38 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021
dept. of archeologyPOMPEII’S HIDDEN LAYER
New excavations expose how ordinary residents slept, shopped, and snacked.by rebecca meadILLUSTRATION BY DANIELE CASTELLANO
T
he journey from Naples to the
ruins of Pompeii takes about half
an hour on the Circumvesuviana,
a train that rattles through a ribbon
of land between the base of Mt. Ve-
suvius, on one side, and the Gulf of
Naples, on the other. The area is built
up, but when I travelled the route
earlier this fall I could catch glimpses
of the glittering sea behind apartment
buildings. Occasionally, the moun-
tainous coast across the bay came
into sight, in the direction of the old
Roman port of Misenum—where, in
79 A.D., the naval commander and
prolific author Pliny the Elder watched
Vesuvius erupt. Pliny, who led a res-
cue effort by sea, was killed by one
of the volcano’s surges of gas and
rock; his nephew, Pliny the Younger,
provided the only surviving eyewit-
ness account of the disaster. My view
sometimes opened up in the opposite
direction, toward the volcano, to re-
veal farmland or a stand of umbrella
pines, their tall trunks giving way to
billowing needle-covered branches.
Pliny the Younger compared the shape
of these trees to the volcanic erup-
tion, with its column of smoke rising
to a puffy cloud of ash that hovered,
and then collapsed, burying a goodpart of what is now the Circumvesu-
viana’s route.
I got off at the stop called Pom-
peii Scavi—“the ruins of Pompeii”—
and headed toward the modern gates
that surround the ancient city. Before
Pompeii was drowned in ash, it had
a circumference of about two miles,
enclosing an area of some hundred
and seventy acres—a fifth the size of
Central Park. Its population is esti-
mated to have been about eleven
thousand, roughly the same number
as live in Battery Park City. After the
ruins were rediscovered, in the mid-
eighteenth century, formal excava-
tions continued throughout the nine-
teenth century and into the twentieth,
with successive directors of the site
exposing mansions, temples, baths,
and, eventually, entire streets paved
with volcanic rock. About a third of
the ancient city has yet to be exca-
vated, however; the consensus among
scholars is that this remainder should
be left for future archeologists, and
their presumably more sophisticated
technologies.
At some ancient Roman sites, such
as nearby Herculaneum, unexcavated
areas have been topped with contem-
porary buildings. But at Pompeii, once
you walk inside the gates, you can al-
most block out the modern world: the
ancient city is full of spectacular vis-
tas, with the straight lines of its grid-
ded streets leading to Vesuvius in the
distance. And, every so often, a visi-
tor comes across a street or an alley-
way that dead-ends at a twenty-foot-
high escarpment covered with scrubby
grass. This is the boundary between
Pompeii’s revealed past and its still
buried one.
I had come to Pompeii to explore
one such boundary, at the abrupt
terminus of the Vicolo delle Nozze
d’Argento—the Street of the Silver
Wedding—in a corner of what arche-
ologists have designated as Regio V,
the city’s fifth region. For many years,
the formal excavations stopped here,
just past one of Pompeii’s grandest
mansions: the House of the Silver
Wedding, which was uncovered in the
late nineteenth century and named, in
1893, in honor of the twenty-fifth wed-
ding anniversary of the Italian mon-
The ancient city was two miles in circumference. A third of it is still unexcavated. arch, Umberto I, and his wife, Mar-