the southern question.
Read the history of Southern Italy (Campania) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before it became the Roman city we know, Pompeii was a modest Italic town built in a strategic spot: a plateau of volcanic rock beside the mouth of the river Sarno, on fertile Campanian land, close to the sea and to trade routes. The first permanent settlements go back to the 7th-6th centuries BC and are attributed to the Oscans, an ancient Italic people who spoke their own language, Oscan, whose inscriptions turn up all over the site and can still be read on some walls and signs.
That small Pompeii did not live in isolation. In those centuries the Bay of Naples was a ferment of cultures: the Greeks had founded prosperous colonies such as Cumae and Neapolis, and the Etruscans exerted their influence from the north. Pompeii felt the impact of both worlds: it adopted Greek features in its town planning and religion — the Temple of Apollo and the Doric temple of the so-called Triangular Forum bear witness to that Hellenic contact — and it fell within the orbit of the disputes between Greeks and Etruscans over control of the Tyrrhenian.
Around the 5th century BC, a warrior people from the mountains, the Samnites, came down onto the plains of Campania and seized the region, Pompeii included. Under Samnite rule the city grew, was walled and took on much of its layout. For generations the Samnites were Rome's great rivals in central and southern Italy, and fought long, bloody wars with it. That Samnite past left a deep mark on Pompeii, visible in its walls, in the Oscan language of its inscriptions and in many of its oldest houses.
Pompeii's definitive integration into the Roman world came by force. During the Social War (91-88 BC), in which the Italic peoples rebelled to demand Roman citizenship, Pompeii sided with the rebels. In 89 BC the Roman general Lucius Cornelius Sulla besieged and took the city — the marks of his projectiles can still be seen on some walls — and shortly afterwards turned it into a Roman colony, settling veterans of his legions there. The city was officially renamed Colonia Cornelia Veneria Pompeianorum, in honour of Sulla and of the goddess Venus, who became its protector.
As a Roman colony, Pompeii lived its most splendid period. It was completely Latinised, filled with public and private buildings in Roman taste — the monumental Forum, the baths, the theatres, the amphitheatre — and prospered thanks to its farming, its wine, its oil, the production of garum (the famous fish sauce) and its busy trade through the nearby port. On the eve of its destruction it had between 10,000 and 15,000 inhabitants and was a lively, bustling city, with its elites, its merchants, its craftsmen and its slaves.
The Pompeii we visit today is essentially that 1st-century Roman city: its cobbled streets with raised crossings, its taverns and bakeries, its luxurious domus with atria and gardens, its frescoes and mosaics, its election graffiti and its inscriptions. Nothing, though, had prepared it for what was coming from the mountain that dominated its horizon.
In AD 62 — some sources put it in 63 — a violent earthquake shook the Bay of Naples region and hit Pompeii and neighbouring Herculaneum hard. The quake badly damaged public and private buildings: temples collapsed, houses cracked and the city's running water network was affected. The philosopher Seneca left an account of that disaster in his writings, describing the panic and the destruction.
What the Pompeians could not know is that the earthquake was in fact a warning from the volcano. Today volcanologists read that AD 62 quake — and the tremors that followed in later years — as part of the activity preceding the great eruption, signs of magma moving beneath Vesuvius. But at the time nobody associated the mountain, covered in vineyards and woods, with a dangerous volcano: it had not erupted for centuries and many did not even consider it active.
So Pompeii did what any city does after a disaster: it rebuilt. In the seventeen years between the earthquake and the eruption, the city was almost permanently under construction, repairing temples, putting up new houses and redecorating interiors. That rebuilding explains why many buildings were half finished or newly restored when the end came, and it gives archaeologists a fascinating snapshot of a city in full transformation.
In AD 79, Vesuvius woke with catastrophic violence and buried Pompeii within hours. The traditional date is 24 August, handed down by Pliny the Younger's letter; however, recent archaeological finds — among them a charcoal inscription discovered in 2018 with an October date, along with remains of autumn fruit, lit braziers and warm clothing — have led many specialists to think the eruption actually happened in October of 79. The debate is still open, but the evidence for an autumn date is increasingly solid.
