Pompeii was an ancient city in southern Italy, south-east of Naples. In 79 AD the volcano Vesuvius blew up. Ash and hot liquid rock buried the city, and many people died. The tidy picture is that everything was frozen exactly as it was, like a photograph. Though actually a lot of the soft stuff burned or rotted. What later diggers found were streets, houses, shops, wall paintings, and empty holes in the ash where bodies had been — they poured plaster in and got the shapes of people. From the 1700s on, that digging taught us a huge amount about ordinary Roman life, not only emperors: bakeries, graffiti, family rooms. The name is Latin, probably from an older local word for “five,” because the town had five districts. In English we write Pompeii with two i’s at the end.