Take a trip to Pompeii

Pompeii is notable for what happened here in 79 ADS, when Mount Vesuvius erupted and smothered the town in ash. The eruption seized and frozen Roman life in time, and when the site was excavated, it provided a picture of a bygone civilization. Pompeii was an ancient city in what is today the comune of Pompei, near Naples in Italy's Campania region. If you visit Pompeii today, you can anticipate an open-air museum with intact houses, baths, and old Roman forums, all packed with the artifacts of the people who lived there at the time of the eruption.

The unearthed city provided a rare picture of Roman society, frozen at the moment it was buried, while much of the specific evidence of its residents' ordinary lives was destroyed in the excavations. With a population of over 11,000 in AD 79, it was a prosperous town with numerous beautiful public structures and sumptuous private dwellings with expensive decorations, furniture, and pieces of art that were the major attractions for the early excavators. The ash included organic remnants, including wooden artifacts and human bodies.

Pompeii is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of Italy's most famous tourist destinations, with around 2.5 million tourists each year. Following a series of excavations before to 1960 that disclosed the majority of the city but left it in disrepair, additional big excavations were prohibited or restricted to certain, prioritized sections. This resulted in new discoveries in hitherto undiscovered sections of the city in 2018.

Location: Pompei, Metropolitan City of Naples