Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town

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Mary Beard is a Fellow of the British Academy and was awarded an OBE in 2013 and a damehood in 2018 for services to classical scholarship. This is the less popular entrance to the ruins and away from most tourists (who often arrive at the Porta Marina entrance). Those few slips should have been edited out and the cover does not relate to the drama of the story which is a shame as it may mislead and thus miss a wide readership.

When Vesuvius explodes into a cloud of fiery ash and rocks fall from the sky like rain, will they have time to escape -- and survive the epic destruction of Pompeii?Harris depicts the famed seaside town as the ancient equivalent of Las Vegas, Amsterdam and Chicago with its popular entertainment, brothels and brutal materialism. Once a very widely read book and now relatively neglected, it culminates in the cataclysmic destruction of the city of Pompeii by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. Ampliatus plans to offer a cheap water supply to Pompeii, which Exomnius had helped him to do while he steals from the imperial treasury.

This remarkable book rises to the challenge of making sense of those remains, as well as exploding many myths: the very date of the eruption, probably a few months later than usually thought; or the hygiene of the baths which must have been hotbeds of germs; or the legendary number of brothels, most likely only one; or the massive death count, maybe less than ten per cent of the population.

Because Herculaneum is much smaller than Pompeii, it is relatively easy to see in half a day (note that there is no food service within the Herculaneum archaeological site itself).

Plenty of streets blocked to traffic here and lots of detailed archaeological evidence to get to grips with, but coming through the book to the reader is the passion of the author and his need to discover and reveal new facts about Pompeii to his readers. During a sweltering week in late August, as Rome's richest citizens relax in their villas around Pompeii and Herculaneum, there are ominous warnings that something is going wrong. Many people hold a number of misconceptions about the eruption in AD 79 (there wasn't any lava flow, for example) and the eventual discovery of the ruins. Two academic books I found extremely useful were The Roman Street by Jeremy Hartnett and The Brothel of Pompeii by Sarah Levin-Richardson.

Tag harbours ambitions to become a gladiator and thus find a way to be freed from slavery, and his opportunity comes when Quintus, a pompous young man seeking to curry his father’s favour, is deemed too vulnerable to train with the other gladiators who would rough him up, and Tag is chosen to train with him. It gives a thorough history of the creation of the first plaster casts and includes descriptions of the discoveries and plaster creations taken from newspapers and letters at the time. Most of the city was evacuated during the catastrophe, its contents largely removed by the fleeing inhabitants.

Mary Beard's expertise shines through, as well as her common-sense dismissal of some of the more fanciful interpretations of archaeological evidence. The novel uses its characters to contrast the decadent culture of 1st-century Rome with both older cultures and coming trends. Pompeii is such a wonderful archaeological site and one that allows archaeologists to develop new ways to investigate how that ancient city functioned. A wealthy, multi-cultural town, Pompeii had made a fortune in fish sauce, perhaps the least appetising of condiments.An Italian Feast is a gastronomy about Italian culinary history and consciousness, about how Italians cook, eat, and how their food is an intimate part of their culture.