City
Pompeis
Pompei Scavi
Listen to the story
Pompeis, the city at the foot of Vesuvius, is marked on the Tabula with the usual pair of towers, a sign the map also gives to many modest places. That is a puzzle, because the eruption of 24 August AD 79 had buried the town long before this late Roman map was made. Scholars have suggested that it lived on not as a city but as a simple halt where travellers could rest beside the road. In its prime it was a busy trading town at the mouth of the Sarno, a harbour for Nuceria and Nola, and Cicero kept a country house there. Its remains are the excavations of Pompei Scavi in Italy.