Pompeii

The first stable settlement dates to the 8th century BC, when the Oscans founded five villages that merged by the early 6th century BC into one walled town at a crossroads of routes to Cumae, Nola and Stabiae. Greek and then Etruscan settlers controlled, rather than conquered, the town in turn, before the Samnites – from what is now Abruzzo and Molise – likely took the area around 424 BC; under Samnite rule Pompeii stayed loyal to Rome during the Third Samnite War and the war against Pyrrhus.

Pompeii joined the Social War revolt against Rome, and in 89 BC was besieged by Sulla, whose artillery targeted the Porta Ercolano – ballista-shot impact craters are still visible in the walls. The city surrendered after nearby Nola fell despite defenders under Lucius Cluentius, becoming the Roman colony of Colonia Cornelia Veneria Pompeianorum. Sulla's veterans were granted land there and Rome's opponents dispossessed; the Pompeians received citizenship, and Latin replaced Oscan as the main language.

From about 30 BC Pompeii gained new public buildings under Augustus, including the Eumachia Building and the Macellum, and around 20 BC was fed by a spur of the Serino Aqueduct built by Agrippa. An AD 59 riot in the amphitheatre between Pompeians and Nucerians left dead on both sides; the Senate sent in the Praetorian Guard and banned events there for ten years. A severe earthquake on 5 February 62, estimated at magnitude 5 to 6, badly damaged the city, and rebuilding was still under way years later; around 64 Nero and Poppaea visited and gave gifts to the temple of Venus, the city's patron goddess.

Vesuvius erupted in AD 79 over two days. Its first phase, around eighteen hours of falling pumice, let most residents escape; only about 1,150 bodies have been found on site, many carrying valuables their owners had tried to save. Pyroclastic flows of scorching ash then swept the city, killing those who remained and burying it under up to 6 metres of ash and pumice. A 2010 study found heat, not suffocation, killed most victims: flows still above 250°C at 10 kilometres were fatal instantly, even indoors; 2023 archaeology showed some buildings also collapsed in quakes during the eruption, killing occupants.

Pliny the Younger watched from across the bay at Misenum and described the eruption in a letter written some 27–28 years later; his uncle Pliny the Elder, commander of the Imperial fleet there, died attempting to rescue people by sea. Long dated to August, the eruption is now placed in autumn: a charcoal inscription dated 17 October, found in 2018, and a 2022 study dating it to 24–25 October, point away from a summer date.

The buried city was first struck in 1592, when architect Domenico Fontana, digging an aqueduct, cut through ancient walls covered in paintings and inscriptions – and kept the find quiet. Giuseppe Macrini excavated further walls in 1693 and identified them as Pompeii. After the spectacular finds at nearby Herculaneum from 1738, engineer Roque Joaquín de Alcubierre began digging at the Pompeii site in 1748, though the city was not yet identified; an inscription found on 20 August 1763 confirmed it. Karl Weber directed the first scientific excavations, and up to 700 workers dug under the French occupation, 1799–1815. Giuseppe Fiorelli, who took charge in 1863, devised the technique of pouring plaster into voids left by decomposed bodies to recreate the dead's final postures, and introduced the numbered regions and blocks still used to catalogue the site.

Allied bombing badly damaged or destroyed many buildings in the Second World War, and an earthquake in 1980 caused more destruction. Large-scale excavation, last attempted at this scale by Amedeo Maiuri in the 1920s–1950s, has since given way to conservation; a moratorium on new digging, imposed in 1999, was lifted in 2017. Since 2018 work in unexplored Regio V has found two men killed by a second blast after surviving the eruption's first phase, an inn with food still in its jars, and a ceremonial carriage at a villa outside the walls.

Pompeii became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997; in 2013 UNESCO warned it could be listed as endangered without progress on conservation, and a five-year, EU-funded 'Grande Progetto Pompei' begun in 2012 stabilised the highest-risk buildings. The site remains among Italy's most visited, with about 2.5 million visitors a year; in 2024 its management capped daily tickets at 20,000, with timed entry in peak summer.