How Pompeii Was Found: Excavations from 1748 to Today

Pompeii was never really lost, and no one found it in a single day. A canal cut through the ruins in the late 1500s without anyone noticing what it had hit. Digging at Herculaneum began under King Charles of Bourbon, and in 1748 he ordered work on the Civita hill, where Pompeii lay. The city was named from an inscription in 1763. The methods that make Pompeii readable came later: Giuseppe Fiorelli in the 1860s, Vittorio Spinazzola and Amedeo Maiuri in the twentieth century, and a run of repairs after the collapse of 2010. The timeline below gives twelve dates, and the sections after it say what each one changed.

No. The ancient geographer Strabo knew a living Pompeii, a river port on the Sarno. After AD 79, according to the Park, survivors came back to recover what they could, and centuries of clandestine digging followed. Nobody was excavating systematically, but the ruins were not unknown. Fontana's canal, at the end of the sixteenth century, cut the whole hill and exposed structures and inscriptions. The Park's phrase for that moment: "the time was not yet ripe."

In the late 1500s Pompeii lacked a patron with money and a reason to dig, not information. Charles of Bourbon had both. His men were already digging at Herculaneum, and the Park says the work moved to Civita in 1748 after ten years there. The early campaigns were driven by the search for objects more than by a wish to understand a town.

The early digs were run by engineers. Roque Joaquín de Alcubierre led the work at Civita (standard accounts, not a Park source), and Karl Weber made plans and surveys that historians treat as the first systematic record. Francisco La Vega took over in 1764. They worked under a king who wanted objects, and the best panels and mosaics were cut out and taken to Naples. That is why the National Archaeological Museum holds so much of what you will see described as "from Pompeii." Our guide to Pompeii at the Naples museum sorts out what went where.

The finds went to the royal collection in Naples. The lasting legacy is the paperwork: plans and surveys that record how some buildings looked when they were opened.

When Italy was unified in the 1860s, Pompeii passed to the state, and Giuseppe Fiorelli took charge (sources give 1860, 1861 or 1863 for the year he became director). He did four things that still shape the site. He dug from the top of the deposit downward. He divided the city into regions, blocks (insulae) and numbered entrances, so a door could be given an address. He made the first plaster casts of victims in 1863, as described in our page on the body casts. And he started a school of archaeology in 1866, with a library in the House of the Plaster Corpses (VI 17,27), both closed in 1875.

That address system is why a house is called "VI 15,1" and not "the one with the painted Priapus." It is also the structure behind our address book of buildings.

Spinazzola's campaign on the Via dell'Abbondanza between 1910 and 1923 exposed one of the main streets of the city along its whole length, with the frontages of its houses and shops. He found the Schola Armaturarum in 1915, and in 1914 he dug the garden of the House of the Cryptoporticus, where four casts were made. Maiuri, who directed from 1924 to 1961, carried the digging into the 1950s south of the street. By standard accounts he also became the first to dig beneath the AD 79 layer, in the House of the Surgeon, looking for what lay under the city that burned.

The stretch of the Via dell'Abbondanza that visitors walk exists because it was dug whole. So does a problem that came with it: large areas left open to rain and sun for a century.

The twentieth century was hard on the site. Bombing in 1943 destroyed the Antiquarium and damaged frescoes and casts. Maiuri and his staff restored part of what was hit, and a new Antiquarium opened in 1948. The Irpinia earthquake of 1980 caused more damage, and the Antiquarium stayed closed for decades afterward. UNESCO listed the area in 1997 as "Archaeological Areas of Pompei, Herculaneum and Torre Annunziata," under criteria iii, iv and v.

On 6 November 2010 the Schola Armaturarum, a building used by an association of military type, collapsed. Newspapers tied it to heavy rain and to a roof rebuilt in the 1940s and 1950s. The building reopened on 3 January 2019. It was the shock that gave the Great Pompeii Project its urgency: a decision of the European Commission on 29 March 2012 set aside about 105 million euros of European and national money to stabilize excavation fronts and reduce the hydrogeological risk. In 2013 UNESCO-appointed experts warned that, without substantial progress within two years, an "in danger" listing would be inevitable.

The Great Pompeii Project is mostly invisible. It was about retaining walls, drainage and the edges of old trenches. If you wonder why a visitor sees so little "new" at Pompeii for the money spent, that is the reason: the work held the old digs together.

As the digging slowed, visiting grew. The Park's own series for the Pompeii excavations goes from about 2.17 million visitors in 2000 to about 3.81 million in 2019, then to about 565,000 in 2020 and about 1.0 million in 2021, the pandemic years. It passed 4.0 million in 2024 (about 4.07 million in the Park's published series; other official tables differ by a few percent) and was 4,000,090 in 2025. The chart shows the scale the Park has to manage.

Since 2018 the digging has been in two places, both inside the city walls. In Regio V a wedge of more than 1,000 square meters opened between the House of the Silver Wedding and the Vicolo di Lucrezio Frontone. It produced the charcoal inscription of October 2018, discussed on our page on the eruption hour by hour, and a thermopolium, a street-food counter, painted with a Nereid riding a sea horse. It was fully excavated by December 2020 and opened to the public on 12 August 2021.

In Regio IX, Insula 10, work began on 27 February 2023. The Park's communiqués list the finds: a still life in June 2023; election slogans on walls and the last offering on a household altar in September 2023; a shrine with blue walls in June 2024; two victims, a man and a woman with coins and jewelry, in a service room in August 2024; and in January 2025 a private bath complex for up to thirty people, which the Park's communiqué ranks among the big ones known, next to a banquet hall painted black with third-style scenes of the Trojan War.

About two thirds of the city has been excavated, according to Giacomelli and colleagues (2003). UNESCO's page gives about 44 hectares as the excavated area; other documents use other perimeters, and the 98 hectares in UNESCO's listing belong to the whole serial site, including Herculaneum and Torre Annunziata. The authors estimate about 464 victims still lie in the unexcavated third. The rest of the city stays under the ash, partly because of the Park's choice to leave it.

"Found in 1748" compresses a longer story. Also, visitor counts for "Pompeii" sometimes mean the four sites the Park runs; the chart above counts the excavations alone.