[Speaking Italian] Narrator: In A.D. 79, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius entombed Pompeii in meters of pumice and ash, preserving the city and its people for two millennia.

Today, Pompeii's ruins are the archeological wonder of the world, but incredibly, 1/3 of the 66-hectare site remains unexcavated.

Now this is about to change... as a team of Italian archeologists set out to unearth a new complex of buildings.

Man: This is the biggest excavation in a generation in Pompeii.

It's an entire city block.

It took a very long time to plan it, so it's very specialized.

[Speaking Italian] Narrator: The team have no idea what they will find, but each discovery will cast light on the ancient city... revealing new secrets about the lives of the ancient Romans and capturing the imagination of the world.

[Man speaking Italian] [Volcano rumbling] [Dogs barking] ♪ Narrator: Almost 2,000 years ago, Mount Vesuvius shattered the lives of the people of Pompeii forever.

A violent eruption threw a column of rock and ash 21 miles into the air.

Within hours, millions of tons of ash and pumice had buried the entire city.

Thousands were killed.

Man: The eruption buries the city, and it is lost to history for centuries.

And it's not until 1748 that excavations commence in earnest.

They find an inscription, and it says literally "Pompeii" on it.

This is when they realize they have discovered the most infamous city in the Roman world.

♪ Narrator: Today marks a new chapter as the teams start work on an untouched area of the site.

This is Insula 10... a 3,000-square-meter city block backing onto Via Nola, a busy commercial street leading to the eastern gate lined with shops and luxurious villas.

This was a wealthy part of town.

The team think they are likely to find a large residential complex, possibly the home of an elite citizen.

Man: Excavation has always to do with the element of surprise.

You're looking into the past almost 2,000 years.

The real archeology is to find something completely different, surprising, unknown, and then trying to make sense of it.

Pompeii is extremely fragile, and it's always a fight, a battle against time.

Excavating is also a huge responsibility.

You have to restore and protect what you excavate forever... as it's an enormous challenge to preserve this site for future generations.

♪ Dicus: We do not have constant excavations uncovering new regions of Pompeii.

But when it does happen, it's incredibly exciting because the potential to find something brand new is right there.

Anything that we find can change what we know about this city.

[Machines rumbling] Narrator: As the dig begins, the team need heavy machinery to reach the original floor level, buried under 5 meters of pumice and ash, and a delicate touch to reveal what lies beneath.

In a small room close to the main street, anthropologist Valeria Amoretti makes a shocking discovery.

[Speaking Italian] [Speaking Italian] Narrator: Valeria has been unearthing ancient bodies for many years.

[Amoretti speaking Italian] Narrator: Valeria quickly discovers this person didn't die alone.

Close by, there's a second body.

[Amoretti speaking Italian] Narrator: With both bodies severely crushed, the team are keen to find out exactly how they died and who they were.

Could a clue to their identities lie in the room next door?

[Speaking Italian] Narrator: Gilberto is excavating what looks like a large brick-built oven.

It's unusual to find one so big in a private house.

[Speaking Italian] Narrator: Gennaro Iovino is one of the dig team leaders.

He's lived close to the ruins all his life.

[Iovino speaking Italian] [Speaking Italian] [Iovino speaking Italian] [Gilberto speaking Italian] ♪ Narrator: It takes the archeology team a few days to clear all the volcanic debris from the oven.

[Speaking Italian] Narrator: Gennaro wants to know if the oven was ever in use.

[Iovino speaking Italian] [Speaking Italian] Dicus: The fact that we can see the scorching from the high heat of the flames and the oven, we can see bits of fuel spilled about that lit the oven.

We know that this bakery was in use in the years and possibly even days before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, and that really does bring this city to life.

It reminds us that there are actually people living here and working here.

[Amoretti speaking Italian] Narrator: As Valeria continues to work on the fragile skeletons, she wants to understand how these people died.

[Amoretti speaking Italian] Narrator: So what could have killed these people so quickly?

Volcanologist Professor Chris Jackson is an expert in ancient volcanoes.

