Ruins of Pompeii

The ruins of Pompeii lie near Naples in Italy's Campania region, preserving an ancient Roman city that was buried under four to six meters of volcanic ash and pumice when Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, an eruption that unfolded over roughly two days and killed most of its victims through the extreme heat of pyroclastic flows rather than by suffocation. The site went largely unrecognized for centuries after its burial; an architect stumbled on ancient walls there in 1592 while working on an aqueduct, but the city was not formally identified as Pompeii until 1763, with systematic excavation beginning in 1748 and accelerating considerably during the French occupation of Naples between 1799 and 1815. Archaeologists and historians regard Pompeii as the only archaeological site in the world offering a complete picture of an ancient Roman city, since its sudden burial froze streets, homes, businesses and public buildings from across the social spectrum in a single moment rather than leaving them to centuries of later rebuilding. Organic material trapped in the hardened ash, including the bodies of victims, decayed away over time and left cavities that excavators later filled with plaster to recover their exact final forms, while the city's extensive surviving graffiti has become an important source for understanding everyday, colloquial Latin. The ruins today comprise hundreds of excavated structures spanning the full range of Roman urban architecture, from grand houses to modest shops.