How life returned to the streets of Pompeii

With a new BBC TV series about Pompeii in the offing, Sophie Hay looks back 100 years to a dig that transformed our understanding of daily life on the city's streets

- Sophie Hay

For 1,800 years, the streets of Pompeii lay dormant. Ever since the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius razed the city in AD 79, its alleyways, corners, shop fronts and crossroads had slumbered under a layer of volcanic debris. But then, in the second decade of the 20th century, something happened that would breathe life back into Pompeii’s once teeming thoroughfares. That something was the appointment of a new superintendent of archaeological works, a man called Vittorio Spinazzola.

For decades, the daily life of the inhabitants of ancient Pompeii had been examined purely through the city’s private houses and public buildings: its baths, its markets, its temples and bakeries. The streets connecting these places were often overlooked.

All that changed when Spinazzola arrived in Pompeii in 1911. The archaeologist was convinced that excavating the streets could yield rich evidence of daily life in the ancient city. Spinazzola’s predecessors had concentrated on excavating single properties or insula blocks in the western part of the city. Spinazzola, however, took a different approach. He chose to excavate the remaining eastern half-kilometre stretch of the via dell’Abbondanza – the main east-west road that traversed the city – and the facades of the buildings that opened onto it.

By breaking the seal of the undisturbed volcanic deposits from the top downwards, Spinazzola revealed the upper floors and roofs of buildings that fronted onto the street as well as further evidence of life at street level itself. In the words of his son-in-law Salvatore Aurigemma: “No more monotonous… and deserted Pompeiian streets but windows, balconies, canopies and terraces, one after another, as if all life had no purpose but the street.”