Pompeii was first struck in 1592, and tunnelled straight through.

79 · 1592 · 1748 · apart: 1669 years

Architect Domenico Fontana, digging an underground aqueduct, ran into walls with paintings and inscriptions but carried on. Excavation began only in 1748.

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The event

• Eruption of Vesuvius79 · Pompeii. Vesuvius buried Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabiae under ash and pyroclastic flows; the scholar Pliny the Elder died in the disaster. The entombed towns preserved a frozen snapshot of everyday Roman life for archaeologists.

1st century · 16th century · 18th century

More amazing facts

• 79 · 200 A little over a century after Vesuvius buried Pompeii, across the ocean in Teotihuacan the Pyramid of the Sun rose — one of the largest pyramids in the world.
• 79 · 80 The Colosseum opened a year after Pompeii was buried, under the same emperor.
• 79 · 1752 The only library from antiquity to survive whole was saved by Vesuvius.
• 79 · 600 The Americas have their own Pompeii, five centuries younger than Italy's. Vesuvius buried Pompeii in AD 79; volcanic ash buried the Maya village of Joya de Cerén in El Salvador around AD 600.
• 80 A vomitorium was not a room where Romans threw up at feasts.
• 80 Gladiators were nicknamed hordearii, 'barley-eaters'. They lived on a nearly vegetarian diet of barley, beans and dried fruit thought to build strength, while legionaries got barley instead of wheat only as a punishment.

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