Pompeii · Italy · 40.750556, 14.489722 · PYR record in the living atlas
When Vesuvius buried Pompeii in AD 79, loaves of bread were still in the ovens. One carbonised loaf, stamped with its baker's mark, survived intact enough to read. That is the peculiar gift of this catastrophe: not temples and tombs, which every ancient culture leaves behind, but lunch, graffiti, election posters, price lists and door keys. Pompeii is the most complete snapshot of ordinary Roman life anywhere, preserved by the thing that ended it.
What the city was before the ash
Pompeii covers roughly 66 hectares inside its walls, of which about two-thirds has been excavated. The circuit walls are largely Samnite work in opus incertum, and the fabric behind them is a catalogue of Roman building practice: Sarno limestone and Nocera tufa in the older structures, opus reticulatum and brick-faced concrete in the later ones, and frescoes laid on multiple coats of lime plaster in Egyptian blue, cinnabar red and carbon black, which the volcanic burial preserved better than any gallery could have.
The city was old before it was Roman, and its early sequence is less tidy than the usual telling. Oscan, Samnite and Greek influences all shaped it, and the sixth- and fifth-century BC development of the street grid, including who laid out the first planned streets, is still argued over. Pompeii sided against Rome in the Social War and was taken by Sulla in 89 BC. The refoundation as a Roman colony came later, in 80 BC, under the name Colonia Cornelia Veneria Pompeianorum. Those two dates are routinely run together into one event. They are eleven years and two quite different things apart.
Then, seventeen years before the eruption, in AD 62, a severe earthquake struck the region and damaged the city badly. Much of Pompeii was still under repair when Vesuvius went. That matters for how the ruins read, and it complicates the frozen-city framing this article's own title uses: a good deal of what visitors walk through was a building site rather than a working town, with walls down, materials stacked and rooms out of use.
The town wrote on its own walls
Most ancient cities are known through what the elite chose to carve. Pompeii is known through what everybody scrawled. More than 2,600 electoral notices have been catalogued from its street frontages alone, painted advertisements in which bakers, fruit sellers, muleteers and neighbours put their names behind candidates for local office. Alongside them run thousands of scratched graffiti: prices, insults, love notes, arithmetic, lines of Virgil misquoted. The corpus is published as volume IV of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, and it is still being added to as new blocks come out of the ash. Nowhere else in the Roman world can you read what a town's tradesmen thought about an election.
The grand houses are the other half of that record, and short accounts of Pompeii rarely name them. The Alexander Mosaic came out of the floor of the House of the Faun. The Villa of the Mysteries, outside the walls, carries the Dionysiac fresco cycle.
Even the date is an honest argument
The traditional eruption date of 24 August comes from Pliny the Younger, whose letters survive only in medieval copies that do not agree with each other. The ninth-century Codex Laurentianus Mediceus gives the ninth day before the kalends of September, which is 24 August. Other manuscripts drop the month entirely, an edition printed in 1474 gives 1 November, and the bishop Carlo Maria Rosini later emended the text to 8 December. Meanwhile the excavators kept finding autumn. Pomegranates and walnuts in the larders, wine already sealed in fermentation jars, braziers in use, heavier clothing on the dead. In 2018 a team working in Regio V, under the Great Pompeii Project, the ten-year EU- and Italian-funded programme of excavation, conservation and drainage launched in 2012, found a charcoal graffito dated XVI K Nov, the sixteenth day before the kalends of November, which is 17 October. That is not decisive on its own, because the graffito carries no year and the question is whether it was written days before the eruption or a year earlier, and charcoal on an open wall is fragile. Against the autumn reading, analysis of garum residues points to summer fish. The Getty's summary of where the balance now sits is that autumn, and perhaps 24 October, is the most likely date. We flag it the way the evidence deserves: the old date is disputed, the autumn case is strong but not closed, and honest uncertainty beats false precision. You will see the October date given flatly as established. It is not, and the charcoal will not carry that weight.
