Pompeii

Pompeii was a Roman city located on the point on the map above. Pompeii was a pleasure city with 20,000 people living in the city. It was in the Roman empire until 79 A.D. greatly resembling modern day Las Vegas. The reason it stopped being ancient Las Vegas in 79 A.D. is that the nearby Mt. Vesuvius became nearby volcano called Vesuvius, which erupted and sent out giant clouds of ash for miles around. These ash clouds buried the city 20 feet deep, killing all 20,000 people and completely hiding it from later Roman searches. During the eruption of Vesuvius a man named Pliny the Younger was on a boat in the bay of Naples, the water between Naples and Pompeii. From that boat Pliny was relatively safe from the heat and while he was below decks he was safe from the ash. Pliney was a writer, and so he wrote a first-hand report about the eruption, which is quite useful. Pliney spent most of the rest of his life talking to other survivors and eye-witness’ from another lesser known city called Herculaneum which was also destroyed by Mt Vesuvius, but by the lava and mud flows, not the ash clouds, while he investigating where Pompeii disappeared to, because the roman searchers couldn’t find it. It wasn’t until 1863 when Giuseppe Fiorelli began systematic searches that Pompeii was fully unearthed. Part of the digging process was that they would pour plaster of the better quality resin into gaps left in the ash by decomposed bodies of the people in Pompeii, thus giving us accurate images of the dying people. This is why Pompeii is so famous in Rome, though another major aspect of Pompeii is how debauched and depraved it was, leading people to think of it as ancient Las Vegas.