You often hear that ancient sites like Pompeii and Herculaneum offer valuable windows into the past. More than windows, I think of them as glass-bottom boats. Constantly moving, constantly changing, and, for those who want to dive in and explore for themselves, as interactive as they are immersive. Away from Rome, the Eternal City, those wanting to transport themselves back to the ancient world can do little better than the South of Italy.
First there’s Naples, the spirited monumental metropolis of the Mezzogiorno (a term for the Italian South). Its history stretches as far back as the Stone Age, with the likes of the Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Normans and Spanish subsequently leaving their marks on the city, as any visit to Underground Naples will reveal. Then there’s Baia, a little-known underwater archaeological site, which counts among its ruins an ancient villa and dining room of the emperor Claudius.
Further south, just off the coast of Sorrento, is the island of Capri, home to the palatial Villa of Jupiter, which was built by the emperor Tiberius in the early first century CE. Ostensibly Tiberius ruled from this palace because he preferred the solitude of the island to the chaos of Rome. In reality, he moved there so he could let loose his perverted debaucheries and indulge his sadistic proclivities away from the prying eyes of the capital.
But for all the sites the South has to offer, none have permeated our imagination like Pompeii. Emerging from the ashes that concealed it for around fifteen hundred years, the site has long captivated its visitors as a city “frozen in time”.
Until Pompeii’s discovery, we had just one surviving account of the volcanic eruption, a letter written by Pliny the Younger. Pliny described Vesuvius’s eruption in great detail: flames shooting out of Vesuvius’s crater, raining pumice pummeling everyone below, and the death of Pliny’s uncle, the encyclopaedist Pliny the Elder, who fatally sailed across the bay to get a closer look.
With the unearthing of Pompeii’s buildings (and, more macabrely its people), we can bring Pliny’s account to life and reconstruct aspects of ancient daily urban life. This might be the elite luxuriating in one of its many villas, the gladiators training in its barracks, the prostitutes working away in its brothel, or one of Pompeii’s thousands of “invisible” inhabitants: its slaves. But when it comes to capturing the past, and journeying back in time to the day of the eruption and the weeks leading up to it, people often overlook Pompeii’s smaller, but much richer, sister city, Herculaneum.
The city of Herculaneum, 10 miles north of Pompeii, was also buried by the eruption of Vesuvius. But rather than being covered by four meters of ash like Pompeii, it lay under 20 meters of ash, mud, and other pyroclastic matter. This results in a remarkably well-preserved site which offers arguably the world’s best window into the ancient past.
Why visit Pompeii
Pompeii’s biggest cliché is that it’s a city frozen in time. A site that offers an invaluable snapshot of a cataclysmic moment, the freeze frame of a day in which the world of its inhabitants turned to fire and ash, and a blanket of darkness descended and settled.
A good guide will tell you that echoes of this event still reverberate within Pompeii’s houses, brothels, amphitheatres, temples, and other perfectly preserved buildings. More poignantly, we believe we can still hear these echoes from the city’s dead, its world-famous plaster-cast population, whose eternal death throes give us our most direct and personal conduit to the past.
Yet this isn’t the real Pompeii. Sure, the site might be a window of sorts to the ancient city of nearly 2,000 years ago. But it’s more accurate to think of Pompeii as a mirror that reflects what it wants its visitors expect to see. This is because Pompeii isn’t frozen or static, but a site in flux, adapting to survive amidst overcrowding and underfunding. Rather than a time capsule from antiquity, Pompeii is more like a highly sophisticated, cunningly deceptive, archaeological theme park.
Pompeii has been tricking visitors since the eighteenth century. European aristocrats, stopping off on one of their grand tours, would venture into one of its many villas to be greeted by the gruesome remains of one of its dead, whom locals had placed there moments before. These early tourists would leave believing they had made a remarkable discovery, in reality they’d been treated to a sublime piece of stagecraft. But the magic served its purpose: it kept people coming back for more.
Manmade disasters have played as much of a role as natural phenomena in shaping the site we see today. Heavy bombing during the Allied campaigns of 1943 destroyed vast swathes of the site, flattening Pompeii’s Amphitheatre and Large Forum and reducing the city’s ruins to rubble.
It is an inconvenient truth that much of the modern site of Pompeii has been reconstructed over the centuries, and that roads you walk and buildings lining them may be date back decades rather than millennia.
Pompeii still tricks its visitors. It just does it more surreptitiously.
It’s not hard to understand why.
First, Pompeii contribues significantly to Italy’s tourism economy, welcoming nearly 4 million visitors in 2023 and 3 million in 2022, and so making it as alluring as possible makes good business sense. Second, we like coherent narratives in history because we take comfort in certainty, and Few stories offer such a poignant sense of pathos and reminder of life’s transcience as Pompeii. Its story of everyday life interrupted by unimaginable disaster is simple, universal and effective without being overcomplicated. But the risk with wandering around Pompeii on your own (and take this from someone who’s done it) is that you’re never quite sure what you’re looking at: not just where it’s from, but also when.
