What has been dug up in Pompeii recently

A third of Pompeii is still buried, and the part being worked on right now — insula 10 of Regio IX, along Via di Nola — has produced the most striking finds in a generation. None of it is in the printed guidebooks yet, and much of it has no sign on site either.

The Black Room

Announced in April 2024: a banqueting hall roughly fifteen metres by six, with walls painted black and mythological scenes from the Trojan War set against them — Helen and Paris, Cassandra. The black was practical rather than moody. These rooms were used after dark, lit by oil lamps, and black walls did not show the soot. The archaeologists also noted the effect the flickering lamps had on the figures, which appeared to move.

The Dionysian frieze

Announced in February 2025 and the most significant of the group: a megalography, a frieze of near life-size figures running round three walls of a large hall, showing the initiation rites of Dionysus. Nothing on this scale had come out of Pompeii since the Villa of the Mysteries, roughly a century earlier — which is the comparison the park itself reached for.

The blue shrine

A small sacrarium in the same insula, remarkable because the whole room is finished in Egyptian blue. That pigment was expensive and normally used sparingly, on details; a room entirely covered in it says something about who lived there.

The bakery

Less beautiful and more revealing. A bakery in the same block, with windows barred with iron and no exit to the street, where enslaved people and blindfolded donkeys turned the mills. It is the clearest surviving picture of what the labour behind a Roman city actually looked like, and it sits a few metres from the painted rooms above.

Seeing it in person

Two practical warnings. First, access to active excavation areas rotates: rooms open and close week to week, and nothing here is guaranteed on the day you visit. Check the park’s announcements shortly before you go rather than relying on any article, including this one.

Second, signage in the new areas is minimal to absent. Regio IX sits in the northern part of the site along Via di Nola, well away from the Forum, and it is entirely possible to walk past the whole thing without realising what you are looking at.

Updated 2026-09-10