The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found

The same as "Pompeii. The life of a Roman town", different title. If I knew I wouldn't buy it. Otherwise the book is an excellent tour in an ancient Roman town of Pompeii with descriptions of everyday life of the Pompeianas.

I echo a prior reviewer who stated that the pictures and diagrams are at odd places in the book where you have to flip back and forth between the writing and the picture/diagram referenced. However, that is my only complaint. The book is very well written and gives a good understanding of what happened when the Vesuvius erupted and what a modern visitor is looking at when visiting Pompeii (reconstruction). I recommend this book to anyone interested in the period and/or archaeology.

While reading Joseph Jay Deiss's excellent book "Herculaneum" I also discovered this book. I just, almost, resisted the temptation to say, "Dug up this book." Sorry, but that's the mood I'm in today.For anyone who has visited either/or both the buried ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii, they are quite different even though they are only a few miles apart and both were originally buried by the same eruption of nearby Mount Vesuvius. While I enjoyed and reviewed both volumes, this one answers more of the questions I had from my actual tourist's visits to both historical locations.The author of this book points out that few things about the history of Pompeii are known for certain. Even such basic information as when was Pompeii first settled? When the volcano buried it in 79 CE (AD) it was a Roman City, but it had only been under Roman control for a couple of hundred years and archeological evidence points to the site being occupied as early as 900 years prior to that eruption. We do not even know the names of all the cultures that occupied what we call Pompeii. And many of the names the guidebooks use were not the original names or addresses in Pompeii at the time of the eruption. Most of those names are modern-day nametags. Only rarely has the name of the actual owner of a particular structure been identified by surviving, intact inscriptions on the property. We know from delivery instructions on supplies that landmarks were used to find particular addresses. Such descriptions would read something to the effect "deliver to the two-story tavern on the green and ask for Marcus."The name of the most popular and remembered exhibit at Pompeii, the Brothel with it's erotic and/or pornographic wall paintings depicting the various services available therein, is detailed and leaves the reader very doubtful about whether the landlords name is even remotely correct. The route used in determining the name is just too circumstantial and twisted.The author points out that Pompeii was much larger than Herculaneum, but unlike that buried neighbor, after the eruption stopped, residents and looters returned to Pompeii to see what they could salvage. Herculaneum didn't suffer that fate at the time because it was encased in a form of solid lava. There is evidence that the looters managed to uncover parts of Pompeii rather soon after the disaster. The most direct evidence "is found in two words scratched by the main door of one grand house, which was found to be almost empty when uncovered by nineteenth-century excavators. It reads: `House tunneled', words hardly likely to have been written by an owner, so presumably a message from one looter to the rest of his grand, to them that this one had been `done'. "The message, though written in Latin, was in Greek characters." Other signs point to the possibility of much of Pompeii being still in ruins from a major earthquake that occurred twenty years before the city was buried. Even the actual date of the eruption is in question and except for some letters prepared as reports some years later, there is much disagreement about the exact date of the final catastrophe. There are also many signs that when the mountain first started to show signs of a pending eruption that most of the population took flight and in many cases may have taken cartloads of their possessions as well? In Herculaneum the wall of hot pyroclastic flow appears to have caught those residences by surprise because half finished meals were left on the tables, valuables were sitting out in the open on top of furniture, and the city was not in a state disrepair from the same large earthquake two decades before. That fact may also be attributable to the inability of residents or looters to return to the buried city to plunder it. Other cities were simply built on top of the rock hard site, but their foundations didn't go nearly deep enough to reach Herculaneum. This book is full of fascinating details about Pompeii. One obvious example is that much of it has been reconstructed. It shows pictures of some of the excavated buildings as they really appeared when uncovered and also show similar pictures of damage caused to the ruined city by Allied Bombings in World War II. Pompeii has been a tourist's city for centuries and it became a major tourist site once the railroad reached it in 1839. It was not unusual for "discoveries" such as skeletons to conveniently be unearthed while visiting royalty or other VIP's happened to be there observing the dig. It was in the interest of Italy to give their important visitors something to talk about once they returned home. Naturally, so large a site is still being pilfered. Only now the thieves don't dig in the middle of the night, they sneak in and steal the exhibits on display. The book shows a number of images of now missing fresco's and art treasurers. One of my favorite bits of trivia was that the rich in Pompeii dined at home and the poor always ate at the cafes, bars, and taverns because they didn't have cooking facilities in their small quarters or they actually lived outdoors because they were homeless. I liked the sections about how children, or it could have been bored workman, stuck coins against the wet plaster near ground level before it dried. The impressions those coins left in the walls helped date the ruins. Workman still do that today. I witnessed some US coins being slipped into the corner stone concrete pouring of one major Boston building project. Even over a period of thousands of years, Boys (both children and adults) will still be boys. This is a fascinating book that every visitor to Pompeii or Herculaneum should attempt to read before traveling there. It will make what they see much more meaningful.It's nice to know the meaning of what the eye beholds. And no, I'm not going to mention anything more about the circuitous method used to try and identify the owner of the brothel. And don't forget to visit it. There is a slight additional fee for visiting it. My, my things never change. Sex still sells. One of my teenage son's comments after leaving the exhibit was something I'll always treasure. "You know Dad, if I'd been alive in this era I would have been a great painter."

great book

Excellent tour of Pompei by Mary Beard. I used it on a recent visit to the ruins and found it very helpful. i would it to anybody with is interested in thr history of Rome.