He's come to a partially unexcavated area of Pompeii to examine some of the volcanic rock that buried the city.

Jackson: Here, we're looking at some of the material associated with the very earliest phase of the eruption.

And it's this-- this white pumice we have here.

And if you were in Pompeii at that time, the sky would have been black.

It would have been very dark, because all of this material would have been swirling around in the atmosphere before raining down out the sky like snow.

But the thing is, it was falling continuously during that earliest phase of the eruption, quickly building up into a thick layer on the roofs of the houses.

And although this material is quite light and these particles are quite small, this would have been falling out the sky for around about 19 hours.

Those roofs would not have been able to withstand the thick layer of material deposited in a relatively short period of time.

And amazingly, my feet are on ground level here at Pompeii, and this wall of rock towers above me, really gives you a sense of the material that came into this city and swamped it.

During that initial phase of the eruption, ash and pumice was raining down on the roofs of houses in Pompeii.

Some residents may have come inside to hide indoors unaware that the buildup, the slow creep of this incessant ashfall was eventually going to lead to catastrophic failure and loss of life in Pompeii.

[Speaking Italian] Narrator: The revelation that a collapsing ceiling crushed these people implies they were sheltering in this room during the eruption, but who they were remains a mystery.

Next door in the oven room, Gennaro calls in Dr. Nicolas Monteix, expert on Roman bakeries, to determine what the oven was used for.

[Speaking Italian] Dicus: One thing about most of the bakeries we find in Pompeii is that they're very easy to see, because they are directly connected via a doorway to the street, and this tells us that people right off the street, possibly in that neighborhood, were going in and buying their bread directly from the source.

This one is different.

There is no door.

In fact, this bakery is sort of in a private part in the corner of this house.

So what does this mean about this bakery?

[Speaking Italian] Dicus: This is a way for the owners of the house to make money, and this is a way for the residents of Pompeii to get their daily bread.

And it makes sense because bread was such a staple.

This was a hot market, and they could be sure that they are going to sell their bread every single day.

♪ Narrator: But what would life have been like for those working in the newly-discovered bakery?

Across Pompeii, archeologists have found over 40 bakeries.

Dr. Nicolas Monteix has come to one of the best preserved.

[Monteix speaking French] ♪ Narrator: 3 months in, the team have unearthed a large oven, indicating this was a commercial bakery, and a small room next door containing two skeletons.

Now they begin excavating an untouched area in the center of the block, the atrium or reception room, where visitors, merchants, and workers might have entered from the main street outside.

[Iovino speaking Italian] [Speaking Italian] Narrator: This is a millstone used to grind grain.

They were essential for making bread.

But why is this in the reception room?

Alessandro Russo, co-team leader, has joined Gennaro to try and make sense of the discovery.

[Speaking Italian] Narrator: This millstone was brand-new and unused at the time of the eruption.

And just meters away, something equally unexpected appears.

[Speaking Italian] Narrator: These are 2,000-year-old roof tiles.

Unused, they are still in almost perfect condition.

[Speaking Italian] Narrator: Finding dozens of new roof tiles and a brand-new millstone suggests that renovation work was taking place here.

But why?

Could this building work be linked to a dramatic event which rocked Pompeii 17 years before the eruption?

♪ Mount Vesuvius still looms large over the ruins of the city.

2,000 years ago, to the Pompeians, it would have looked like any other mountain, but its looks were deceiving.

Jackson: Magma is always moving around within the Earth's crust, and sometimes when that magma moves, it pushes against the rocks, and those rocks can break.

And it's the breaking of those rocks that can generate a series of earthquakes.

Narrator: In A.D. 62, 17 years before the Vesuvius eruption, a violent earthquake shook the city.

[Rumbling, cracking] Jackson: The earthquake severely damaged Pompeii, and following that earthquake, there was a number of other earthquakes.

Narrator: These earthquakes damaged buildings across the city.

Back at the dig, evidence is mounting that this property was one of them.

