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heemperor Nero is thought to have visited the southern Italian city of
Pompeii in a.d. 64 , perhaps spending a few nights in the enormous villa
his wife, Poppaea, owned in the nearby town of Oplontis. Nero would
have seen a city struggling to recover from a devastating earthquake two
years earlier. “Pompeii was a city in crisis and flux,” says archaeologist
Stephen Kay of the British School at Rome. The Pompeians labored to
fix damaged roads, repaint walls whose frescoes had been ruined, rebuild their homes,
revitalize the city’s infrastructure, repair its cemeteries, and construct what they were
confident would be a new, earthquake-proof temple to their patron goddess, Venus.New research is uncovering the ancient
city’s dynamic story from its origins to the
eruption that buried itby Benjamin Leonard and Jarrett A. Lobell