Which city was buried by Vesuvius in 79 AD?

Pompeii, along with Herculaneum, Stabiae and Oplontis - and the two main sites were destroyed in different ways, which is why they preserve different things. Pompeii was buried in metres of pumice and ash falling from the eruption column; Herculaneum was hit by pyroclastic surges of superheated gas and debris that carbonised organic material instead of burning it, so wooden furniture, doors, rope and food survive there.

The famous casts are not bodies. Giuseppe Fiorelli realised in 1863 that the voids in the ash were the spaces left where bodies had decayed, and poured plaster into them - so what is displayed is a mould of the shape a person occupied at the moment the ash set around them. It was an inspired piece of archaeological method and it produced the most affecting objects of the ancient world.

The Herculaneum library is the ongoing story. Around 1,800 papyrus scrolls were carbonised into what look like lumps of charcoal, unopenable without destroying them, and they are the only library to survive intact from antiquity. Since 2023 the Vesuvius Challenge has been reading them using X-ray tomography and machine learning to detect the ink - the first words came out in 2023, and passages of Greek philosophy have been recovered from scrolls nobody could open for 260 years.