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commerce. It was the place where the rich built their villas.
All jewelry and trinkets found here are ornate and opulent, a tangible sign of how rich some of the people were.
Many artisans, stores, and businesses, of which the most eminent was the cloth business, flourished.
An amphitheater for gladiator games held 20,000 spectators. Two theaters offered shows at any time of the day. More than hundreds bars and taverns made life a pleasure.

Three public baths, very similar to today's spas, added to the pleasures of this city, where rich Romans didn't spare expenses for their comfort. A fourth bath was under construction at the time of the eruption.
Ten temples were dedicated to ten different gods, that too a sign of affluence. Worshiping many gods was expensive.
A huge basilica held a law court, a bank, and a meeting place for business people.
The word Basilica comes from the Greek Basileus which means king. Basilica was the king of buildings in any ancient city and it was enormous.
All this magnificence disappeared in a few minutes. Pompeii is a stern reminder to the living that all is temporary, futile.
When Vesuvius erupted, it was the first time in thousands of years. Nobody knew that it was a volcano, as memories of the previous eruption had been lost.
This zone of Italy sits where the two tectonic plates under the continents of Africa and Europe collide. Volcano eruptions and earthquakes are the lot of the people living in such regions.
In 62 AD, when Nero was at the helm of the Roman Empire, a huge earthquake destroyed buildings and killed people in Pompeii.
Nero, although a lunatic, had advised that Pompeians should relocate, but nobody listened. To ask the rich Romans to relocate would have been like asking kids to quit playing video games these days. The rich didn't move. Pompeii was their playground. The poor stayed too as they didn't have any other place to go.
In the night of August 25, 79 A.D. the volcano abruptly woke and sent a rain of stones over Pompeii.
Most Pompeians could have survived the stones, but, soon after, an avalanche of molten lava, ashes, and asphyxiating gases killed all of them.
The lava and the fine ashes settled around each body, encasing it like a mold. Over the centuries, while the bodies decayed inside their molds, their shapes were kept intact in the most minute details.
When archaeologists found the layers of lava, they understood that those layers, like time capsules, would provide a lot of information.
They began to work on each mold

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