When German archaeologist Gabriel Zuchtriegel was made director of the Pompeii archaeological park in early 2021, 140 professors and former curators signed a petition against the appointment, and two members of the academic advisory board resigned in protest ‒ his experience, relative youth at 40, and nationality were issues.
Zuchtriegel had been director of the Paestum archaeological park since 2015, the year after a law change allowing foreigners to head Italian museums. Paestum, 100km south of Naples, has the best-preserved Greek temples in the world but nothing like the profile of Pompeii, a Unesco world heritage site that, Zuchtriegel writes, is to classical archaeology what the Vatican is to the Catholic Church.
In 2023, Pompeii attracted nearly four million visitors and is one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations. Zuchtriegel is in charge of the park, made up of the Roman town, buried in an eruption from nearby Mount Vesuvius in 79AD, together with excavated villas and other sites in the area. Excavations began at Pompeii in 1748, after the ruins were discovered late in the 16th century.
Part memoir, part guidebook, The Buried City, translated in this version by Jamie Bulloch, outlines Zuchtriegel’s vision for Pompeii, and the visitor experience in particular. Rather than being something to tick off the list, for Zuchtriegel, Pompeii should, like any museum, speak vividly to visitors’ souls, stoking the “engine” that drives them on. In The Buried City, Zuchtriegel gives an insight into his own engine, and why Pompeii intrigues him.
The way the eruption happened (well explained in one chapter) meant that Pompeii was astoundingly well-preserved, a city frozen. Whereas pots from the Roman era are typically excavated as shards, in Pompeii they were found intact on top of stoves, with loaves of bread in the ovens. This “Pompeii effect”, as it is known, does not, however, mean that understanding what was left is always clearcut.
In part, this is because of the decline in the profile of classical studies, and that classical archaeology, “once the leading light in all manner of innovations, now limps behind the other humanities”. After studying classical archaeology in his home country, Zuchtriegel worked in Italy with Massimo Osanna, the previous Pompeii director, now head of all Italian museums. Osanna is credited with starting the transformation of Pompeii, which was suffering from a lack of funding and a decline in the state of the ruins.
Like the English classics scholar Mary Beard, Zuchtriegel is a good communicator, adept at explaining the differences between the classical world and our own. For example, slavery, “perhaps the thing we find most disturbing about antiquity”, as “in the eyes of the ancient elites, a slave was essentially nothing more than a ‘tool that could speak’”. But slaves could be freed by their owners and effectively reborn. The more than 1000 dwellings excavated to date in Pompeii (around a third of the city remains buried) include the House of the Vettii, which was built by two former slaves who made their fortune in the wine business.
The lives of slaves, women and children in the Roman world are less well known than those of the elites. And so, writes Zuchtriegel, “the perspective of the elite veils the reality of ancient life like a screen onto which a very particular vision of reality is projected … Pompeii is like a rip in the screen, through which we have the opportunity to take a peek behind the official version of history”. So it is not just the state of preservation, but the chance to see “the fabric of workshops, apartments, taverns, boarding houses, shops, baths and bordellos” that makes Pompeii a unique place for archaeology.
In early 2021, the discovery of a ceremonial chariot in a villa near Pompeii was a worldwide sensation. Navigating around illegal tunnels built by grave robbers, Zuchtriegel describes the pathway to a room near where the chariot was found, revealing “the most fascinating discovery I’ve been part of in my life as an archaeologist so far”: a 16 sq m room where slaves lived and worked, with three camp beds, a tiny window and a chamber pot beneath one of the beds.
As Zuchtriegel explains, what and how to communicate about discoveries such as the slave quarters is not straightforward. At one extreme is a naive view that archaeologists “simply pass on information about everything we find and then it’s up to journalists to determine what’s worth a headline on the front page”. At the other extreme, Zuchtriegel and his team have been criticised by Italian media for sensationalism, revealing new finds as a distraction or for marketing purposes.
Zuchtriegel rejects both positions, arguing that “although communication isn’t everything, everything is communication”. This aligns with his mission to connect Pompeii with people. “Archaeology is something that ultimately must benefit the wider public. We mustn’t sit on the knowledge we accumulate; people who make our work possible in the first place through entrance tickets or tax revenue need to have a share in it.”
An exhibition about the lives of the poor and enslaved has been followed by “Being a Woman in Pompeii”, an exhibition that runs until January 2026. Inspired by the Ravenna site in northern Italy, where a performing arts festival started in 1990, a theatre project has been established at Pompeii, starting with a performance by 70 Neapolitan teenagers in 2022 of Aristophane’s comedy The Birds in the ancient theatre.
The Buried City was first published in German last year. The English edition has an afterword, updating readers on excavations under way in a roughly 9000m section in the heart of the city, the largest excavation for 60 years. A structure has been built on top of the excavations, protecting the ruins and paintings, but also enabling visitors to see the work happening.
For Zuchtriegel, who became an Italian citizen in 2020, Pompeii is “a place of encounters between people, some long vanished, others full of life – that’s it”. The German subtitle of his book (Was Pompeji über uns erzählt or What Pompeii says about us) points to another Pompeii effect, where, faced with the stories of the victims, visitors reflect on their own lives and how things can change in an instant. “In Pompeii we get so close to the stories of the victims, their faces, names, writings, that it’s sometimes difficult to bear.”
