Mount Vesuvius erupted violently in 79 CE, burying Pompeii under pumice and ash and Herculaneum under pyroclastic flows and mud, and destroying Oplontis and Stabiae. Thousands died; Pliny the Younger's letters describing the ash column and his uncle's death remain the first eyewitness account of a Plinian eruption. The towns were abandoned and largely forgotten until systematic excavation began at Herculaneum in 1738 and Pompeii in 1748. What emerged was not monuments but an ordinary Roman town: its grid of insulae, forum, basilica, baths, aqueduct and lead water mains, street fountains, stepping stones, bars, workshops, painted shopfronts and election notices.
Pompeii turned Roman urbanism from a literary abstraction into measurable evidence, giving planners and architects a complete working city plan with block sizes, street hierarchy, water supply and mixed commercial-residential fabric. Its eighteenth-century rediscovery fuelled Neoclassicism and the Grand Tour, and it became the model for treating an excavated town as an instrument for teaching city design.
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