The History of Pompeii, from Oscan Town to Open Excavation

Pompeii was seven hundred years old when Vesuvius buried it, and it has been coming back out of the ground for nearly three hundred more. Both halves of that matter, because most of what you walk past on a guided tour was shaped by the second half as much as the first. Guides who work on the site run the Pompeii Italy guided tours listed here.

Before Rome: Oscans, Greeks and Samnites

The city stands on a lava plateau about thirty metres above sea level, looking down the valley of the river Sarno to a busy port at its mouth. Its origins are genuinely uncertain. The oldest evidence runs from the late seventh into the first half of the sixth century BC, when the first walls — built of a soft tuff the archaeologists call pappamonte — enclosed 63.5 hectares. That is very nearly the area the walls still enclose today, which means the city's footprint was fixed before almost anything you can see in it was built.

A mixed population of Etruscans, Greeks and local people developed the place, and in the fifth century BC a proper fortification in Sarno limestone went up on the Greek system. Towards the end of that century the Samnites came down from the mountains of Irpinia and Sannio into the Campanian plain and took the towns around Vesuvius. Pompeii was heavily urbanised under them, and a fourth-century BC limestone circuit followed roughly the line of the older one.

Sulla's siege and the colony of 80 BC

Rome's campaigns between 343 and 290 BC brought Campania into its orbit, and Pompeii joined the Roman republic as an ally. In 90–89 BC it rebelled with the other Italic peoples, demanding the same social and political standing as Rome. The city was besieged by the troops of Lucius Cornelius Sulla, surrendered, and in 80 BC was refounded as a Roman colony under the name Cornelia Veneria Pompeianorum.

You can see the date in the fabric. The barrel vault of the Marina Gate, the most impressive of the city's seven gates, belongs to the Sullan colony. So does much of what followed: the colony enriched Pompeii with public and private building, and the work continued under Augustus and Tiberius. The Amphitheatre is older still, put up in 70 BC by the magistrates Caius Quinctius Valgus and Marcus Porcius, and it is the oldest amphitheatre known anywhere in the Roman world.

The earthquake of 62, and a city still in scaffolding

In AD 62 a violent earthquake shook the whole Vesuvian area. Rebuilding began at once and was still unfinished seventeen years later, held up by the scale of the damage and by the swarm of aftershocks that followed. This is the single most useful thing to know before a first visit: the Pompeii you walk through was a building site. Half-repaired walls, stacked materials and rooms out of use are not decay — they are the state the city was in on the day.

The eruption: 24 August, or 17 October?

The traditional date is 24 August AD 79, from the letters of Pliny the Younger, and the park's own visitor guide gives it. In October 2018 the park announced something that complicates it: a charcoal inscription found in Regio V, dated to the sixteenth day before the Calends of November — 17 October. Charcoal is fragile and unlikely to have survived long on a wall, which argues that the writing was recent when the ash fell.

The park treats the question as open rather than settled, and has published new readings of the epigraph, including one from Giulia Ammannati of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. An autumn date also fits the braziers, the heavier clothing on some of the casts and the autumn fruit found in the storerooms. Almost every page you will read gives one date and stops; the honest answer is that the year is certain and the day is not.

Rediscovery, and the first digging of 1748

The city was found again at the end of the sixteenth century, during work on a water channel, and then largely left alone. Excavation proper began in 1748 under Charles III of Bourbon, King of Naples, ten years after Herculaneum, and it continued through the nineteenth century. Early digging was closer to treasure hunting than archaeology: the Forum had already been stripped of its decoration in antiquity, and the campaign that opened it in 1813 was begun at the request of Maria Carolina Bonaparte.

The names on the houses come from that period. Where the owner was unknown, the excavators named the building for whatever they found in it — a bronze faun, a mosaic of actors, a painting of Menander. That is why Pompeii's addresses read like a catalogue of discoveries rather than a street directory.

Giuseppe Fiorelli, the casts, and the addressing of a city

In 1858 Giuseppe Fiorelli divided Pompeii into regiones and insulae — districts and blocks — and that grid is still how every building on the site is referenced. There are nine regiones. If a guide says “Regio V”, they mean the district in the north-east where the newest work is going on.

Fiorelli is also the man behind the casts. Bodies buried in ash decayed and left voids; he had liquid plaster poured into them, and what came out preserved the shape of a person at the moment the surge reached them, skeletal remains still inside. The casts are the image most visitors arrive with, and knowing that they are plaster rather than petrified bodies makes them more remarkable rather than less.

What is being dug now

Roughly 49 of the site's 66 hectares have been excavated. The rest is left buried on purpose: exposing a building starts a conservation obligation that never ends, and the current priority is stabilising what is already open rather than opening more. The Antiquarium, the museum beside the Porta Marina entrance, reopened to the public in January 2021 and is where finds are displayed on site.

Active work continues in Regio V and Regio IX, and several tours here reach the current excavation fronts. Reviewers on the private three-hour tour mention seeing them, which is the sort of thing a guide knows about and a map does not.

A Pompeii timeline

Sources

The city’s history, the excavation record and the dates above are from A Guide to the Pompeii Excavations, published by the archaeological authority for Pompeii, and from the park’s own 2018 announcement of the Regio V inscription. Prices and hours change — check before you travel.