'The best book on Pompeii I've ever read' STEPHEN FRY

'An essential read for anyone interested in this extraordinary place' TELEGRAPH

'Brilliant' TOM HOLLAND

A vast area of Pompeii is being excavated for the first time, revealing astonishing insights into how people really lived. In this revelatory new history, Director of Pompeii Gabriel Zuchtriegel shares the untold stories that are at last emerging.

Pompeii is a world frozen in time. There are unmade beds, dishes left drying, tools abandoned by workmen, bodies embracing with love and fear. And alongside the remnants of everyday life, there are captivating works of art: lifelike portraits, exquisite frescos and mosaics, and the extraordinary sculpture of a sleeping boy, curled up under a blanket that's too small.

The Buried City reconstructs the catastrophe that destroyed Pompeii on 24 August 79 CE, but it also offers a behind-the-scenes tour of the city as it was before: who lived here, what mattered to them, and what happened in their final hours. It offers us a vivid sense of Pompeii's continuing relevance, and proves that ancient history is much closer to us than we think.

'A fascinating new book about what we are still learning about this most haunting of all lost cities... deeply moving' MAIL ON SUNDAY

'Makes the familiar magical' DAN SNOW

"'[Gabriel] has written an essential read for anyone interested in this extraordinary place - or indeed anyone interested in running an organisation with baggage. He has a light touch, yet is philosophically challenging.'" - TELEGRAPH

"'A fascinating new book about what we are still learning about this most haunting of all lost cities... the discoveries will continue for many years yet. And they can be as deeply moving as any film or novel.'" - MAIL ON SUNDAY

"In The Buried City, the director of Pompeii, Gabriel Zuchtriegel, reveals the latest archaeological finds to show what life was like in AD79 before Vesuvius erupted...What is special about Pompeii, Zuchtriegel says, is not its temples or theatres but its workshops, taverns, baths and bordellos, the unmade beds and uneaten meals, the lives, high and low, interrupted suddenly when the mountain exploded. All human life is there... Zuchtriegel speaks up for the under-privileged, including today... fascinating and well argued." - THE TIMES

"The everyday is his highest art. This book has an honestly expressed aim to encourage readers to bring their whole selves into their thinking about Pompeii... There is much charming chatter in The Buried City as well as learned disquisition, always lightly delivered, and a powerful sense of a man grapping with what we can take from antiquity." - TLS

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'Archaeology has never been told so vividly.'

"'Gabriel Zuchtriegel's book is as fabulous as it is unusual.'" - Süddeutsche Zeitung