Rome and Pompeii: a peerless capital whose history is universally known, and a thriving provincial city, its image enshrined in its remains at the tragic instant of catastrophe. An exhibition and a catalogue that offer an unprecedented view of the relationship, still relevant, between two socio-political spheres, the capital and its province.

With the exhibition Pompeii 79 AD. A Roman History and its catalogue, the purpose is to use materials with an outstanding historical content and great visual impact to reconstruct relations between the capital and the provincial city, common to all great state formations both in the past and the contemporary world. A relationship in which Rome was dominant ever since the full republican age. It began as a first phase of alliance, in which Pompeii, like most of the Italic world, supported Rome in its conquest of the East, receiving immense quantities of slaves, plunder and other resources that generated an agrarian and manufacturing economy capable of exporting products across the whole Mediterranean area. In this phase the wealth and luxury of the capital’s aristocracy expanded into the periphery, which sometimes even surpassed the levels of the centre. Later, during the 1st century BC, the convulsions that shook the whole Peninsula reduced Pompeii to the status of a Roman colony. The story of this second phase reveals a periphery that eagerly followed the model of the centre, without ever being able to match its splendour. Finally decline overtook the whole peninsula and Pompeii in particular, in the short period between the devastating earthquake of 62 AD and its tragic end in the eruption of 79 AD.