What Vesuvius kept

The library of the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum was carbonised in the eruption and has been unreadable for two and a half centuries: the scrolls crumble if touched. On 5 February 2024 the Vesuvius Challenge awarded its Grand Prize to a team that recovered around 2,000 Greek characters from an unopened scroll using high-resolution X-ray tomography and machine learning. On 25 June 2026 a full scroll, about a metre and a half of text over twenty columns, was read the same way. Two floors of the villa have still not been excavated.

Source: scrollprize.org; Alanews, 27 June 2026

A study in Scientific Reports explained the single known case of vitrified human brain tissue, from a victim at Herculaneum. The brain passed 510 degrees in an ash cloud that was extremely hot but diluted, then cooled fast enough to turn to glass before the pyroclastic deposits buried the town.

Source: Scientific Reports, via AGI, 28 February 2025

The 24 August in every textbook comes from a medieval copy of a letter by Pliny the Younger, not from an original. In October 2018 excavations in Regio V uncovered a charcoal inscription carrying an October date, written in a material that would not have survived months on a wall. Autumn fruit, lit braziers and heavy clothing point the same way.

Source: Parco Archeologico di Pompei

In Regio IX archaeologists excavated one of the largest private bath complexes ever found in a Pompeian house: hot, warm and cold rooms and a changing room with benches for about thirty people, with a cold plunge inside a ten-by-ten-metre peristyle. It opened directly off a banqueting room decorated with scenes from the Trojan war.

Source: Parco Archeologico di Pompei, 17 January 2025

In February 2025 a near life-size frieze was uncovered wrapping three walls of a banqueting room in Regio IX: dancing bacchantes, huntresses, satyrs. It dates to 40-30 BC, which means it was already a century old when the volcano erupted. The excavation covers 3,200 square metres and has produced more than fifty new rooms.

Source: Ministero della Cultura, 26 February 2025

In the Porta Stabia necropolis, two victims were found metres from each other. An older man was crushed by falling pumice while sheltering under a terracotta mortar, carrying a lamp, an iron ring on his left little finger and ten bronze coins. A younger man was caught later, by a pyroclastic flow. The first still had a chance to run.

Source: Ministero della Cultura, 27 April 2026

In June 2026 the skeleton of a horse or donkey was found in the Casti Amanti complex, inside a working area with an oven, storerooms and the owner's house. It died some distance from the stable it lived in, which the excavators read as a probable escape during the eruption. The route itself is a hypothesis, not a reconstruction.

Source: Parco Archeologico di Pompei, via Adnkronos, 5 June 2026

Pompeii and Herculaneum are not finished sites. They are active ones, and the news from them is better than the guidebooks.