Pompeii provides the most detailed snapshot of Roman urban life that archaeology has recovered: a city frozen in 79 AD by the eruption of Vesuvius, with its streets, buildings, paintings, graffiti, shops, and the casts of its dead preserved in volcanic ash.

The town was a prosperous commercial center, not a major city by Roman standards (population perhaps 20,000). Its economy combined agriculture (wine and fish sauce being major exports), small manufacturing, and commercial service for travelers on the road between Naples and Salerno. The evidence of commercial activity is everywhere: over 80 eating establishments (thermopolia), multiple bakeries with grain still in their mills, fullers' shops, dyers, bronzesmiths, and the complex of a major cloth manufacturer.

The wall paintings of Pompeii represent one of the largest surviving bodies of Roman painting. The four Pompeian styles — from simple architectural imitation to illusionistic landscape to the elaborate combination of the third style to the extravagant theatrical scenery of the fourth — provide a laboratory for tracking Roman painting's development over two centuries. Many paintings that are now lost were recorded in 19th-century engravings made before their deterioration.

The human dimension is most immediately visible in the graffiti, of which about 11,000 examples survive. Political endorsements, insults, declarations of love, records of gambling wins, recommendations of wine shops, philosophical maxims, and explicit sexual content give a more diverse and democratic picture of Roman life than the literary sources allow. The graffito 'I am amazed, O wall, that you have not fallen in ruins, you who support the tedious scrawlings of so many writers' was itself written on a wall in Pompeii.