17-05-2025
Why the man in charge of Pompeii doesn't want you to visit
I am perching on a kerb in Pompeii (built high so that Pompeiian sandals might avoid the street-level sewage) waiting to enter a newly excavated house, not yet open to the public, in Region IX of the city. The bright sunshine that blesses southern Italy in
February exposes furrows on the ancient stones made by carriages that drove through the streets in AD 79. It's the same Mediterranean light that hit the same stones days before the ash and pumice, spurting from Vesuvius, turned day into night. It's one of those rare moments when it's possible to zone out from modern Pompeii's selfie sticks, penis fridge magnets and cacophony of guides. I don't think I believe in ghosts but I am tingling all over.
I pass through an understated gate into what looks like a building site. Understated because this is in fact a portal to the biggest excavation in a generation, a 3,000-square-metre city block. The house we are visiting in Via di Nola was part of the focus of the recent BBC documentary Pompeii: The New Dig, which charted its excavation. The dwelling, next to a bakery and a laundry, partly excavated between 1888 and 1891, had been undergoing building work in AD 79. Three skeletons were found there, thought to be enslaved people who were locked in the small room with no means of escape.
In the atrium of the main house I gawp at the fresco of a 'pizza', a story that was delivered around the world in 2023 when Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the director of Pompeii and the reason I am here, pointed out the likeness. In front of me is a painting of a piece of flat, round bread topped with nuts and possibly dates. In fact, the Neapolitans are said to be the first people to have eaten pizza – in the 18th century. At best, you can call this an ancestor of the pizza. It wouldn't make the cut at Domino's.
Next I walk into a black-walled banqueting room, momentarily reminding me of Adrian Mole's bedroom. It was probably painted so in order to hide the grubby stains made from the soot created by the oil lamps – and is all the better to show off bright frescoes inspired by the Trojan wars. One depicts Apollo wooing Cassandra with his lyre; another shows Paris meeting Helen of Troy sporting a transparent dress (very Met Gala) with hunting dog in tow. At its official unveiling Zuchtriegel explained: 'People would meet to dine after sunset; the flickering light of lamps had the effect of making the images appear to move, especially after a few glasses of good Campanian wine.'
The director appears out of nowhere. Forget the booming presence of many of the folk who run major cultural institutions; he prefers a low-key approach. After the photo shoot, which he politely tolerates, we retire to his office, a 10-minute walk away.
Zuchtriegel, 43, has been director of Pompeii for four years. The archeologist, originally from Weingarten in southern Germany but an Italian citizen since 2020, previously served on the technical secretariat of the EU-funded Great Pompeii Project, to develop a programme of conservation, maintenance and restoration, and worked on the 2015 exhibition Pompeii and Europe 1748-1943. He spent the five years before he was made Pompeii capo running Paestum, the archeological park south of Pompeii.
You might think that with fluent Italian and a degree in classical archaeology, prehistory and Greek philology from the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin, plus a doctorate in archaeology from Bonn, he was the perfect match for Pompeii, but Zuchtriegel's appointment was controversial. When he was made director in 2021, Irene Bragantini and Stefano De Caro, two members of Pompeii's scientific committee of four, resigned. The latter argued: 'It is difficult for [Zuchtriegel] to have sufficient experience to decide, manage and direct conservation and above all restorations, where it is very easy to make mistakes but spend millions.'
Well, he seems to be coping. We are here because he has written his first book as director, The Buried City: Unearthing the Real Pompeii, which is published in the UK this month. 'It's actually not a very long book but it wasn't my plan to write everything about Pompeii,' he says modestly.
In fact, he 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.
Stephen Fry has called it 'the best book on Pompeii I've ever read'. When I mention this Zuchtriegel shrugs. I can't tell whether it's that modesty again or if he hasn't heard of his British superfan.
