On a recent morning at the necropolis of Porta Sarno, just outside Pompeii’s eastern edge, Mattia Buondonno gingerly raised a protective tarp covering a tomb discovered last year. According to the inscription on the tomb’s pediment, its occupant was a freed slave named Marcus Venerius Secundio, who became rich and “organized performances in Greek and Latin that lasted four days,” Buondonno, a Pompeii tour guide, read, translating from the Latin.

Inside the tomb, believed to date to just decades before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that smothered Pompeii in AD 79, archaeologists had discovered one of the best preserved skeletons ever found. “It’s odd for that time. Normally adults were cremated,” Buondonno said.