Octavius lived here*

He must have been wealthy. He must have had a high status. Friends would come to call, to admire this decorative well in his house. Octavius Quartio enjoyed life on a pedestrian street from which rattling carts were banned, in one of the richer and more exclusive areas of Pompeii. And he died, horribly, in the sudden democracy of death brought about by the eruption of Vesuvius, the mountain that had always been there.

We first visited Pompeii 21 years ago. Since then it has grown as archaeologists excavated more and more of the city - yesterday (I’m writing this on Tuesday morning) we only recognised a couple of places we’d seen before, and one of these was the Forum. But what has grown even more since then is the number of visitors. I’ll not go on about it, but it has become almost impossible to think, to reflect, to imagine in the way we did the first time, and the increased area of streets, shops, houses, baths - it makes little difference in terms of the great herds of gaping tourists preoccupied with not losing their guide.

We lost ours for about five minutes as her voice receded and crackled and then vanished in our earphones as we cast about the street with its great stones slippy with dust and furrowed with the ruts made by cart- wheels, until we saw at the far end of a miraculously empty road of bakeries and fast food shops her yellow umbrella and pink shirt. As we hurried to catch her, I had a moment to think of that other hurrying under a hail of hot ash …

The visit ended for us with a sandwich supplied by the hotel because of our early start, eating leaning on a wall outside the site before we walked the modern street to the bus-park. The drive back to our hotel- one of the last of the drop-offs, was even more terrifying than the outward trip - the traffic is horrendous . We spent the rest of the day drinking tea, sitting in the sun, reading, recovering.

And all through dinner, far below us in a wooded gorge that divides the city, a peacock screamed.

* The house is known, apparently erroneously, as the House of Loreius Tibertinus.