How the other half lived in Pompeii ... 2,000 years ago

Professor of classics Michael Scott takes a closer look at what a new unearthing tells us about how the Romans really lived

You might think a site that has been excavated since the 18th century has little left to surprise us with. But Pompeii is the gift that just keeps on giving. Partly because – despite how long we have been working on it – there is still so much to uncover: one-third of the ancient city is still yet to be cleared of the thick ash layer that was laid over it by Vesuvius in 79CE.

We are in the middle of extraordinary new discoveries from Pompeii because of the big effort that has been put in over the last few years to excavate different parts of this un-investigated area.

As a result, we have seen a spectrum of amazing finds being unearthed that speak to the wide variety of lifestyles, work, wealth and fashions that criss-crossed the Roman town, which was famous in antiquity as a summer bolthole by the sea for wealthy Romans.

From industrial-sized bread ovens, to serpent shrine frescoes and the enigmatic decorative image of what many initially thought was a pizza (spoiler: it wasn’t!); to the physical skeletal remains of women and children hiding under their staircase from the eruption, as well as a man who seems to have survived the initial volcanic blast but then got pinned down beneath a falling piece of masonry; to the endless graffiti (one charcoal inscription shifted our understanding of when the eruption took place), we are getting, more than ever before, a sense of Pompeii as a living city – warts and all.

I have visited, studied and filmed at Pompeii many times. It is a bewitching place where you can all too easily forget you are in an ancient city destroyed by a volcanic eruption, as you walk down paved streets with buildings towering above you.