Pompeii (Campania)
Somewhere under 4 to 6 metres of volcanic ash and pumice, an entire Roman city kept its shape for nearly seventeen centuries. When you walk into Pompeii today, you are walking on streets that still carry the grooves of cart wheels, past bakeries with stone mills still in place, past walls where election slogans were painted and never washed off.
This is not a ruin in the usual sense. It is a city interrupted — one that was already rebuilding from a serious earthquake in 62 AD when Vesuvius erupted on August 24th, 79 AD and stopped everything mid-sentence. The scale of what survived, and what it tells you about ordinary Roman life, is unlike anything else in Europe.
How Pompeii (Campania) came to be
Pompeii's origins go back to the Osci people, who settled the site around the 7th or 6th century BC. The Samnites took control by the 5th century BC, and the city passed into Roman hands after the Social War — Roman general Lucius Cornelius Sulla besieged it in 89 BC, and by 80 BC it had become the Roman colony of Colonia Cornelia Veneria Pompei.
The eruption of 79 AD buried it, and it stayed buried until systematic excavations began in 1748. The archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli, who took over as director in 1860, introduced the plaster-casting technique that turned voids left by decomposed bodies into three-dimensional figures — a method still in use today.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Spring (April–May) and autumn (September–October) offer mild temperatures and are the most comfortable seasons for covering the site on foot. Summer is genuinely punishing — the ruins offer almost no shade, and midday in July or August is not the time to be here without a hat and significant water. Winter is quiet and cool, with shorter opening hours from November through March.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.