The eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 C.E. was a paradoxical thing. It was truly cataclysmic – it wiped out the entire populations of nearby towns - but it also yielded to history one of the most extensive and intact ruins of an ancient city. That settlement was Pompeii.

This is one of Italy’s most visited sites and you can Skip The Line with this ticket. The force of the eruption was many thousands of times greater than an atomic bomb. Unsurprisingly, the entire population was wiped out but the ash combined with the lack of moisture to preserve much of Pompeii. And what you witness today is an extraordinary insight into the life of a city during Roman times. The details of everyday life abound.

On the floor of one of the houses (Sirico’s) you can read a famous inscription, Salve lucru (“Welcome, profit”) and it indicates a trading company owned by Sirico himself. You can inspect wine jars labeled Vesuvinum – a play on both Vesuvius and the Latin for wine, vinum. This is quite possibly the world’s first-known marketing pun!

There are over 50 hectares to be explored. That’s a lot of space and makes for a full day. You can walk around the Forum with Vesuvius itself in the background or you can sit yourself under a tree and marvel at the nearby amphitheater, which is considered by modern scholars to be of a particularly sophisticated design.

You can see the remnants of the all-important aqueduct, which provided water for 25 street fountains, at least four public baths, and a large number of private houses and businesses. There are numerous statues and frescoes, and all in all you get a remarkable picture of a real, functioning town. Just one that happened to exist more than two millennia ago (though it was wiped out in 79 C.E., the town was founded about 700 years prior).