The best way to avoid this uncertainty is by taking a tour with a good guide. Especially in Pompeii, it really pays to have a guide who can bring the city to life. And this isn’t just because they can contextualize its architectural relics: the Temple of Apollo, the Temple of Jupiter, the House of the Faun and the Gladiator Barracks, to name a few. They can also bring to life the stories of those who lived, toiled, and died there.
Despite being a trickster, Pompeii is still one of my favourite sites in Italy, if not in the world. But when it comes to transporting you back to a tangible past, Pompeii will always come runner-up to its lesser-known but better-preserved counterpart, Herculaneum.
Why visit Herculaneum
Herculaneum is less than a third the size of its more famous counterpart, making it much more manageable to visit in a morning or afternoon. This is mainly down to the town’s function: while Pompeii was a bustling metropolis akin to Naples’ historic centre, Herculaneum was a chic, sleepy seaside community, not dissimilar to Sorrento. A staggering 75 per cent of Herculaneum also remains buried and is likely to remain so given that the modern town of Ercolano now sits on top.
Where Herculaneum immediately differs from Pompeii is that, rather than seamlessly merging with today’s world, it forcefully transports you back two thousand years by making you descend to the ancient level. The tunnel at the site’s modern entrance brings you right down to the ancient beachfront where you’re met with a particularly macabre sight. For sheltering in perpetuity within the vaults of the ancient boathouses are the skeletal remains of several dozen ancient inhabitants, grisly reminders of the desperation that gripped the town in its final hours.
Venture further into Herculaneum and the narrative changes from human loss to material gain. There’s the House of the Wooden Screen, which, as its name might suggest, is home to the only surviving wooden screen from the ancient world. Also on display is a wooden cradle: a heart-rending everyday object begging a question of mortality that will never be answered.
One of Herculaneum’s most striking features is its resplendency of colour. Its frescoes, mosaics, columns and walls remind us that antiquity wasn’t black and white but was flushed with an often garish splash of colour. Standing alone in an ancient painted room is indescribably transportive, and given Herculaneum’s relative obscurity, you’re more likely to be alone here than you are in Pompeii.
Something else Herculaneum does more effectively than Pompeii is give you a sense of the ancient world from street level. You get this through some of the remarkable relics preserved in the eruption, including grain containers in a tavern and, in one of the town’s bakeries, even an ancient oven (the charred bread has long since gone however).
But the main reason it gives you a sense of walking down ancient streets is that it’s lined by multi-story buildings, common designs in the Roman world despite being conspicuously absent from Pompeii. In fact if you want to get a real sense of what multi-story Pompeii might have been like, your best bet is to head down to the region’s capital Naples and wander around its historical centre.
Planning your visit to Pompeii and Herculaneum
Having visited both sites several times, I’d suggest setting aside a day for each site. You could spend anywhere from a half to a full day in Pompeii while Herculaneum offers enough for a morning or afternoon (on either side of which you may wish to visit the nearly intact villa nearby at Oplontis).
Entry to Pompeii (Scavi Archaeologici di Pompeii) costs €18. Concessions are available for some groups, including EU students aged 18-25
Entry to Herculaneum (Parco Archaeologico di Ercolano) costs €13. Concessions are available for some groups, including EU students aged 18-25
If you’re planning on visiting three or more sites, museums, or galleries across the region during your vacation it’s well worth picking up Campania Artecard at one of the sites. Be aware that, for unknown reasons, free transport is only included on the three-day card. And there are discounts on the cards for those between 18-25, so don’t forget to bring ID.
How to get to Pompeii and Herculaneum
The most convenient way to get to Pompeii or Herculaneum from Naples, Sorrento, or anywhere else on the Amalfi Coast is by hiring a driver. You can save, however, by taking the train. Both sites are on the Circumvesuviana line connecting Naples and Sorrento, the journey from Sorrento taking 30 minutes to Pompeii and 45 to Herculaneum. Transport is free if you have the three-day Campania Card. If not, a single ticket to either site from Sorrento will set you back €2.10.
Visiting Pompeii and Herculaneum
On a material level, Pompeii and Herculaneum are unrivalled, both immersive environments offering treasure troves of historical trinkets. On a human level both their stories offer poignant reminders of life’s unpredictability, given context by the sites’ buildings but given pathos by the skeletons or cast bodies of their ancient inhabitants. Pompeii certainly deserves its A-list status, and should be on your list of must-see places during your vacation. But if you’re looking for a more intimate, quiet, and authentic conduit to antiquity, Herculaneum steals the show. But there’s only way you can make up your own mind: go and see both for yourself!
