One day in 1711 a peasant digging a well on his property in Resina, on the bay five miles southeast of Naples, came upon a level of white and polychrome architectural marbles, obviously ancient. This chance find led to the discovery of what proved to be the buried town of Herculaneum, destroyed in the eruption of Vesuvius of August 24, A.D. 79. Workmen digging in 1748 by the Sarno canal, nine miles farther along the bay, found bronzes and marbles on a site which an inscription, discovered fifteen years later, identified as Herculaneum’s more famous sister city, Pompeii. Thus began a saga of excavation which has told the modern world more about ancient life than any other dig in the long history of archaeology, and this in two towns which have left almost no record in literature. In a few hours of a summer afternoon the eruption stopped the life of two flourishing little cities dead in its tracks: dinner on the tables, the wine-shops crowded, sacrifices at the moment of being offered, funerals in progress, prisoners in the stocks, watchdogs on their chains. The townsfolk had not even time to gather their possessions. Ironically, going back for their little hoards of gold and silver spelled death for many of them, under the hail of pumice-stone and ashes (or, at Herculeaneum, the river of lava) which asphyxiated (Fig. 8.1) or engulfed them. At Herculaneum, on the afternoon of the eruption, rain turned the volcanic ash to mud, which solidified, burying the town thirty to forty feet deep. Electric drills and mechanical shovels are needed to dig there, so progress has been slow. Even Pompeii, under its shallower layer of pumice-pebbles and light ash, is still only about three-fifths excavated. [Illustration: FIG. 8.1 Pompeii, victims of Vesuvius, from House of Cryptoporticus. (V. Spinazzola, _Pompeii: ... Via dell’ Abbondanza_, 1, p. 443)] For a century and a half after their rediscovery the two sites were treated almost entirely as a quarry for works of art, as a plaything for the various dynasties that misruled Naples, and as a romantic stop on the Grand Tour. The discovery of ancient artifacts here revolutionized the taste of Europe: Ludwig of Bavaria built a replica of a Pompeian house at Aschaffenburg; Winckelmann, the great Romantic art historian, conceived here many of his notions of the wonders of Greek art; Casanova’s brother copied some of the paintings, and did a brisk business in forgeries. Nelson’s mistress, Lady Hamilton, was a frequent visitor: her husband was British ambassador to Naples. Goethe was impressed by Pompeii’s smallness; Napoleon’s marshal Murat supervised the dig, and Garibaldi made Alexandre Dumas his Director of Antiquities here. A generation of Victorians sobbed over _The Last Days of Pompeii_, and the young Queen herself visited the Site in 1838.