Pompeii's Walls Preserved 11,000 Pieces of Graffiti

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE and sealed Pompeii under ash, it preserved something archaeologists rarely recover: the casual handwriting of everyday people. Scratched and painted across walls, archaeologists have catalogued more than 11,000 inscriptions, gathered over a century and a half into Volume IV of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum.

These were not grand monuments but the chatter of the street. Locals scrawled election slogans, market-day notices, prices and bar tabs, love notes, crude jokes and pointed insults. One mock endorsement reads: “All the late drinkers ask you to elect Marcus Cerrinius Vatia.” Children even scratched lopsided drawings of gladiators.

Shopkeepers, laborers, soldiers and enslaved people alike left their marks.

Because graffiti cut across every social class, it offers a rare window onto voices usually missing from official Roman records. One building near the amphitheatre alone carries 400+ handwritten messages. Together they read less like a museum than like an ancient social-media feed, frozen mid-conversation by the volcano that destroyed the city.