Still off-limits, Regio V will someday be opened to visitors. Now, like nearly all the other scents of Rome’s classical era, the once pungent garum is virtually odorless. The alleyway turned out to be lined with grand houses, some with intact balconies, some with amphorae-the terra-cotta containers used to hold wine, oil and garum, a sauce made from fermented fish intestines. Archaeologists discovered and unearthed the Vicolo dei Balconi only last year, in a part of the site called Regio V, which is not yet open to the public. 79, when Mount Vesuvius rumbled to life after being dormant for nearly 300 years, the alley was entombed and its balconies largely incinerated in the cascades of scorching ash and superheated toxic gases known as pyroclastic surges that brought instant death to the residents of Pompeii.
Vesuvius engulfed Pompeii, Pliny the Younger recalled, in darkness that was "as if the light has gone out of a room that is locked and sealed." This article is a selection from the September 2019 issue of Smithsonian magazine Buy
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