The thing about Pompeii is that it shouldn’t exist anymore. Not like this anyway.
In 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius decided to have what volcanologists politely call a “Plinian eruption”—named after Pliny the Younger, who watched from across the Bay of Naples and wrote about it with the kind of detached fascination you’d expect from someone far enough away to survive. The volcano hurled 1.5 million tons of molten rock and ash per second into the atmosphere. Per second. That’s roughly the weight of the Empire State Building being launched skyward every few heartbeats. The resulting column reached 21 miles high, punching through the troposphere like it wasn’t even there.
Turns out, being buried isn’t always the worst thing that can happen to a city.
When Volcanic Ash Becomes the World’s Most Morbid Time Capsule
Here’s where it gets genuinely strange. The pyroclastic surge that killed everyone in Pompeii—a ground-hugging avalanche of superheated gas and rock fragments traveling at 180 miles per hour—reached temperatures around 570 degrees Fahrenheit. Hot enough to kill instantly. Not hot enough to completely incinerate bodies. So what you got was something far more unsettling: people flash-frozen in their final moments, then gradually decomposed inside hardening volcanic ash, leaving perfect negative space molds of their last seconds alive.
Giuseppe Fiorelli figured out in 1863 that you could pour plaster into these voids. The result? A man crouched with his hands over his face. A dog twisting on its chain. A pregnant woman on her side. Not statues—three-dimensional photographs rendered in plaster and pumice, capturing expressions that shouldn’t have survived two milenia.
Walk through the site today and you’ll see them behind glass: the Pompeians who didn’t make it. roughly 1,150 bodies have been found so far out of an estimated population of 11,000. Which means either most people escaped, or we haven’t found them yet. Both possibilities are equally unnerving.
The Graffiti That Accidentally Became Archaeological Gold
But wait—maybe the dead aren’t the most revealing thing about Pompeii.
The walls tell better stories anyway. Ancient Romans loved graffiti the way modern humans love Twitter: compulsively, crudely, and with absolutely no filter. Over 11,000 inscriptions have been cataloged. Political slogans (“Vote for Lucius Popidius Sabinus, he provides good bread”). Bathroom humor that would make a middle schooler blush. A heartbreaking note from April 19, 79 AD—just months before the eruption—that simply reads “I don’t want to sell my husband.”
The mundane stuff hits harder than any marble statue ever could. Pompeii preserved a loaf of bread, carbonized but still showing the baker’s stamp. An entire thermopolium—ancient fast-food joint—with its serving counter still intact, menu prices visible on the wall (you could get a sausage for one as, roughly the cost of a loaf of bread). There’s even a fresco of what appears to be an early pizza, though Italian food historians will fight you on whether it counts.
Why Pompeii’s Preservation Was Basically a Cosmic Accident
The improbable part is that Pompeii survived being discovered in 1599. Early excavations were basically treasure hunts with shovels; artifacts got yanked out with no documentation, buildings were plundered, frescoes were hacked off walls. King Charles III of Spain started more systematic digs in 1748, but “systematic” is generous—they literally used gunpowder to blast through inconvenient walls.
Modern archaeology didn’t really arrive until the 20th century, by which point huge chunks of the city had already been destroyed by the very people trying to uncover it. The irony is spectacular: Pompeii survived a volcano only to nearly get demolished by enthusiastic antiquarians.
Today about two-thirds of the city has been excavated, covering roughly 163 acres. The Italian government pours about 105 million euros annually into preservation, because volcanic ash might have saved Pompeii from time, but it didnt save it from rain, tourism, and entropy. Frescoes fade. Mosaics crumble. In 2010, the Gladiators’ House collapsed. In 2014, a wall in the House of the Moralist came down. Ancient cities are shockingly fragile when you dig them up and expose them to weather.
The archaeological superintendency now uses drones, 3D scanning, and laser mapping to document everything before more of it falls apart. Which feels both incredibly modern and darkly funny—using cutting-edge technology to preserve a place that only exists because it got flash-frozen by a mountain’s temper tantrum.
So you visit Pompeii and you walk streets that haven’t seen regular foot traffic in 2,000 years. You peer into bedrooms and bakeries and brothels. You see the ruts worn into stone roads by wooden cart wheels, still visible after all this time.
And you think: this could happen again tomorrow. Vesuvius is still active, and three million people now live in its shadow. The volcano’s last eruption was in 1944—practically yesterday in geological terms. Experts estimate another major eruption is “overdue.”
History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme. Sometimes in pyroclastic flows.
