The Buried City by Gabriel Zuchtriegel

The Buried City: Unearthing the Real Pompeii

By Gabriel Zuchtriegel

Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch

The University of Chicago Press 2025

New from the University of Chicago Press is Jamie Bulloch’s English-language translation of the 2023 book Gabriel Zuchtriegel wrote about his experiences as Director of the Pompeii Archeological Park. The Buried City: Unearthing the Real Pompeii is about more than just the city that died in AD 79 when Mount Vesuvius erupted and engulfed streets and temples and houses in ash punctuated by shock waves of intense heat; it’s also about the disciplines of archeology and reconstruction that are slowly, painstakingly unearthing the preserved remains.

Zuchtriegel as a narrator is present on almost every page in the first person, which separates his book from the small library of titles dedicated to Pompeii. He starts his book off, for instance, with a bit of a whopper, mentioning that around 120 people a year have heart-related medical emergencies at Pompeii every year and then blandly reassuring his readers that “Statistically, heart attacks and other medical emergencies don’t occur more frequently in Pompeii than in your average pedestrian zone.” To which anyone familiar with, say, the Mall of America, or Boston Common, or the Paseo del Bosque Trail will say “The Hell you say,” but since the claim isn’t even remotely accurate, perhaps the Director had something in mind that didn’t quite survive translation.

The book’s narrative supports the generous number of fascinating photos included in the book, all pointing at the strange immediacy of the archeology going on at the site. “In Pompeii … excavations have actually uncovered a whole host of pots on stoves, loaves in ovens, coins in tills and even unmade beds in bedrooms,” Zuchtriegel writes. “In archeology, this is sometimes referred to as the ‘Pompeii Effect.’”

In many ways, this entire book is a chronicle of the Pompeii Effect. Thanks to Zuchtriegel’s storytelling energy, the most famous dead city in the world feels alive and teeming with activity. The teams at work in the large portions of Pompeii not open to the public are moving with the care and deliberation of professionals wanting to find every last thing that can be found. The most famous relics of Pompeii, those eerie casts of dead and dying city dwellers preserved in the very moments when they were engulfed in oven-heat or heavy ash, are here given their full context, their beautifully-restored bedrooms and parlors. There’ve been Pompeii books more densely detailed with the historical facts of those lives, but there’s been none quite so effective at showing readers how those details are learned.

 Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News