Pompeii’s origins reach back to the 8th century BCE, when Oscan settlers occupied a volcanic plateau above the river Sarno, near the Bay of Naples. The Samnites took the site around 424 BCE; in 89 BCE the city fell to Sulla during the Social War and became a Roman colony shortly after, formally named Colonia Cornelia Veneria Pompeianorum. By the first century CE it was a prosperous commercial town of an estimated 11,000 to 20,000 inhabitants, with a forum, three public baths, an amphitheatre, two theatres, brothels, bakeries, and extensive private houses. On a single day in the autumn of 79 CE Mount Vesuvius erupted in a Plinian column that buried Pompeii under several metres of lapilli and ash. The traditional date of 24 August, transmitted through manuscripts of Pliny the Younger, has been questioned since a charcoal inscription discovered in 2018 carried the date of 17 October.

“Its general appearance can best be expressed as being like a pine-tree, for it rose to a great height on a sort of trunk and then split off into branches.”

Pliny the Younger, Epistulae VI.16, to Tacitus

Excavations began in 1748 under King Charles III of Bourbon, prompted by the discovery of Herculaneum a decade earlier. The Spanish military engineer Rocque Joaquín de Alcubierre led the first campaigns at a site then known only as Civita. On 20 August 1763 an inscription mentioning the Rei publicae Pompeianorum confirmed the identity of the buried city. A century later, in 1863, the archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli devised the technique that would define Pompeii in the public imagination: by pouring liquid plaster into the cavities left in the hardened ash by decomposed bodies, he obtained casts of the victims at the moment of death — a method still used today with transparent resins. The same era opened the Villa of the Mysteries, the House of the Faun, the Lupanar, and the great public buildings around the Forum to scholarly study.

In 1997 UNESCO inscribed Pompeii on the World Heritage List together with Herculaneum and the villas of Torre Annunziata (ancient Oplontis), recognising the three sites as the most complete surviving picture of a Roman urban and suburban landscape. The Parco Archeologico di Pompei, established as an autonomous institute in 2016, manages the site today. The Grande Progetto Pompei, a restoration and consolidation programme co-funded by the European Union, was launched in 2012 to stabilise structures damaged by decades of weather and uneven conservation. Excavation continues: the Regio V campaigns in the Insula dei Casti Amanti have produced new frescoes, inscriptions, and stratigraphic evidence that keep redrawing what is known of daily life in a Roman city interrupted in mid-sentence.