One of my favourite stories from the book, I tell him, is the 'curse' of the city. 'Every week packets and parcels arrive in Pompeii containing pumice, mosaic tesserae or shards that someone has pinched,' he writes. 'The remorse comes years, sometimes decades, later.' A legend suggesting that there is a hex on those who loot prompts people to consider whether their bad luck has come from that 'souvenir' on their desk. The returned artefacts often come with guilt-ridden letters. Zuchtriegel is the priest in Pompeii's confessional. 'I've read about divorces, job dismissals and even cancer diagnoses,' he says.
Our conversation turns to tourism. In the book, Zuchtriegel lays out his hope that fewer people will come to the site, perhaps an unpopular mission for a director of a tourist attraction. Yet what he wants is for those who do come to have longer, deeper experiences here and at other sister sites, rather than coming in on a cruise ship for a three-hour box-ticking circuit.
'It is better to have someone here staying three days and visiting the other sites than three people coming only for half a day. It's not sustainable,' he says. 'This is also my approach in teaching art history: it's better to pause over one thing for three hours than look at 10 paintings at the same time. Because then you understand something that you can apply to everything.'
Pompeii has recently set limits of 20,000 visitors a day, down from last year's 36,000. Won't this hit its coffers? Funding comes mostly from the €18 (£15) entrance tickets and part of that income goes to the state to sustain smaller museums throughout Italy. Zuchtriegel seems relaxed.
'This is not going to have any economic effect on the park,' he says. 'It is possible to have this limitation but still develop the site economically. But this depends on our choices.'
In the book he expresses his wish to focus more attention on sites outside Pompeii, to spread the love. Rural areas, such as nearby Boscoreale, have the opposite problem – fewer visitors than they could accommodate. 'What you have is two problems where one is the solution to the other,' he says. 'If you could bring people to visit the other sites around Pompeii it might help people lower the pressure on the site.' Such a strategy is also smart from a research perspective. Two thirds of Pompeii has been excavated; in the countryside less than five per cent has been excavated. The scientific potential is huge.
One of the most exciting recent finds has been at Civita Giuliana, a villa complex to the north of Pompeii which had undergone some excavation years ago. Work resumed there in 2017 (a tunnel network has been found in which a previous owner had smuggled out antiquities, a prosecutable crime).
A slave room was discovered with a bed, which gives a sense of how the poor people of AD 79 lived. 'There must have been a huge workforce. Potentially 80 to 100 people found space there,' Zuchtriegel says. He makes the point that great monuments, palaces and temples are much more likely to survive millennia rather than 'a hut or a humble place where enslaved people lived'. Was its discovery a highlight of his career? He pauses for a stretch long enough to cook a sort-of pizza. 'Yes, I would definitely say so,' he says.
In fact my conversation with Zuchtriegel contains more long pauses than a Harold Pinter double bill, especially when I ask him what he believes to be his achievements so far. If it's initially disconcerting, it's eventually refreshing in a world where those in charge tend to have an immediate soundbite for everything. 'You could look at achievements and try to make a list, some kind of top 10, but what is essential is the atmosphere and the context that you create as a leader,' he says. 'Of course we try to give support [to visitors] and there is an app, guides, books, panels and a map, but there should also be space for your own [thoughts] as everyone has a different experience of Pompeii.'
He's talking to my hot stones moment.
'We tend to think that we have to do something: we go to a museum where we have to do something but the real change comes if you get to the 'being' and don't remain on the 'doing'.' This is a man who has read his German philosophers. 'Many things happen if you come to Pompeii,' he adds.
He's not wrong; if you're Madonna, for instance, you might leave with your pockets a little lighter than when you arrived. In his early days as director, Zuchtriegel conceived a project – Sogno di Volare (I Dream of Flying) – to bring in local school children to perform in Pompeii's amphitheatre, once home to gladiatorial battles. 'Madonna had this wish to visit the site and so we came in contact and I told her about this project,' he says. 'It took so long to explain it to many people, starting from the school and the teachers and my colleagues here. 'It's not our core business!'' he says, mimicking the naysayers. 'Madonna immediately decided this was something worth supporting.' With her Ray of Light Foundation, the star – who celebrated her 66th birthday in Pompeii last year – has funded the entirety of the 2024-25 season with a reported €250,000 (£212,000) donation.
