Researchers have detected cobalt in glass found in the Pompeii ruins.

Sulla moves to the offensive, defeating a Samnite army and recovering some of the major cities in Campania.

Pompeii, which has taken part in the war that the towns of Campania have initiated against Rome, is in 89 BCE besieged by Sulla.

The so-called Villa of the Mysteries is a large Roman country villa located near Pompeii, initially built in the third century BCE, and surrounded on at least three sides by a terrace with a colonnade.

The villa is remodeled sometime before the earthquake of CE 62-63, the colonnade being replaced on the main axis of the villa by a rectangular verandah.

Decorating a large (twenty-nine by nineteen feet/nine by six meters) rectangular hall in the villa are the superb paintings—dating from the first century BCE and late Hellenistic in style—that give the villa its name, featuring numerous life-size figures of humans and deities in a Dionysiac ceremony against vivid red walls.

…nearby Pompeii.

The Romans regard Mount Vesuvius, which dominates the two seaside towns, as an extinct volcano, and do not interpret the quake as a sign of its renewed activity.

Reconstruction of the Roman resort towns of Pompeii and neighboring Herculaneum is still in progress seventeen years after the great earthquake On the morning of August 24, 79, the sudden, violent eruption of Mount Vesuvius buries Pompeii, Stabiae, and a number of smaller settlements under a thick layer of lava, stone, and ash.

When the eruption ceases on the second day, more than two thousand of Pompeii’s inhabitants have perished in the layer of ash and volcanic debris that covers the city to a depth of about twenty feet (six meters).

The scientific curiosity of Pliny the Elder leads to his death by asphyxiation when he approaches too close to Mount Vesuvius on its eruption.

His nephew, Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, called Pliny the Younger, delivers an eyewitness account of the calamity in two letters written to the historian Tacitus.

Additionally, Titus visited Pompeii once after the eruption and again the following year.

During the second visit, …

The two towns of Pompei and Herculaneum, covered by thick layers of ash  in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79, had been abandoned and eventually their names and locations forgotten.

The first time any part of them was unearthed had ben in 1599, when the digging of an underground channel to divert the river Sarno ran into ancient walls covered with paintings and inscriptions.

The architect Domenico Fontana was called in; he unearthed a few more frescoes, then covered them over again, and nothing more came of the discovery.

A wall inscription had mentioned a decurio Pompeii ("the town councilor of Pompeii") but its reference to the long-forgotten Roman city was missed.

Fontana's covering over the paintings has been seen both as censorship—in view of the frequent sexual content of such paintings—and as a broad-minded act of preservation for later times, as he would have known that paintings of the hedonistic kind later found in some Pompeian villas were not considered in good taste in the climate of the counter-reformation.

Herculaneum had been properly rediscovered in 1738 by workmen digging for the foundations of a summer palace for the King of Naples, Charles of Bourbon.

Pompeii is rediscovered as the result of intentional excavations in 1748 by the Spanish military engineer Rocque Joaquin de Alcubierre.

Both towns will be excavated to reveal many intact buildings and wall paintings.

Charles of Bourbon will continue to take great interest in the findings even after becoming king of Spain, because the display of antiquities reinforces the political and cultural power of Naples.