In Pompeii, ancient graffiti depicting everyday life has been revealed thanks to modern technology

Two thousand years before anyone called it street art, the people of Pompeii were already there: scratching jokes, insults to enemies, declarations of love and dirty graffiti on the walls of the city.

Now, in a small corridor that once joined two theaters, an international team of researchers used advanced digital imaging to work to decipher the paintings that were worn until they were accessible, and found 79 never-before-seen documents.

The findings come from a project called Bruits de couloir (Corridor Whispers) — edited by Louis Autin and Éloïse Letellier-Taillefer of the Sorbonne University in Paris, and Marie-Adeline Le Guennec, professor of ancient Roman history at the Université du Québec à Montréal.

Letellier-Taillefer, an archaeologist studying the theaters of Pompeii, said when he passed through Le Guennec how impressed he was by the number of inscriptions in the passage. Le Guennec, who was completing his PhD on ancient Roman inns, was also struck by how similar they were to drawings of workers’ quarters. The two decided to continue investigating graffiti as a popular form of communication.

That conversation led to two rounds of fieldwork. In 2022 and 2025, the group produced extensive re-readings of some 300 inscriptions on the walls of the corridor, as well as 79 new discoveries – including an intimate piece that was almost lost: a declaration of love to a man named Erato.

“Erato’s graffiti is fragmentary, so we don’t know who really loves Erato. Unfortunately, the name of his lover was destroyed by time,” said Le Guennec.

Erato was one of the nine muses in Greek and Roman mythology and associated with romantic poetry. In ancient Rome, it meant “beloved.”

“It’s a name that freedmen or slaves would have,” he said, “because slaves were often baptized by owners with strange names, and Erato was one of them.”

This declaration is also expressed in the slang used by the Pompeiians, Le Guennec said.

The lives of ordinary people depicted in graffiti

The name scratched shows what graffiti and historical records and the remains of luxury houses often capture: the traces of the slaves, the poor and the common people who filled the ancient world so much.

Among the finds are gladiator fight scenes, statues and paintings of animals, ships and the ubiquitous phallus from around the Roman world.

“In Roman culture, sexual qualities were a symbol of prosperity and fecundity, so it is not unusual to find them in a humorous way, with some exaggeration,” said Le Guennec. “There’s a lot of sexual representation of women, too.”

Graffiti, he said, is also a window into class and gender in the ancient city. Women appear in inscriptions but are rarely honored posthumously and rarely as writers, he said – a peaceful measure of access to education.

Disaster struck Pompeii, near Naples in southern Italy, in AD 79, when Mount Vesuvius erupted, burying the ancient Roman city and its inhabitants under volcanic ash and pumice.

It is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and home to the Archaeological Park of Pompeii.

Lorna Bieber, a visitor from New York, said the hallway still feels strangely intimate.

“It’s interesting that ordinary people reacted the way people do now. That they were playful and rude and funny and wanted to leave their mark,” he said, “never think that hundreds and hundreds of years later, other people who did graffiti are looking at it.”

Corridor graphics revealed in a new way

The tunnel itself ran between Pompeii’s Teatro Grande, where audiences sat for hours of Greek-style drama, and the smaller Odeion, used for music and recitals. Spectators passed through it at halftime; commercial people pass through it to do business; soldiers, enslaved people and civilians depended on its walls. Its face is full of casual marks.

However, actually reading the marks has been a challenge. Many were so faint that earlier scholars had dismissed them as random bruises. The team’s breakthrough was an imaging technique called Reflectance Transformation Imaging or RTI.

A flat surface is photographed multiple times under variable illumination. A computer then converts the resulting shadows into a digital 3D model. Researchers can beam visible light into that area, and the inscriptions – invisible to the naked eye – leap into view with startling clarity.

The team worked at night, inside the corridor itself, using an RTI detection dome built by French imaging company Mercurio Imaging.

For Pompeii archaeologist Giuseppe Scarpati, who works on the site, the paintings on the corridor walls are a kind of map of the everyday world that surrounded them.

“Pompeii was closer to the coast 2,000 years ago than it is today, with ships constantly coming in and out of its port,” he said. “What people saw they drew.”

Throughout the extensive archaeological site, which has been uncovered for the past 230 years, more than 10,000 inscriptions have been recorded.

However, Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director general of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, calls the tunnel one of the most important places in the city that has ever been buried.

“It is a great help to close the ancient gaps,” he said.

Artificial intelligence was not used in the passage analysis. But Scarpati notes that the park recently used AI to render an image of the remains of a man who escaped the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 with a large terracotta bowl that he may have used to protect his head from the volcano’s collapse.

Scarpati said he is curious about what such tools might one day do in writing. “I can’t wait to see some of these graffiti brought to life by AI,” he said.

In June, the Bruits de couloir the team plans to launch a public digital platform that will integrate corridor photogrammetry with high-resolution RTI data and all epigraphic records.

Anyone with a screen will soon be able to step inside the ancient corridor and listen to its 2,000-year-old voice.