For a knowledgeable and witty guide to the city you can’t beat Mary Beard, who helps us see it was not all marble columns and pretty paintings.

Beard therefore manages to give an impression of the historiography of the city, drawing on changing ideas from archaeology and forensics, and circumstantial evidence from the (also fragmentary) contemporary literature. This remarkable book rises to the challenge of making sense of those remains, as well as exploding many myths: the very date of the eruption, probably a few months later than usually thought; or the hygiene of the baths which must have been hotbeds of germs; or the legendary number of brothels, most likely only one; or the massive death count, maybe less than ten per cent of the population.

In 2007, together with studio, Harris wrote a screenplay based on Pompeii for director Roman Polanski.

If you are a resident of another country or region, please select the appropriate version of Tripadvisor for your country or region in the drop-down menu. A living museum, Pompeii provides a remarkable insight into daily life during the Roman Empire two thousand years ago.Destroyed by Vesuvius in 79 CE, the ruins of Pompeii offer the best evidence we have of life in the Roman Empire. Through the eyes of four characters - a young engineer, an adolescent girl, a corrupt millionaire and an elderly scientist - Robert Harris brilliantly recreates a luxurious world on the brink of destruction.

In a newly commissioned preface, author Ferdinand Mount praises this account of a ’city of gags and graffiti’. The novel uses its characters to contrast the decadent culture of 1st-century Rome with both older cultures and coming trends. The book also has many rare (and heretofore unpublished) photographs of the casts, taken from the Pompeii Archaeological Site's photographic archive. It was a great pre-Pompeii visit book and I really liked how it describes the arguments between archeologists as well as what is considered fact.This site has an archive of more than one thousand seven hundred interviews, or eight thousand book recommendations.