It's just the beginning, says Zuchtriegel. He is hoping to bring in more local philanthropists. I presume he wouldn't agree to having branded signs on Pompeii's houses?
'Visibility is OK,' he says, surprising me. 'You want to thank people, you want this to be known, it's an added value; someone decided to support Pompeii. Why? Because he shared our vision. So it is much more than the economic contribution.' Watch out for the House of the Painters sponsored by Dulux, or, maybe, Badedas hitting up the Stabian Baths.
We have talked of what's here to see but, in the book, Zuchtriegel touches on what has been lost and the live issue of restitution. Should the treasures from Pompeii, in museums around the world, be returned?
Another Pinter-esque pause. 'Well, in Etruscan Places, DH Lawrence travelled through Etruria in 1927 and visited a lot of Etruscan tombs and wrote beautifully about this experience,' says Zuchtriegel. 'He says that museums are wrong, but if you must have museums, let them be small. So the idea is that taking something away from its original context is always some kind of violent intervention.'
Zuchtriegel says you can feel this very clearly in Pompeii during excavations. 'You see all the objects in situ and it would be so fantastic to show this in the moment of excavation and we try to do this to a certain point, where you can see the pot on the fireplace and the statues where they were found… with the light from that period and the acoustics.' He sighs.
'And then you go to the Metropolitan Museum and you see the frescoes from Pompeii and Pompeii walls, and statues in museum halls, and it all tastes so wrong.'
And the Parthenon marbles? 'I certainly understand why they want it,' Zuchtriegel says of the Greek government. 'If you go to London, you see it out of context, in a gallery of paintings, and you see it at eye level, which was not the original position [it was originally 13 metres above ground]... it was part of a building and now it is part of some gallery which maybe is necessary if you want to really look at it, but you couldn't do this in the 5th century BC. So it is always a very difficult question.'
In fact Pompeii has its own hot potato: the statue of Doryphoros – the Roman 1st or 2nd century BC marble copy of a lost bronze by the Greek sculptor Polykleitos, depicting a warrior. It is currently in the Minneapolis Institute of Art [MIA]. The Italians say that it was looted in the 1970s from Stabiae, an ancient city about three miles southwest of Pompeii, and insist that fragments were smuggled to Switzerland. We know it was displayed in a museum in Munich in the 1980s, then it disappeared in 1984, and was acquired by the MIA in 1986 for $2.5 million (£2 million). The institute claims it was found off the coast of Italy in international waters. If true, that would scupper Italy's claim to the statue. In February 2022, an Italian magistrate ruled for its return, yet so far MIA is holding firm.
Zuchtriegel looks towards the window. 'Morally it should come back, absolutely, I think maybe because it's not from Pompeii but a site that is very important for the history of the whole region, but lesser known,' he says.
It would galvanise his ambition to send more people to a less economically robust city and away from overrun Pompeii. 'Absolutely,' Zuchtriegel says. 'When we talked with American colleagues many years ago to find an agreement to bring the statue back, one of the colleagues from the US raised the question: 'Where would you exhibit the statue? Because we are a great museum.' Which is true. Their idea was to ask, 'Would you have an equally important place [to display it]?' And I thought, 'This shows that you haven't understood anything.'' Another sigh. 'Of course I would bring the statue back to Castellammare di Stabia.' For Zuchtriegel, authenticity trumps visitor heft. 'From the part of Italy it's very clear, we have a court order, so it is now more of a diplomatic question. Leaders should come together and see if they can resolve this.'
Perhaps this is one of the good things about Giorgia Meloni and Donald Trump getting on? It's complicated, he says. MIA is a private foundation, which has little to do with the US federal government, and Pompeii is ruled by the Italian Ministry of Culture. 'So you also have to find the right levels [of communication]. But I don't give up the hope that we will see the statue returned. The hope is that it's not going to be a fight but a win-win situation, maybe a collaboration.'