♪ [Iovino speaking Italian] [Speaking Italian] Narrator: In a small room nearby, the team discover more evidence of ongoing repair work.

[Speaking Italian] Dicus: These tools are left here for 2,000 years.

And what this does is really compress history.

We are looking at activities that were going on literally at the moment Mount Vesuvius began erupting and people thought, "It's time to go," and they forget their tools, they forget the roof tiles stacked up on the wall, and they flee.

Narrator: It's now clear that builders were at work when the eruption occurred, repairing the damage from the earthquakes.

Similar repairs were being carried out all over Pompeii.

♪ Archeologist Dr. Domenico Esposito is visiting a building known as the House of the Painters at Work.

Here, there is clear evidence of how a group of Roman decorators were suddenly interrupted by the disaster.

♪ [Tools clanking, scraping, and hammering] [Indistinct conversations] ♪ Narrator: When the eruption started, the workers here fled, leaving behind not just their half-finished frescoes but also their paints, still in their original pots.

♪ Narrator: At the dig, the team is unearthing evidence that the builders here also left in a hurry.

[Speaking Italian] Narrator: Are these the remains of the builders' last meal?

♪ Narrator: Dr. Erica Rowan is an expert in ancient food.

She believes examining what the Romans were eating provides a window into their world.

Rowan: By studying food, you can kind of study almost any aspect of the ancient world, so you can look at politics, you can look at colonialism or imperial expansion, but then you can also look at what regular people are eating on a daily basis.

It's a good lens with which to kind of look at life in the past, to really try and connect with their kind of lived experiences, a good glimpse into kind of ancient lives.

Narrator: Erica has joined Chiara to investigate the remains of the ancient workers' meal.

Corbino: This is a small fragment of a fish.

And look at this.

Rowan: That's a nice piece of eggshell.

Yeah.

In Pompeii, to have this mix of ingredients seems to have been something quite common.

Yeah, it's quite diverse and flavorful, and even kind of regular people can afford quite a range of ingredients.

And, of course, eggs, you can just, you know, hard-boil them and carry them anywhere, so they're a good, good snack while you're working.

And we found these almost complete, kind of a cooking-- not a pot, but, uh... A casserole dish?

A casserole?

A shallow bowl.

And it was located on the fireplace, so it's quite likely that they cooked this animal there.

Oh, yeah.

You can see, like, the burn.

Yeah.

Yeah, there are evidence of burning.

Burning on the outside of it.

I guess you can picture everyone's working, and one guy goes to the side and he's just making lunch in the corner.

Yeah, yeah.

♪ Rowan: You can imagine them where they've set up their kind of little lunch station, and every day, somebody goes over and kind of lights the fire and gets it going and starts making food while the rest of them work... [Tapping and clanking] Rowan: somebody potentially just sitting on the stairs eating the pork, eating the chicken... [Indistinct conversations] and then kind of discarding the bones and thinking, "I'll clean them up later when we're all finished."

But, of course, that didn't happen.

It was a particularly touching scene because it is entirely the norm.

That is what people would do, that little moment in time that you can really kind of imagine their regular lives.

♪ [Indistinct conversations] Narrator: As the dig continues, in the southwest corner of the atrium, a fascinating fresco has come to light... an image that will capture the imagination of the world.

[Woman speaking Italian] Narrator: In the center of the fresco is a food offering with fruit, a cup of wine, and what looks like a pizza-- one of the first frescoes of its kind found in a Pompeian house.

Zuchtriegel: I came to the excavation, and somebody said to me, you know, after the oven, there's also the pizza.

And I thought it was actually a joke.

I didn't think there actually was something like a pizza.

[Prisco speaking Italian] Zuchtriegel: If you look at it, it seems like a pizza from Naples, right?

Some kind of bread or pita with some kind of fruits and other spices on it.

It's something that might be considered a kind of ancestor of modern pizza in the sense that it's a very simple, poor kind of food, but it then became part of this lavish decoration.

Narrator: It's a simple food, but the quality of the painting is impressive.