The casts are not who the captions said
Digging began here in 1748 under the Bourbon king Charles VII of Naples, and it was closer to treasure-hunting than to archaeology, though Karl Weber and Francesco La Vega brought a rudimentary stratigraphic awareness to it late in the century. Giuseppe Fiorelli, who directed the site from 1863, changed both halves of the job. He divided the city into the numbered Regiones and Insulae still used in every excavation report since, which is where the Regio V and Regio IX in this article come from. And he realised that the cavities left in the hardened ash by bodies that had rotted away could be filled with plaster, turning a void back into a person.
The casts he and his successors made are the most reproduced images from any archaeological site, and each one arrived with a story attached: a mother shielding her child, two sisters clinging to each other. In 2024 a team publishing in Current Biology sampled bone fragments embedded in 14 casts and recovered usable genomes from five. The results took two of those stories apart. The adult from the House of the Golden Bracelet, wearing the bracelet and captioned as a mother for generations, was genetically male; so was the child; and none of the four people in that group were related to one another to the third degree. The pair from the House of the Cryptoporticus, shown for a century as two embracing women, included at least one man. The captions were nineteenth-century storytelling, not evidence. The general lesson is the one to carry away: proximity in death does not establish family, and the familial groupings long read off the position of bodies frequently do not survive genetic testing. The same study found all five individuals had ancestry drawn mainly from the eastern Mediterranean, with Anatolian, Levantine and Iranian farmer components, matching the pattern genetics has found in imperial Rome. Pompeii was a port town of a cosmopolitan empire, and it looked like one. Ancient DNA work is now routine in the archaeological park's own laboratory, so expect further revisions to the human story here rather than fewer.
How they died is still argued about
Reference works, including Britannica, still say most victims suffocated. Giuseppe Mastrolorenzo and colleagues published a different reading in PLOS ONE in 2010. Pompeii sits about 10 kilometres from the vent, at the outer edge of the pyroclastic surges, and the bone evidence from the victims, colour changes from natural to pale yellow with linear microcracking, indicates exposure in the range of 250 to 300 degrees Celsius. The surges passed in something between roughly 30 and 150 seconds, which they argue is far too short to asphyxiate anybody. They record 73 per cent of victims in life-like postures against 27 per cent in sleep-like ones, and widespread cadaveric spasm, the instant stiffening that only follows sudden violent death. Their conclusion is that heat killed people where they stood, indoors as well as out. The older asphyxiation account has not disappeared from the literature, and we are not going to pretend the question is settled. What is not in dispute is the scale. More than 1,000 bodies have been recovered from a town whose population is put at somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000, and the frequently quoted death toll of about 2,000 is an estimate rather than a count. Most of Pompeii got out.
It was not abandoned
The other half of that sentence is what happened next, and it has been badly underestimated. Stratigraphic work at the Insula Meridionalis, published by Gabriel Zuchtriegel and colleagues in 2025 in the park's own E-Journal of the Excavations of Pompeii, recovered ceramics, coins and fifth-century AD oil lamps: informal settlement on top of the buried city, continuing for centuries after 79. The reason this took so long to establish is not subtle. Earlier excavators habitually stripped those upper layers away without recording them, in a hurry to reach the Roman levels underneath. A city sealed in an afternoon is a better story than a ruin that people kept living in, and the better story is the one that got dug through.
The block they are digging now
Since 2023 the current campaign has been working Insula 10 of Regio IX, about 3,200 square metres, close to a whole city block, under the park's director Gabriel Zuchtriegel. What has come out of it is not art history. One bakery's milling room had no view out and small windows barred with iron; semicircular grooves were cut into the basalt paving around the millstones to stop draught animals slipping and to hold them on their circle. A donkey and an enslaved person worked each mill together, one driving and one managing grain and flour, exactly as Apuleius describes in the Metamorphoses a century later. Next door the diggers found a building site frozen mid-job: piles of lime, stacked tuff, tools left where they were put down, which is now letting researchers test how Romans mixed quicklime hot and how quickly a wall could be raised. Two frescoed rooms turned up with Poseidon and Amymone and with Apollo and Daphne, and three victims, two adults thought to be women and a child of three or four. In January 2025 the same campaign published what is thought to be the largest private bath complex yet found in a Pompeian house, and in February 2026 newly uncovered frescoes were reported from a suburb outside the walls.