Even if it takes time, you feel he will be here in Italy to see it. Zuchtriegel lives in Pompeii and nearby Naples with his wife Katharina, a Berliner who he met in Italy, and their two children, Carlotta and Gianni, who are at school in Naples. The couple first came to Italy in 2012 and married during the pandemic in 2020 in Roscigno in Campania, the same year that Zuchtriegel, who learnt Italian at university, became an Italian citizen.
'Learning a new language can actually be like reinventing yourself,' he says. 'There is a great possibility of letting things go, your past, which you really don't need anymore. So learning a different language is also learning a different way of talking and thinking.' Someone who knows him told me that he's funnier, lighter in Italian. He pauses. 'I have moments when I can't stand myself in Italian and German,' he laughs.
His children are unlikely to be archeologists, he says. They are 'traumatised by too many museum visits. But this is fine.' Anyway, he makes the point that being an archeologist is not easy. I wonder if it's going to get even harder with AI making aspects of the job obsolete. He nods. 'I think that a certain kind of archeology is really over.'
Did he just talk himself out of a job? 'Traditionally what you brought into the scientific community was the data,' Zuchtriegel says. 'You could find thousands of articles from the last two centuries, a new painted tombstone, a new archaic statue – this is what people had and would share, on which careers were based. Now with AI all this is automated. Let's say you find a painting in Pompeii and you use AI to give me all the dating and comparisons and models and you get that in probably less than one minute.'
Yes, I scoff, but how much will it get wrong? 'I think very little,' Zuchtriegel replies. 'If this work is not appreciated any more as you can do it automatically, then what is the role of the archeologist? Imagine you have the data in no time.' He clicks his fingers. 'It will all be about what you are making of it – and what is your contribution to the contemporary discourse.'
So Pompeii is investing in AI, he says, at the level of conservation. 'But these developments are so large-scale that we have to imagine it's changing anyway whether we invest or not.'
Meanwhile, one of the biggest challenges is not digging for treasures. In The Buried City he posits the need to leave further excavation to future generations. Pompeii was discovered in the 16th century. Caroline Bonaparte, Napoleon 's little sister who bankrolled much of Pompeii's early excavations in the early 19th century, believed that the whole city could be unearthed in three years. Thankfully, this was a gross overstatement. Early excavations didn't always prioritise conservation and techniques have much improved and should continue to do so.
'They didn't know that tiles or bones could be important; they threw bones away!' Zuchtriegel says. 'Today we can make DNA analysis.'
'How much we have lost in the last two and a half centuries,' he mourns. 'Paintings faded away and walls collapsed. It's the big issue in Pompeii. The measure we will be judged by is the conservation side, it's not the discoveries or the publications and it's certainly not the visitors.'
I can't help but think that the latest dig in Region IX has helped seal his own reputation. Of excavating, he says: 'It is a huge temptation and I think it is a bit like making debt with other people's money. You have to excavate something and build careers on that; it really has changed careers.' Yet he says there is little evidence to prove that new excavation attracts more visitors to a site.
'And who is going to pay for the debt of future generations who have to do the maintenance and the monitoring?' The unsexy bit. 'Yes, the unsexy bit. I don't think we should ban excavation… but you always have to know what you are doing.'
Zuchtriegel writes in The Buried City of how, maybe after a few drinks, he and his colleagues play 'choose your favourite house in Pompeii'. I ask him about this parlour game. This time he doesn't need to think for too long. 'The House of the Vettii, which I have been studying since university,' he says.
He's referring to the Roman townhouse that closed for 20 years and reopened in 2023 after a period of restoration. It was probably the home of two brothers, freedmen who had risen to prominence through the selling of wine and, they now think, through prostitution. In the house they found an advert for a Greek enslaved woman and erotic images among paintings and decorations that showcase the Pompeiian style close to the time of the eruption.
Zuchtriegel continues. 'It becomes an old, familiar place, a place almost in your soul. These people become part of your imagination even if they are from 2,000 years ago.'
I see that this parlour game is absolutely no game to him. 'The two Vettii and the slave girl, of course it is an illusion, but they almost become part of your family.'
