What to See in Pompeii: The Route, in Order

Enough for what, is the honest reply. Two hours is enough to walk the guided line and stop properly at six or seven places. It is not enough to see Pompeii, and no length of visit is.

Here is what each block of time actually reaches.

Every packaged half day from Naples buys you the two-hour row. If you want the three-to-four-hour row, the practical route is the train plus a tour that meets you at the gate, because you keep your ticket and your slot after the guide leaves. The cost comparison is on the homepage.

The Forum is the one part of Pompeii that photographs the way people imagine it: two rows of column stumps, the Temple of Jupiter's podium at the end, and the flat double summit of Vesuvius directly behind. Standing there with the volcano in the frame is the moment most visits turn from sightseeing into something else.

Around it: the Basilica, which was the law court and the business exchange rather than a church; the Temple of Apollo with its colonnade; the macellum, the covered meat and fish market; and the granary, now a store of amphorae and casts behind glass rather than a room you enter.

It is also the least shaded place in Pompeii, which matters more than it sounds in July. Reviewers on the guided half days repeatedly recommend morning departures for exactly this reason, and the seasonal detail is here.

The date on the label is not the date you learned

Almost every book says the eruption happened on 24 August 79 AD. Excavation evidence published in 2018 moved it to 24 October, which fits the autumn fruit, the braziers and the heavier clothing found in the ash better than high summer ever did. Around 20,000 people lived in the area at the time, and a large share of them got out.

Signage across the site is gradually catching up, so you will see both dates during one visit. If a guide gives you August without qualification, that is the older reading rather than an error.

What to look down at

The paving is the exhibit. Deep parallel ruts worn into hard basalt by iron-tyred cart wheels, raised stepping stones set across the road so pedestrians could cross above the run-off, and kerbs high enough to need them. The gaps between the stepping stones are cart-axle width, which is a two-thousand-year-old standards document lying in the street.

Bakeries and food counters

Pompeii had around thirty bakeries. What survives is the hardware: hourglass millstones of grey lava that a donkey or a slave turned, and a domed brick oven that looks like every pizza oven in Naples because it is.

The thermopolia are the other half of the same story: L-shaped masonry counters faced with marble scraps, with wide terracotta jars sunk flush into the top for food. There were dozens across the city, because most Pompeians lived in rooms without kitchens and ate out.

The Lupanare

The purpose-built brothel, ten small rooms with stone beds and painted panels above the doors. It is the most queued-for building in Pompeii and one of the smallest, so budget the wait rather than the visit. Guides handle it briskly and without much ceremony, which is the right call.

Four public bath complexes have been excavated. The Terme Stabiane are the oldest and the most legible: you can follow the sequence from changing room to warm room to hot room, and see the double walls the hot air ran through. The Terme del Foro are smaller and better preserved overhead, with a stucco vault that survives in moulded panels.

For houses, the two names every guide uses are the Casa del Fauno, the largest and grandest in the city, whose floor mosaics including the Alexander mosaic now live in the Naples archaeological museum; and the Casa del Poeta Tragico, small but famous for the mosaic of a chained dog at the threshold.

Further out lie the Teatro Grande, the horseshoe theatre for comedies and mime, and the Templo di Iside, the temple of the Egyptian goddess Isis, which is one of the best-preserved buildings on the site and one of the least visited.

The amphitheatre and the Palestra Grande

At the far eastern end, about twenty minutes' walk beyond where guided tours turn round. The amphitheatre is the oldest surviving stone amphitheatre in the Roman world and held around twenty thousand people, more than the town's own population, so it drew crowds from the whole bay.

Beside it is the Palestra Grande, a colonnaded exercise ground with a pool, where bodies were found at the exit. It is the quietest significant space in Pompeii at almost any hour, for the simple reason that it is far from the coach park.

The Villa of the Mysteries

Fifteen minutes north-west, outside the walls, past the Herculaneum Gate and along the Street of the Tombs. A large suburban villa with a near-complete cycle of red-ground frescoes showing an initiation rite, and the single most reproduced image of Roman painting.

It is not covered by the €20 express ticket. You need Pompeii+ at €25, or an €8 card-only supplement bought on the day at the start of the villas route. The ticket rules in full, and note that the route closes at the same time as the last general admission.

And what else is in the town, besides the ruins

Plenty of people ask what there is in Pompeii apart from the archaeological site, usually because they have a half day left over. The honest answer is that the modern town of Pompei is a working Italian town rather than a destination, but four things nearby are worth the detour, and the first three are free with your park ticket for thirty days.

Pompeii rotates. Houses close for conservation work and reopen months later, and the list of open buildings is genuinely different from one season to the next. The park publishes the current list on its own site, and the most up-to-date version is on the information boards at the entrance.

Two practical consequences. First, do not plan a visit around one specific house without checking. Second, if a guide substitutes a building, that is not a shortcut being taken: it is the site being maintained. The listings themselves say so, with one noting that itineraries vary with overcrowding and temporary closures.

Every guided half day from Naples covers the route above in about two hours. The differences are where you start, whether the guide is guaranteed, and what happens when the guiding stops.

The $70 van tour gives 2 hours 10 minutes inside, the longest of the packaged half days. The $62 tour from the station door names the Forum, the Lupanare and the Thermopolium in its own itinerary. The $38 tour that meets you at the gate runs 90 minutes to three hours and lets you stay on afterwards, which is the only way on this page to reach the amphitheatre with a guide's context behind you.

Walk it west to east and stop caring about completeness. Two hours takes you along one street of a city that had hundreds, and the parts that stay with people afterwards are almost never the famous buildings: they are the ruts, the counters and the casts. If you want the eastern end as well, buy yourself the afternoon rather than a longer coach. The Pompeii tours from Naples we compare all walk this same line, and the differences between them are on their own pages.