Pompeii’s residents spent a great deal of time socializing in the city’s lush public and domestic gardens. “What’s remarkable about Pompeii is the enormous variety of gardens, and the extent to which Pompeians lived both inside and outside,” says archaeologist Kathryn Gleason. “Pompeians’ devotion of valuable real estate to gardens is noteworthy.” One of the largest private gardens could be found at the back of the Casa della Regina Carolina, an opulent dwelling named in the nineteenth century after Caroline—the queen of Naples and sister of Napoleon Bonaparte—who visited during its initial excavation. Celebrated for its vibrant decoration in the years after its discovery, the house was largely forgotten as its wall paintings faded.

Returning to the property after more than a century, a team of archaeologists including Gleason and Caitlín Barrett of Cornell University and Annalisa Marzano of the University of Reading now hopes to learn about the garden’s original landscaping, as well as find traces of religious activity that might have taken place there. In particular, they plan to explore the house’s two garden shrines, where nineteenth-century excavators found such objects as a marble incense burner and a statuette of the goddess Diana. “These shrines provide us with sites where ritual activity took place,” says Barrett. “The material culture can hopefully speak to the performance of those rituals.”

Pompeii’s many street-side snack bars offered those seeking a quick bite a choice of prepared food and wine. Evidence for the Pompeian food scene includes not only carbonized remains of foodstuffs such as bread preserved by the eruption, but also production facilities, including bakeries and vats for salting fish. In the first century B.C., leavened bread production was confined to several large houses outfitted with domed ovens. According to archaeologist Nicolas Monteix of the University of Rouen, it’s unclear whether these early bakers produced bread solely for their own households or, at least in part, for sale to customers.

By the first century A.D., however, these domestic bakeries had been shuttered and larger-scale commercial bakeries had popped up across the city. Although most Pompeians’ diet consisted largely of cereal-based porridges, and bread still wasn’t widely available to the poor, “I would consider this shift a democratization of bread consumption,” says Monteix, who led a recent project aimed at documenting Pompeii’s 39 excavated bakeries. The rise of commercial bakeries reflected not only a jump in the city’s population, he explains, but perhaps also an increase in grain imports from Egypt and North Africa during the Pax Romana, a period of peace and prosperity in the Mediterranean that was ushered in by the emperor Augustus. The presence of specialized technology in a few of the bakeries, such as hydraulic systems for soaking grain and vessels for dough rising, enabled Pompeii’s bakers to produce high-quality bread for wealthier residents.

Anyone walking along Pompeii’s busy streets couldn’t help but notice the eye-catching letters painted across many of the city’s houses, shop fronts, and public spaces. Some of this graffiti promoted political candidates, while other examples advertised everything from gladiatorial games to rooms for rent. However, not all messages on Pompeii’s walls were so showy. Thousands of examples of a less conspicuous type of ancient graffiti—writings and drawings incised in wall plaster, or occasionally written with more ephemeral materials such as charcoal and chalk—survive today and capture communications among Pompeii’s residents. “Unlike most modern graffiti, graffiti in ancient Pompeii was a positive form of social exchange,” says epigrapher Rebecca Benefiel of Washington and Lee University. One of the most commonly found words in this more informal style of graffiti is feliciter (“happily”), which, when paired with personal names, indicates good wishes for friends, colleagues, and even the emperor.

Benefiel is director of the Ancient Graffiti Project and is currently documenting and analyzing all the extant graffiti in Pompeii, much of which is at risk of fading away. She has identified examples of all sorts of writing across the city, including tally marks scratched on shop walls to track item inventories and the words of satisfied customers who scrawled praise for the sexual prowess of prostitutes in the city’s main brothel. In both private houses and public buildings, Benefiel has found that people traded quotations from the first-century B.C. love poets Ovid and Propertius, often adapting poetic lines to humorous effect. Says Benefiel, “Looking at graffiti in context gives such a strong sense of the people who inhabited these spaces and left their mark.”