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Pompeii: A City Rediscovered. (Five episodes) Video hosted on Youtube The Eruption
On the morning of 24 August, AD 79, the eruption of Vesuvius caught the local population completely by surprise. It is mainly thanks to the vivid eye-witness account of the younger Pliny (a Roman administrator and poet), that we know what happened. Through Plinys writing, the reactions of the people trapped in Pompeii are revealed.
Pliny's uncle, known as Pliny the Elder, was in command of the imperial naval base at Misenum, on the north-west extremity of the Bay of Naples. He was not only a senior military officer in the district, but also an expert on natural science. His 37-volume Natural History is the longest work on science in Latin that has survived from antiquity.
But at the time of the eruption, the elder Pliny was relaxing after a bath and lunch. Even the sighting of a column of smoke "like an umbrella pine" on the far side of the Bay made him curious rather than frightened. Pliny's reference to earth tremors which were not particularly alarming because they are frequent in Campania shows the Roman's scientific naivety between the link to seismic activity (earth tremors) and volcanic activity.
The huge scale of the eruption in AD 79 was in direct correlation to the long period of inactivity preceding it. The ominously silent volcano together with mounting seismic activity was a sure sign of imminent disaster.
The dormant volcano lulled ancient Romans into a false sense of security, though they were aware of the signs of burning at the peak of the mountain.
But they were not the first inhabitants to have been caught unawares. The most important earlier eruption, known as the 'Avellino pumice' happened in 1800 BC and archaeological evidence reveals the destruction of Bronze Age settlements.
Pompeii was buried with tons of pumice and volcanic ash which completely covered the town and its people. But the disaster was gradually forgotten over the centuries, until the exploration of the ancient site started in an area called 'Civita', in 1748. This was found to be a comparatively easy task, because the volcanic debris that had fallen was light and not compacted.
Many artefacts were removed and transported to the private collection of the Bourbon king Charles III who reigned from 1759-88. Today, they are displayed in the Museo Nazionale. Many artefacts and wall paintings were damaged and irreparably destroyed. Scholars such as Johann Winckelmann protested strongly and these practices were stopped, although the stripping of the wall paintings continued.
Today, thousands of tourists stroll through the streets, scarred with chariot grooves, and listen to guides regaling them with entertaining tales of what life was like over 2,000 years ago.
But listening to Pliny the Elders eyewitness account paints a very different picture from the modern holiday hotspot that Pompeii has become. "The thick black cloud advanced behind us like a flood. We could hear women shrieking, children crying and men shouting. Many people begged for the help of the gods, but even more imagined that there were no gods left and that the last eternal night had fallen on the world."
 Map Pompeii For more than 1500 years Pompeii lay undisturbed beneath heaps of ashes and cinders, and not until 1748 were excavations undertaken. The importance of the discoveries first came to the attention of the world through the work of the German classical archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann. New discoveries continued to be made throughout the 19th century and into the 20th. In 1912, in a street that connects the Strada dell' Abbondanza with the amphitheater, several houses were found, each with a balcony on the second floor that was 6 m (20 ft) long and 1.5 m (5 ft) deep. This section of the city is known to tourists as the Nuovi Scavi (New Excavations). Some of the ruins were badly damaged by air raids during World War II and had to be restored. Additional excavations are continuously made. More than one-fourth of the city remains to be excavated, and much of this area lies beneath piles of earth heaped up from earlier excavations.
Among the most significant aspects of the discoveries at Pompeii is the remarkable degree of preservation of the ancient objects. The showers of wet ashes and cinders that accompanied the eruption formed a hermetic seal about the town, preserving many public structures, temples, theaters, baths, shops, and private dwellings. In addition, remnants of some of the 2000 victims of the disaster were found in the ruins of Pompeii, including several gladiators who had been placed in chains to prevent them from escaping or committing suicide. Ashes, mixed with rain, had settled around the bodies in molds that remained after the bodies themselves had turned to dust. Liquid plaster was poured into some of these molds by the excavators, and the forms of the bodies have thereby been preserved; some of these figures are exhibited in the museum erected at Pompeii near the Porta Marina, one of the eight gates of the city.
Most of the inhabitants escaped the eruption, carrying with them their movable assets. After the eruption they tunneled into and around the houses and public buildings, and carried off almost everything of value, even to the extent of stripping marble slabs from the buildings. For this reason few objects of great value have been discovered at Pompeii. Most of the movable objects that were found, and some of the best-executed wall paintings and floor mosaics, have been removed to the National Museum in Naples. Taken together, the buildings and objects provide a remarkably realistic and complete picture of life in an Italian provincial city of the 1st century ad . The surviving edifices, representing a transition from the pure Greek style to the building methods of the Roman Empire, have been especially important for the study of Roman architecture.
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