Skip the Line Pompeii Guided Tour from Sorrento

Follow your guide through the site of Pompeii. You will discover the Forum, that was the heart of Pompeii and surrounded by important public buildings, including the Basilica, the Temple of Jupiter, and the Macellum (food market), the Forum provides insights into the civic life of Pompeii.

The Large Theatre was built by exploiting the natural slope of the hill for the construction of the auditorium. The staircase was separated into three areas with corridors, which were in turn divided into five sectors, and was based on a passage with a barrel vault. It was built around the middle of the 2nd century BC and significantly restored according to the Roman stlye. An inscription, visible at the entrance of the corridor that provides access to the east and that is one of the very few representations known with reference to the name of the architects, recalls the works carried out in the Augustan age by Marcus Artorius Primus.

The Civil Forum is the core of daily life of the city and is the focal point of all the main public buildings for city administration and justice, business management, and trade activities such as markets, as well as the main places of citizen worship.

The Basilica, with its extension of 1,500 square metres, was the most sumptuous building of the Forum, and its space was used to carry out business and for the administration of justice. It is accessed from the Forum through five entrances separated by tuff pillars; inside it is divided into three naves with two rows of brick columns with Ionic capitals. A richly decorated suggestum, where judges sat while judicial affairs were managed, is located at the centre of the short western side.

The Macellum consists of a tuff quadriporticus with a hall for worship in an elevated position on the eastern side, in line with the entrance. The copies of two marble statues, a female and a male armed, are found on the niches of the side wall, together with the fragment of a larger statue, probably pertaining to an emperor, Titus or Vespasian, indicating how this area was intended for the imperial cult. To its left is a room for meetings of a sacred board and to the right a large room with a masonry counter perhaps for fish to be sold.

The Stabian baths, which date back to the 2nd century BC, are among the oldest we know of the Roman world. The main entrance on via dell'Abbondanza leads to a large courtyard. The pool is found to the left, whereas a colonnade is found to the right, which leads to the men's quarters, which are split into the apodyterium (dressing room), with the frigidarium (for cold baths), which leads to the tepidarium (for medium temperature baths) and then to the calidarium (for hot baths). The heating was guaranteed by a piping system in the walls and double floors that circulated the hot air coming from the furnaces and from mobile braziers.

They stretch on the western side of the Forum with eight openings separated by brick pillars and were used as for the fruit and vegetable market (Forum Holitorium). Today they form the greatest archaeological inventory of the city and have more than 9000 artefacts from the excavations in Pompeii and its territory since the end of the 19th century. They preserve the terracotta crockery that was used in the last decades of life of the city for every day activities, such as pots and pans for cooking, jugs and bottles, and amphorae, large containers used to transport oil, wine and fish sauce throughout the Mediterranean.