Vesuvius buries Pompeii
A city is destroyed in a day and preserved for seventeen centuries.
- When
- Known to
- ± 1 year
- Era
- Classical, Holocene
Vesuvius erupts in 79 CE, burying Pompeii under pumice and Herculaneum under pyroclastic flow. Pliny the Younger describes it in two letters, giving the eruption type its name. The ash preserved streets, houses, shops, graffiti, bread in ovens and the voids left by bodies, which nineteenth-century excavators filled with plaster. No other site gives so complete a picture of ordinary Roman life, including the parts Roman literature does not mention.