We have an exceptional account of the disaster: that of the writer Pliny the Younger, who watched it from a distance, from Misenum, and years later described it in two letters to the historian Tacitus. He told how an enormous column of smoke and ash rose over the mountain "in the shape of an umbrella pine", spreading out at the top. His uncle, Pliny the Elder, the famous naturalist and commander of the Roman fleet, sailed towards it to help people and observe the phenomenon at close range, and died on the shore, suffocated by the gases. In his honour, violent eruptions of this kind are today called 'Plinian'.
The eruption unfolded in phases. First, hours of falling pumice and ash that covered Pompeii and collapsed roofs under the weight; many inhabitants fled during that time, but others took shelter in their houses. Then came the worst: the pyroclastic surges, avalanches of burning gas and volcanic material at hundreds of degrees that raced down the slopes and killed instantly those who remained. Pompeii disappeared under several metres of ash and pumice; Herculaneum was sealed by flows of mud and pyroclastic material. Thousands of people are estimated to have died. The city was wiped off the map, and in time even its exact location was forgotten.
For almost seventeen centuries, Pompeii slept underground, forgotten. The area came to be called 'la Civita' and nobody remembered exactly what lay beneath. The rediscovery came in the 18th century, in the middle of Europe's fever for Antiquity. Herculaneum was stumbled upon first (1738) and then, in 1748, excavations began at Pompeii, driven by King Charles of Bourbon, monarch of Naples. At first they were little more than a hunt for treasure and statues to decorate the royal palaces, with no method and no care; but the discovery of an entire Roman city, with its frescoes, its everyday objects and its streets, caused a sensation across Europe and influenced neoclassical art and taste.
The great scientific leap came in the 19th century with the archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli, who directed the excavations from 1863 and introduced a rigorous, systematic method. To him we owe one of the most moving techniques in archaeology: the plaster casts. Fiorelli realised that the bodies of the victims, decomposing under the hardened ash, had left cavities in their exact shape. By filling those voids with liquid plaster and then removing the ash layer, he recovered three-dimensional figures of people and animals at the very instant of death.
Those casts — hunched bodies, people covering their faces, families together, a dog twisted in agony — are the human face of the tragedy and what most affects visitors. They deserve to be looked at with respect: they are not a macabre attraction but the remains of real people who died in a catastrophe. Thanks to them, and to the extraordinary preservation of the site, Pompeii became a unique window onto life — and death — in the Roman world.
Pompeii is not a closed or finished site: it is still alive and still producing surprises. Around a third of the ancient city is yet to be excavated, and the archaeological campaigns of recent decades — especially those of the ambitious Grande Progetto Pompei, aimed at halting decay and studying the site with modern technology — have brought spectacular finds to light: new houses with dazzling frescoes, a thermopolium (tavern) with its painted counter and remains of food, inscriptions, skeletons and everyday objects that renew what we know about the city. It was precisely in these recent excavations that the inscription reopening the debate about the eruption date turned up.
Preserving Pompeii is at once its greatest treasure and its greatest challenge. Exposure to sun, rain, mass tourism and the passing of time constantly threaten the structures and the frescoes; some collapses in recent years set off alarms and led to stronger maintenance and restoration plans. Looking after Pompeii is a permanent and costly task, a difficult balance between opening it to the public and protecting it for future generations.
Today Pompeii is a Unesco World Heritage Site (since 1997, together with Herculaneum and Torre Annunziata) and one of the most visited archaeological sites on the planet, with millions of tourists a year. Its value is incalculable: no other ancient city is preserved so completely or tells in such detail what everyday life was like for ordinary people in the Roman Empire. Walking its streets, with Vesuvius always there in the background, means looking into a frozen instant of history and remembering, with respect, those who lived and died there almost two thousand years ago.