In 79AD, this volcano exploded.

Down below, around the bay of Naples, there were farms, houses,

luxurious villas, Roman towns.

The best known is Pompeii.

The eruption which wiped this ancient town off the Roman map

is one of the world's most famous disasters,

but the tragedy has given historians a priceless legacy.

The inhabitants were overwhelmed by gas, lethal gas, volcanic debris

and we found their bodies exactly where they died.

Many have been cast in plaster, frozen in time.

They've tantalised the world with their last horrific moments of death.

But they tell us little about their lives.

Now, in a cellar just two miles outside Pompeii,

are 54 well-preserved skeletons lying exactly where they died.

They were hiding from the full force of the volcano.

2,000 years later, they're about to give up their secrets.

I'm wondering whether they can tell us something

about the most interesting question in Pompeii,

which is not how the people died, we know how they died,

it's about how the people in Pompeii actually lived.

For the 25 years I've taught classics at Cambridge

I've been fascinated by what life was really like day to day in ancient Pompeii.

I am hoping these skeletons will help take this understanding

one step further and put my theories to the test.

I'll explore the opulent and the ordinary.

Don't have to be rich to wear jewellery.

In a city of the refined and the rude.

It looks to me as if the woman is on top of him but sucking his toes.

I'll see the hardship endured, and the pleasures savoured.

These guys don't look too pissed yet.

I can't find where I left my glass.

I want to see if we can probe a bit deeper and get beneath the skin of this ancient town.

- You don't get closer to real Rome than being in a cesspit, do you? - No.

I am hoping that the people in the cellar will help me discover

what life was like before Vesuvius forced them to flee.

Pompeii is the most important archaeological site in the Roman world.

Nowhere else do we come face to face with antiquity

up close in quite this personal way.

These perfectly preserved ruins

bring millions of us here each year to see a snapshot of Roman life.

But that's all we see, a snapshot.

Of a society where it appears the rich enjoyed a life of luxury

and everyone else, the poor and the slaves, lived lives of drudgery.

That's always seemed too simple to me.

It's much more interesting than that.

I want to bust a few myths about the rich and the poor in Pompeii.

This was the stretch of coastline where rich Romans,

I mean really, really rich Romans from the capital,

used to come for their holidays.

It was supposed to be particularly popular with the fast set,

they came here to gamble, to have fun, to have sex.

Sort of a cross between Las Vegas and Brighton.

And that's what makes Pompeii so remarkable.

It was a town where ordinary people lived cheek by jowl

with the hedonistic rich.

It had all the essentials of a Roman town, with a forum at one end,

and at the other an amphitheatre and training ground for gladiators.

A market, temples, baths, even a brothel.

Perhaps 12,000 people packed into less than a square mile.

Pompeii lies between the Mediterranean and Vesuvius.

It's 17 miles along the coast from Naples, not far from Herculaneum,

and it's in a suburb of Pompeii,

Oplontis, where the cellar of skeletons was unearthed.

It must have seemed a sensible place to come.

It's partly underground and that would have seemed safe,

but it's got good access from the road outside.

It's very hard not to be...

moved by this site.

They might be 2,000 years old

but they're still victims of a terrible human tragedy.

On the other hand, I can't help wondering

what these bones might tell us about the life of these people.

The first thing we can tell from the cellar

is that these people appear to be divided into two groups.

On one side they were carrying money and jewels.

These bodies have been catalogued and tidied away into boxes.

The others, left where they fell, were found with nothing.

So how can we explain this divide?

You could come up with all kinds of theories as to why it might be.

But for my money the most likely thing is that we're dealing with a distinction in wealth.

These skeletons are important

because many of the bones found at Pompeii have simply been jumbled up.

And the plaster casts, they're very poignant, but are much less useful

for forensic science because the bones inside get contaminated.

Remains preserved like those in the cellar

exactly where the people died are rare.

For the first time,

these are going to be analysed by a forensic team, led by Fabian Kanz.

So far we have found at least 54 individuals here, at least,

and this gives us a broad cross section of the society

of the Romans at that time.

The point is we have a great opportunity here because we have a snapshot of the society.

We might have slaves, we might have upper class people,

and we can find out if there have been big differences.

One of the most complete skeletons is that of a man of about 55.

Apart from some dental cavities he seems in pretty good nick.

If you look at the other bones, I noticed this.

I don't know much about skeletons but that looks to me like

something that's got a real big muscle attachment.

Yes, it's the right upper arm,

and it's the muscle attachment for the brachialis,

and as you can see on the left side, it's nearly the same.

And he must be a really strong man.

He's my age, he's got about as good teeth as me, but he's much stronger.

These are the rest of his bones, but why are his bones green?

Yes, you're right. On the whole left side he's green.

And green comes from metal objects, which means he was wealthy.

There was some bronze or copper

or brass objects buried with him.

He had a considerable amount of metal wealth with him.

Yes, the acid in the soil is reacting with the metal object

and that makes him green.

Nearly all of the so-called rich sample, have been at least one or two bones green.

So they all have been buried close to something metal.

Whereas what we call the poor, do any of them have this green?

No, not at all.

Carrying no possessions at all, the bones of the people on one side are unmarked.

