The museum of the destroyed city was itself destroyed: founded in 1861 inside the excavations, the Antiquarium was hit by the bombing of the second world war. It was rebuilt in 1948, then stayed shut for thirty-six years and only reopened in 2016, with a display that tells the long history of this place.
What to see
In the entrance room are frescoes in the fourth style, the statues of four dolphins that came from a private house, a bust of Dionysus and some graffiti detached from walls. Then come the architectural terracottas of the temples, with lion heads and rosettes, and the fragments of Greek pottery found in the sanctuary of Apollo.
The piece that most disconcerts is a tomb from the Sarno valley with all its grave goods: it dates from eight or nine centuries before Christ, that is five centuries before the eruption. People lived here long before Pompeii became the Roman town everyone imagines.
Visiting
The Antiquarium is inside the archaeological park, near the porta Marina entrance; you go in with the excavation ticket and it is the first building you meet, so it is best visited at the start rather than at the end, when you are tired. An hour.
Our editors' tip
Look for the tomb from the Sarno valley and study the grave goods: vases, ornaments, objects of people who lived here when Rome was a village. Pompeii is not a city frozen in one year, it is a place with a thousand years of history behind it at the moment it stopped, and this room is the only place where you see that.