Scratched on the Walls

About this book

Everybody knows how Pompeii ended. Almost nobody knows how it lived. Scratched on the Walls tells the story of the town's last century and a half the way its own people told it: on the walls of their streets. Pompeii has left us more than eleven thousand pieces of writing on plaster: election posters painted in red by professional sign painters, bar price lists, shopping lists, greetings, insults, jokes, love notes, boasts about gladiators and a line from someone who marvelled that the wall had not yet fallen down under the weight of so much scribbling. Alden Rooke, who writes history at pavement level, uses them to walk the reader through a real Roman town, street by street.