Roughly a third of the walled city is still buried, and it is staying buried on purpose. Excavated Pompeii is expensive to keep standing, and the unexcavated third is the part reserved for methods nobody has invented yet. That is the settled policy, but the pace is not settled at all. Geophysical survey shows substantial structures under the untouched areas, and there is a real disagreement in the field about how much could be dug now without irrevocable loss of context, and how fast. Anyone presenting the reserve as a closed question is skipping the argument.
Nothing to align
This atlas exists to test alignments, so the honest report on Pompeii is a negative one, and it is worth stating positively rather than leaving as a silence. Pompeii's street grid and public buildings are not oriented to any astronomical event that has been measured and published. The layout follows the shape of the lava plateau the town sits on, the positions of the gates, and two or three centuries of incremental growth. Individual temples do follow ordinary Roman augural practice, with the cella facing roughly east so that a priest at the altar faced the sunrise, and that is a religious convention rather than an act of observation. No published archaeoastronomical study claims precision alignments here. If you are told the grid encodes a solstice, ask for the bearing and the survey. There is no measurement behind the claim, and we will not repeat it.
What our engines found
We ran the same test here as everywhere else, with the settings fixed in advance and identical at every one of the fifty sites we cover: a 200 km search radius, at least 12 km between sampled sites, 15 sites, a 2 per cent tolerance, and 2,000 Monte Carlo runs against a null model resampled from real catalogued sites in the same region. The settings are frozen because the answer moves if you tune them, and tuning them after seeing the answer is exactly the trick we object to elsewhere. Pompeii returned 53 golden-ratio pairs where chance predicts 49, giving p = 0.2404 (run on 1 October 2026).
That is a little more than chance would predict, and it is not significant. The control points the same way: the control ratio pi/2 scored 1.15 times its expected count against phi's 1.08, so nothing here singles out the golden ratio.
The collinear test is the one that does return something: 16 three-site alignments against 11.3 expected, p = 0.0425. Before anyone builds on that, the honest caveat is terrain. Sites string out along river valleys, coastlines and narrow necks of buildable land, and geography produces straight lines without anyone planning them. It is a number worth investigating, not a conclusion.
We publish the misses because a tool that only reports its hits is not measuring anything. Every figure above is reproducible from the same coordinates, the same settings and the same seed. When the catalogue grows, the figures can move, so we rerun these tests and update this section rather than leave an old number standing.
One limit worth stating plainly, because it is the one most often glossed over. This test compares positions between monuments. It says nothing about any building's own proportions, its height, base, slope or perimeter. That is a separate question, and at several sites a genuinely open one.
Explore it yourself
See Pompeii's dense street grid in the living atlas, place it among its catalogued neighbours around the bay and run the alignment and ley line engines on the real coordinates. The Pompeii Site-Emblem T-Shirt carries the forum colonnade, Vesuvius, the site geometry and the exact coordinates.
Sources worth reading
Pilli et al., "Ancient DNA challenges prevailing interpretations of the Pompeii plaster casts", Current Biology (2024). Zuchtriegel et al. (2025) on post-eruption reoccupation at the Insula Meridionalis, E-Journal of the Excavations of Pompeii. Mastrolorenzo et al., PLOS ONE (2010), on heat as the cause of death. Wallace-Hadrill, Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum (Princeton University Press, 1994). Dobbins and Foss (eds.), The World of Pompeii (2007). Berry, The Complete Pompeii (2007). Hanson, "Scaling in Pompeii", Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory (2024). Volume IV of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum for the graffiti themselves.