But, on the other side of the cellar, the people with green bones

were discovered with a dazzling array of objects.

These are now kept in a guarded vault

at the archaeological museum in Naples.

For the very first time I've been allowed to get really

close to this amazing stuff, and actually get my hands on it.

Look, this is really exciting for me.

This is the first time I have even touched any jewellery from Pompeii.

I am going got be very naughty, and put the bracelet on.

However cynical you are, however much a boring old academic you are,

it's still exciting to wear the bracelet worn 2,000 years ago.

Nothing will ever stop me thinking that's exciting.

I think this is very attractive, actually.

You pick it up, you can feel instantly it's heavy. This is a solid bangle.

But what strikes you about it, instantly, is that it's so big.

It's not only women that wear bracelets,

this could be man's jewellery, a big hunky man.

This is really is a very, very delicate piece of jewellery.

They told specifically that I'm not allowed to try this one on.

The links are really tiny.

It's very high-quality workmanship, very nicely done.

It must've been, it would be very pricey now,

it must have been pricey then, too.

There was a vast treasure horde in the cellar.

Close to the skeleton of the man with green bones,

was a woman in her early twenties.

She had with her

one of the very, very biggest amounts of money found with anybody,

anywhere in Pompeii.

In Roman currency, it was 10,000 sesterces.

What that means is it's about the equivalent

of 10 year's pay for a legionary Roman soldier.

These are some of the coins.

Some were in silver, but a lot were in gold.

And she had them with her in two separate containers.

Instantly you can see

the silver ones are very worn.

These actually have been

money in circulation. These are for actually buying things in the Pompeian market place.

But the gold ones are in absolutely beautiful condition.

I think what this tells us is these really have been somebody's savings.

You can imagine very easily what must have happened, that the people were fleeing,

they wanted to take their valuables with them, they get the purse,

they stuff what's most important to them, these things.

They stuff it inside the purse, put it in their pocket and off they go.

This is what the people in the cellar chose to take with them

as they tried to escape.

They sought refuge from the eruption in what was probably an underground storeroom.

They never made it further than this cellar in Oplontis.

The building above the cellar appears, at first,

like a two-storey, residential home.

But, if you explore a little further,

you see that much more was going on.

There's a large building with two floors of storerooms,

piles of big containers and wheel ruts made by hundreds of carts.

This was clearly more than somebody's house.

This is an agricultural depot.

It's ghostly now.

In Roman times, it must have been an absolute hub of activity with people

packing things up, carting things, wheeling them off,

getting them ready for despatch.

Whoever owned this place must have been pretty wealthy.

But he wasn't anything like as wealthy as one of his neighbours,

because just over there, few yards form this place,

is one of the most luxurious villas

ever found in all of the Roman world.

The cellar is only a stone's throw from this stunning Roman mansion.

100 rooms, decorated with sumptuous frescos, painted with pigments from

the farthest corners of the Roman empire.

And to top it all, an Olympic-size 200-foot-long swimming pool,

where the guests could let their hair down.

So, while the rich frolicked at their pool parties,

what was life like on the streets of Pompeii?

What I used to...

Mattia Buondonno's family has lived in Pompeii for generations

and he's one of the site's most experienced guides.

He's got a local sense of how this place might once have been.

What's your sense of what the ancient town was like, the basics, what was life like here?

Smell!

Smell of the people, smell of the activities of

commerciality that was here, smell on everywhere,

smelling on money.

And the smell of the animals too, presumably.

- Yes! - And just think of the smell of the shit.

- Yes! - Awful!

For them was normal life.

To get an idea of Pompeii

as the people in the cellar would have seen it, I've come to Naples.

Though it's a modern city,

there are some striking similarities with the ancient town nearby.

- So, you could feel yourself in Pompeii. - Here? - Yes. - Why?

Because more or less, the atmosphere, the first floor,

and the busy town...

It's easy to forget that Pompeii was a two-storey town.

People lived above their shops and bars and stairs opened

right onto the streets, just as they do in Naples today.

I think people often wonder where all the stuff was in a Pompeian shop or a bar.

What this tells you is that you can actually hang it from the ceiling...

Like they did 2,000 years ago, as this painting shows us.

All around modern Naples are echoes of Pompeii's past.

From the doors, just like the ones you see in Pompeian frescos.

- There are things like this in Pompeii, are they? - Oh yes, they had! They had!

- Careful, because we don't want the owner to come. - OK, we can get out.

To the images they left on their walls.

I think the graffiti is pretty Pompeian.

The Pompeian graffiti were better than this.

Yes, they were wittier. Wittier, I think.

Ah! That's very Pompeian, is it?

No, Pompeii was cleaner.

- Pompeii was cleaner than that? - Yeah.

You really think so?

Mattia, you don't, do you?

So we can find all kinds of clues

as to how ancient Pompeians lived in modern Naples.

But what can the bones from the cellar

add to the picture of their lives?

This looks quite ordinary to me. This is the leg bone?

This is the lower part of the leg bone and if you compare it to

this bone, it's swollen and you can see all these little holes.

- And what is that? - This is an infection of the skin and the bone.

A possible reason for this might be a cut, is one explanation for it.

So, you get a cut, you haven't got any antiseptic...