Pompeii, a review

Pompeii by Salvatore Nappo is a guide to the historical archaeological site. It’s not the newest, having been published in 1998, but I still wanted to read it and doing so after I visited the site again seemed like the perfect time!

This book has actually been on my tbr since 1998… let me explain! This was gifted to my parents when we used to live near Pompeii (army childhood) and they just kind of… kept it. When I was about 22 we found this book, with some other Campania guides, again and so they were added to my tbr. And that’s why it took so long for me to read it!

Now of course, this is old so there are some issues there in missing information that has been discovered in the years since. However, I found that this was still surprisingly accurate and really interesting. As well as being open minded to sexuality etc in Pompeii, which was unexpected in a 20+ year old read but very much appreciated.

It goes through each and every named site within Pompeii, with photographs of the locations and the artefacts in the MANN (the national museum of archaeology in Naples) with explanations so that you can comprehend what you’re looking at. There are maps included for the overall site of Pompeii, as well as for each individual property, so you can understand how everything links to each other.

On CAWPILE I rated this: Uniqueness: 8, Readability: 8, Personal Impact: 8, Intrigue: 7, Informativeness: 8, and Enjoyment: 7 which gives a score of 6.57 and a 3.5* rating.

Highlight here for trigger warnings: Death, prostitution, slavery.

This is probably one that you won’t pick up, and I get that considering it’s niche and it’s old too. But I’m still super glad I read this. It was really interesting and I learnt a lot from it.

Have you picked up guide books about holiday places? Were they any good?