Magnificent thermal baths designed to be the jewel of Pompeii but destroyed by a volcanic eruption before they could be completed opened to visitors for the first time on Monday after a painstaking excavation. Marble pillars and blocks lie where they were abandoned when the city was submerged by pyroclastic flow from Mount Vesuvius in the 79 AD disaster.

But excavators also found a victim of the disaster, the skeleton of a child who had sought shelter there in vain. The architects "were inspired by Emperor Nero's thermal baths in Rome. The rooms here were to be bigger and lighter, with marble pools," the archaeological site's director Massimo Osanna told AFP.