79

We were expecting just a few foundations and collapsed ruins but there are still complete buildings and dozens of impressive streets to wander around with a helpful guide explaining what happened when nearby Vesuvius blew its top and buried the whole place under metres of ash in just a few hours in 79 AD. Well worth seeing.

Mary reveals the stories of gladiators, slaves, businesswomen and children who lived in the Italian city before it was engulfed by volcanic eruption in 79 AD.

Pompeii, an Italian town buried in lava after the eruption of Vesuvius volcano in 79 AD, whose excavation is still ongoing, intrigues me.

Visitors to the ruined Roman city, destroyed when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, have been stealing souvenirs for years.

'A catastrophe which destroyed the loveliest regions of the earth, a fate shared by whole cities and their people, and one so memorable' --so begins the first of the two celebrated letters written by Pliny the Younger to the historian Tacitus in the 1st century AD, recording the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD and the obliteration of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

The recent movie piqued interest in the once vibrant but ill-fated Roman destroyed by the eruption of uvius in 79 AD. But with ongoing excavations and a quarter of the area still uncovered, there's plenty to discover.

The recent movie piqued interest in the once vibrant but ill-fated Roman city, destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. But with ongoing excavations and a quarter of the area still uncovered, there's plenty to discover.

PS17.99 SET in 79 AD, Pompeii tells the epic story of Milo (Kit Harington, right), a slave turned invincible gladiator who is in a race against time to save his true love Cassia (Emily Browning).

Seventh was "Pompeii," with $4.3 million, about a lovelorn slave-turned-gladiator in 79 AD.

The team said that the eruption would have been similar to Mount Vesuvius' eruption in 79 AD, which wiped out Pompeii.

In the two Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum on the coast of the Bay of Naples in southern Italy, settlements, people, animals and objects were frozen in volcanic ash following an enormous eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. The cities were literally buried in time within a mere 24 hours of eruption.

What was the name of the volcano that erupted in the year 79 AD and destroyed the city of Pompeii?

A colourful picture of the Roman world at the time of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD

On 24 and 25 August 79 AD, Vesuvius erupted and the consequences of that famous eruption are well known.

It is no coincidence that Il Sonno evokes Robert Smithson's fascination with the way natural processes violate the man-made, as described by Spiral Jetty, 1970, whose site, the Great Salt Lake, he called a "dormant earthquake." (Smithson's film about the project would appear to be a major influence on Ligorio's cinematography.) Moreover, Ligorio's title points to the risks taken by human settlements that deliberately ignore the threatening unpredictability of a still-active volcano, which in 79 AD destroyed the neighboring towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum.