"Pompeii - Rising from the Ashes" a Pompeii Travel Page by goodfish

On a late August day in 79 AD, a volcano long believed to have been extinct roared to life and spewed out a vertical column of cinder, rock and ash over 60,000 feet high. Over the next 18 hours, 8 feet of debris fell onto a Roman city by the Bay of Naples, collapsing roofs and walls and completely covering smaller structures. As her 20,000 citizens cowered in the ruins or fled for their lives, Mt. Vesuvius delivered catastrophic pyroclastic surges of poisonous gasses and hot ash that instantly destroyed anything living and entombed the city of Pompeii for the next 1600 years.

Excavations begun in the 17th and 18th centuries resulted in the looting of precious artifacts and a haphazard uncovering of some of the ruins. It wasn't until the government appointment of Giusseppe Fiorelli, in 1860, that the first systematic excavations began, and continued under the rigorous efforts of archeologist Vittorio Spinazzola in the early decades of the 1900's. Today, approximately three quarters of the 164-acre site has been excavated and work continues as resources are available.

The tragic events of 2000 years ago left the priceless gift of a place - and a way of life - frozen in time. The ash that buried Pompeii and neighboring town, Herculaneum, preserved 1st century Roman towns that would have slowly disappeared with the inevitable evolution of social and industrial progress. Because of many dedicated archeologists and scientists, we know where these people lived, what they ate, how they dressed, who they did business with and what was important to them. This is history you can see and experience versus read from a textbook.

Unfortunately, what's left of Pompeii is far from safe. Freed from the layers of ash that protected them for so long, fragile mosaics, frescos and villas - open to the elements and suffering from neglect - are rapidly deteriorating. Lack of security has resulted in the theft and defacement of artifacts, and millions of people, for whom visitor's facilities are almost non-existent, add to the yearly wear and tear. In mid-2008, the state of decay was so bad that the Italian government issued a state of emergency for this World Heritage Site, spurring new improvements over the next several years.

And there's Vesuvius: still looming ominously in the distance and still very much alive...
(Tips under construction)