If you want to know what really happened in the last days of the petrified city, Beard's meticulous reconstruction will fill you in, scraping away many of your preconceptions as it goes, while her evocative writing will transport you back. Discover your next non-fiction read and brilliant book gifts in the Profile newsletter, and find books to help you live well with Souvenir Press.

In this case, you will walk straight out of the train station until you reach the cathedral square (you can't miss the imposing spire). In this award-winning history, Mary Beard guides us through the daily life of Pompeii, an existence that is far more complex than we might have realised. Vicky Alvear Shecter has used a lot of information to create the Roman world, but it has been given to the reader painlessly and creates a vivid picture of life in Pompeii, warts and all. But even as Rome's richest citizens relax in their villas around Pompeii and Herculaneum, there are ominous warnings that something is going wrong.

While many scholars build careers through increasingly elaborate reconstructions of the ancient world, Beard consistently stresses the limits of our knowledge, the precariousness of our constructs and the ambiguity or contradiction inherent in many of our sources.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.Though the Romans have long departed Pompeii, the swirl of humanity keeps going in Pompeii and beyond. Generation, regeneration, again, again, as in a ritual, with blood-stained vestments and nail-torn hands, children of Merlin, chasing a gleam. But it is possible to find lines of the most famous poets of the Roman world scratched into the walls of Pompeii, and Milnor provides a systematic overview of how and why this literary re-production occurred, what it indicates about literacy and learning, and how differently the ancients viewed writing in public spaces. That realization led me back to Pompeii and then Rome, but also to tracking down the archaeology of Roman roads. Two that feature women's names scratched on walls (graffiti) and drawings of women etched in or painted on Pompeian walls (by Erika Zimmermann Damer and Margaret L.

What Lazar does is open your eyes to just how much information there is to be found from the casts and skeletons, and the potential to learn so much more about people and life in the first century. Marcus Attilius Primus arrives in the Bay of Naples from Rome to take charge as aquarius ( hydraulic engineer) of the Aqua Augusta, the aqueduct that supplies water to the towns in the region encompassing the Bay of Naples and Mount Vesuvius. Many of Pompeii’s inhabitants were buried and the city has been largely preserved, thanks to a lack of air and moisture in the area. Firstly there was ample warning of what was about to happen, so we see a town preparing for the eruptions, or indeed repairing the previous damage(and not just from the much earlier earthquake). The protagonist, Glaucus, represents the Greeks who have been subordinated by Rome, and his nemesis Arbaces the still older culture of Egypt.

Pompeii is the most famous archaeological site in the world, visited by more than two million people each year.