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There are places in the world where history feels distant. You look at a ruin, read a date, admire a column and try to imagine the people who once lived there. And then there is Pompeii. At Pompeii, history does not feel distant. It feels uncomfortably close.
You can walk along its streets and see the houses where people lived, the shops where they worked, the bakeries where bread was made, the places where food and wine were sold, the fountains where water was collected and the walls where ordinary people wrote messages, jokes, political slogans and fragments of their lives.
You can almost imagine someone opening a door. Someone going to work. Someone buying bread. Someone arguing with a neighbour. Someone falling in love. Someone worrying about money. Someone feeding an animal. Someone planning what they would do the following morning. Except there was no following morning.
In AD 79, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius brought an abrupt end to the lives of many of the inhabitants of Pompeii. Ash, pumice and volcanic material buried the city, preserving an extraordinary amount of evidence of everyday life. The result is one of archaeology's most extraordinary paradoxes: a city survived because its inhabitants did not.
That is what makes Pompeii so difficult for me. It is beautiful. It is fascinating. It is extraordinarily important. But it is also deeply sad.
It is tempting to think of Pompeii as an enormous archaeological museum without a roof. But it wasn't a museum. It was a city. People lived there. They worked there. They cooked, traded, worshipped, complained, celebrated and raised families there. And archaeology allows us to reconstruct some of those lives from surprisingly ordinary things. A cooking pot. A lamp. A wine amphora. A piece of furniture. A shop counter. A child's object. A painted wall. A bakery. A laundry. A stable. A garden. Even a basket whose shape was preserved in the volcanic material.
The Archaeological Park's collections contain tens of thousands of objects from Pompeii and its surroundings, documenting religion, politics, commerce, craftsmanship and, above all, the small details of daily life. And perhaps that is what makes the city so extraordinary. The grand buildings tell us about power. The ordinary objects tell us about people.
Pompeii was not inhabited exclusively by wealthy Romans living in magnificent houses. There were rich people, certainly. Some houses were enormous and lavishly decorated. The largest domus could cover thousands of square metres, with atriums, gardens, dining rooms and servants' quarters. But alongside those houses existed another Pompeii. The Pompeii of bakers. Shopkeepers. Craftspeople. Farmers. Launderers. Merchants. Cooks. Slaves. Freed people. Children. Women. Labourers. People whose names have disappeared but whose work has not.
One of the most evocative places is the thermopolium, essentially an ancient establishment selling hot food and drinks. Pompeii had dozens of them. Their counters contained large vessels built into the masonry where food and beverages were stored. Imagine walking into one of those places almost two thousand years ago. You were not visiting an archaeological site. You were simply hungry. You bought something to eat. You drank something. You paid. You left.
And now, nearly twenty centuries later, archaeologists are reconstructing that tiny moment of your life. That is Pompeii.
Sometimes we talk about Pompeii as though only humans lived there. They didn't. Animals were part of the city's economy and daily life too. Horses, donkeys and other working animals were used for transport and labour. Dogs lived alongside humans. Animals were kept in stables and were part of agricultural and commercial activities.
Recent archaeological work continues to reveal their stories. At Civita Giuliana, just outside the main city, archaeologists discovered a stable containing equine remains, including a horse whose shape could be reconstructed through the plaster-cast technique. The animal had been found beside a wooden trough whose form was also preserved.
And in 2026, new excavations in the bakery of the Insula of the Chaste Lovers revealed the remains of two more large herbivores. These discoveries matter because they remind us that Pompeii was not simply a human settlement. It was an ecosystem. A place where people, animals, plants, food, work and commerce were interconnected.
One of the things I love most about Pompeii is that its inhabitants left their voices behind. Not only the voices of emperors, politicians or wealthy citizens. Ordinary voices. People wrote on walls. Some inscriptions were political. Some were advertisements. Some were declarations of affection. Some were jokes. Some were insults. Some were simply people making sure that somebody knew they had been there. In a strange way, those graffiti make Pompeii feel more modern than many other ancient cities. Because suddenly the people who lived there stop being "the Romans". They become individuals. People with opinions. People with friends. People with enemies. People with a sense of humour. People who wanted to be heard.
I first arrived in Napoli in 1994 as an Erasmus student. It was a very different Erasmus from the one students know today. My university residence was paid for, meals at the university mensa were covered and I had a university transport pass. That gave me the possibility of doing something I really wanted: discovering Campania beyond the classroom.
During the academic year I studied. During the summer, I stayed in Napoli and tried to make myself useful. I volunteered with the Italian Red Cross, helping with social work at a time when the wars in the Balkans were bringing many displaced people to Napoli. And I also offered my help at Pompeii.
Whenever I accompanied visitors, I used to tell them something else. Pompeii is extraordinary. But please, if you have the opportunity, go to Herculaneum. And go to Paestum. Both are extraordinary archaeological treasures, and both can easily disappear beneath Pompeii's enormous shadow. Pompeii is so famous that it sometimes makes everything around it look smaller. It isn't.
Campania is an enormous archaeological puzzle, and Pompeii is only one of its most spectacular pieces. And the puzzle is still being assembled. Excavations continue. New rooms appear. New objects are studied. Old interpretations are questioned. New technologies allow researchers to reconstruct things that seemed lost forever. The Archaeological Park itself describes current research as an ongoing process: Pompeii is still being excavated, documented and interpreted. We are not finished with Pompeii. Not even close.
There is something I feel every time I return to Pompeii. It is difficult to explain. Walking through those streets, I don't only think about archaeology. I think about death. Not in a sensationalistic way. Not because of the plaster casts. Not because of the volcano. I think about the people. The people who went to bed. The people who were working. The people who were looking after their children. The people who were eating. The people who were frightened. The people who perhaps thought they would survive. And the people who didn't.
It reminds me of other places where history has left behind an uncomfortable silence. Flanders. Normandy. Places where thousands upon thousands of human lives disappeared into wars that we now reduce to dates, battles and arrows on maps. Or places much closer to home. The Fossar de les Moreres. The Born. The Camp de la Bota. The Terres de l'Ebre. Places where human beings died and where memory becomes an act of respect. Because ruins are never just stones. A battlefield is never just a landscape. An archaeological site is never just an excavation. Behind every fragment there was somebody who once had a life. Somebody who had a name. Somebody who was loved. Somebody who expected to see another morning.
That is why I don't like the idea of Pompeii simply as a "city frozen in time". It is more complicated than that. Pompeii is a city interrupted. A city whose people were suddenly removed from the future they were expecting to have. And perhaps our responsibility, nearly two thousand years later, is not simply to admire what survived. It is to remember those who did not. To study them. To understand them. To give them back, as far as archaeology allows, their ordinary lives. Their work. Their families. Their fears. Their humour. Their animals. Their food. Their homes. Their voices. Their dignity.
Because the greatest treasure Pompeii has given us is not a fresco, a villa or a perfectly preserved street. It is the possibility of knowing that these people existed. And as long as we remember them, they are not completely lost. Pompeii is not only about the end of a city. It is about the persistence of human memory. And perhaps that is why, after all these years, I still find it impossible to walk through Pompeii without feeling my heart stop for a moment.
The volcano stopped their lives, but it did not stop their stories.
More information: History Extra
Tenebrae rursus, cinis rursus, multus et gravis.
Elsewhere it was day; there, night
-blacker and denser than any night.
Darkness again. Ash again. Much and heavy.
Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus
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