Visiting Pompeii comes with a health risk, Gabriel Zuchtriegel tells us. In his first weeks as director general of Pompeii’s archaeological park, an employee quietly informed him that heart attacks are a common occurrence along the city’s basalt streets. Zuchtriegel optimistically wonders whether these constitute cases of Stendhal syndrome. After all, a place like the Garden of the Fugitives should induce at least mild heart palpitations. Here, thirteen ‘bodies’ (in reality, casts of the dead made by pouring plaster into cavities left by the decomposed corpses) lie arranged in an eerily neat row. In a place so deeply associated with death, brushes with mortality are perhaps to be expected. 

This doesn’t stop millions of visitors passing through Pompeii each year. The Buried City is less a history of Pompeii or a survey of recent excavation work than an attempt to ask why people are drawn there. Zuchtriegel takes Stendhal’s ecstatic episode in Florence seriously and holds that ‘a museum visit can indeed become a spiritual experience’. He feels, however, that academia and archaeology have done their best to stamp out the possibility. Using Pompeii as a case study, he examines ‘why we are interested in antiquity and what antiquity says about us’. These are big questions. His attempt to address them is a meandering blend of history, memoir and archaeological reportage that doesn’t quite arrive at an answer but offers a lot along the way. 

Part of the ancient city’s appeal lies in what Zuchtriegel calls the ‘Pompeii effect’. The volcanic ash that enveloped the city in AD 79 appears to have frozen it in time. Visiting Pompeii, Goethe poked around cramped dwellings still cluttered with domestic objects and commented on being transported to that