The city of Pompeii, was located about five miles from Mount Vesuvius, sometime at the beginning of 1st Century AD. Mount Vesuvius, was a volcano near the Bay of Naples in Italy, has erupted more than 50 times. Greek settlers made the town part of the Hellenistic sphere, thus Pompeii fell under the influence of Rome in the 2nd century B.C. and eventually the Bay of Naples became an attraction for wealthy vacationers from Rome who relished the Campania coastline.
Pompeii was a flourishing resort for Rome’s most distinguished citizens. Elegant houses and elaborate villas lined the paved streets. Tourists, townspeople and slaves bustled in and out of small factories and artisans’ shops, taverns and cafes, and brothels and bathhouses. People gathered in the 20,000-seat arena and lounged in the open-air squares and marketplaces.
In the year August 79 A.D. Mount Vesuvius erupted again. The blast sent a plume of ashes, pumice and other rocks, and scorching-hot volcanic gases so high into the sky that people could see it for hundreds of miles around, the volcano buried the ancient Roman city of Pompeii under a thick carpet of volcanic ash. The Volcanic dust poured across the land like a flood, and enveloped the city in total darkness. By the time the Vesuvius eruption come to an end the next day, Pompeii was buried under millions of tons of volcanic ash. About 2,000 Pompeiians were dead, but the eruption killed as many as 16,000 people overall. Some people drifted back to town in search of lost relatives or belongings, but there was not much left to find. Pompeii, along with the neighboring town of Herculaneum and a number of villas in the area, was abandoned for centuries. Pompeii remained mostly untouched until 1748, when a group of explorers looking for ancient artifacts arrived in Campania and began to dig. They found that the ashes had acted as a marvelous preservative: Underneath all that dust, Pompeii was almost exactly as it had been almost 2,000 years before. Its buildings were intact. Skeletons were frozen right where they’d fallen. Everyday objects and household goods littered the streets. Later archaeologists even uncovered jars of preserved fruit and loaves of bread.
