Pompeii and Urbanism
A violent earthquake in 63 AD devastated the area near Naples in Italy and reportedly was a warning of the eventual devastating eruption of Mount Vesuvius that occurred in 79 AD. I finally got to visit Pompeii in July 2019 after many years of curiosity and was quite amazed as a Town Planner about the scale of the site and the sophistication of the urban development. The ancient city was thought to have grown from an earlier settlement somewhere around the 6th century BC. Nearly 2000 years ago the volcanic eruption buried Pompeii in ash and preserved the day to day life in time. Although organic matter had decayed in the intervening period the space left was able to be filled by the archaeologist to leave a cast of what…