And close by, other colorful frescoes are starting to emerge.

Rowan: It's a good size atrium, so it presumably was a potentially wealthier household.

I feel like they're aiming probably for kind of a luxurious look, because it's a big silver platter and then a big silver cup to show wealth.

And there's a lot of detail and a lot of different colors, so a lot of effort has gone into it.

It is unique, it is different, so it's obviously also a commission, so they have spent time and money and effort on it.

It's a new fresco because they hadn't finished the rest of the atrium.

And, of course, if they were just renovating it or redoing this room, presumably it's in the very last years before the eruption, or maybe even A.D. 79 itself, if they were finishing the room.

Narrator: The quality of the pizza fresco suggests whoever owned this building wanted to impress visitors.

At the excavation, Valeria and her team look for clues that could help identify the two bodies.

Could they be the wealthy owners of the bakery, who ordered the renovations and paid for the pizza fresco?

[Speaking Italian] [Camera shutter clicks] Dicus: Because the skeletal remains really have no possessions with them-- not even a pin to tie their toga-- this helps us understand who they were.

And perhaps we have the enslaved peoples hiding out in this bakery, perhaps the very ones who baked the bread the day before, and now they're looking for a safe place, and they find themselves in this room.

And, unfortunately, this room becomes their tomb.

Narrator: And after further analysis, Valeria thinks she can identify their age and sex.

[Amoretti speaking Italian] Narrator: And digging further, Valeria uncovers a shocking new find.

[Speaking Italian] Narrator: The two crushed bodies are accompanied by tiny fragments of a third.

[Speaking Italian] [Iovino speaking Italian] ♪ Dicus: So what all of this evidence tells us about the house is that it was active.

People were inside of this house.

They were living there.

They were working there.

They were coming in day after day to repair part of the house.

All sorts of people were in there.

We have the bakery on one side with 3 bodies-- two adults who were very possibly slaves themselves, who worked the oven, who baked the bread.

You have a fabulous fresco with food on a silver platter with that flatbread.

Perhaps that flatbread is something that the owner himself made in the bakery and he would say, "Here it is, freshly baked."

We have repair work going on.

They were planning to revitalize this space even further because they were planning to live here for a very long time.

They had no idea what was about to hit them.

[Iovino speaking Italian] ♪ Jackson: 24 hours before the eruption, things would have started to change in Pompeii.

[Stone cracking] There'd have been a series of earthquakes shaking the city.

There'd be smells in the air-- sulfur dioxide being expelled from the magma within the volcano.

There'd have been emissions of steam out of the volcano as magma rose through the volcano and actually came into contact with water.

Animals, birds would have started to leave the area.

They would have known something had changed.

And then about an hour before the eruption, there was an emission of steam and ash from Vesuvius.

Gases within the magma had started to increase the pressure within the volcano, which at that time didn't have a crater but was covered by hard rock.

Those pressures built and built and built, finally blowing the top off the volcano.

Magma and rock surged out of the center of that crater, going up a few tens of kilometers very quickly into the atmosphere.

The people living in Pompeii at that moment would have known something was happening, but they wouldn't have heard anything straight away, and that's because the sound of the top of the volcano being blown off took 24 seconds to reach them.

[Volcano rumbling] [People yelling] Narrator: Chaos broke out across the city.

And we can now begin to picture the scene of terror that played out in the room at the front of the bakery.

Two women and a small child came here to shelter from the hail of pumice and ash.

[Iovino speaking Italian] Child: Mama!

Mama!

Mama!

[Iovino speaking Italian] [Speaking Italian] Narrator: As the pumice continued to rain down, after several hours, the ceiling collapsed, killing all three instantly.

[Loud crash] ♪ Narrator: All over the city, people were facing the same life or death decision: Should they stay or should they go?

♪ But for two women and a child in a bakery near the eastern gate, it was too late.

♪ ♪ To order "Pompeii: The New Dig" on DVD, Visit ShopPBS, or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS This program is also available with PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video ♪