This is a thought-provoking and wide-ranging work, bringing together such diverse subjects as changing attitudes to Pompeii's erotic material and the excavations' impact on 19th-century Italy's emerging political identity. Its often-surprising insights shed new light on this most familiar of sites.

• 1. Introduction: Ruins and Reconstructions ; 2. A Tamed 'desire for images': Goethe's Repeated Approaches to Pompeii ; 3. Ruined Waking Thoughts: William Beckford as a Visitor to Pompeii ; 4. Making History: Pliny's Letters to Tacitus and Angelica Kauffman's 'Pliny and his Mother at Misenum' ; 5. Site, Sight, and Symbol: Pompeii and Vesuvius in 'Corinne, or Italy' ; 6. Bulwer-Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii: Recreating the City ; 7. Objects of Affection: Necromantic Pathos in Bulwer-Lytton's City of the Dead ; 8. Delusion and Dream in Theophile Gautier's 'Arria Marcella: Souvenir de Pompei' ; 9. Archaeology Meets Fantasy: Chasseriau's Pompeii in Nineteenth-Century Paris ; 10. Italian Classical Revival Painters and the 'Southern Question' ; 11. Cities of the Dead ; 12. Christians and Jews at Pompeii in Late Nineteenth-Century Fiction ; 13. Rocks, Ghosts and Footprints: Freudian Archaeology ; 14. On the Edge of the Volcano: 'The Last Days of Pompeii' in the Early American Republic ; 15. Experiencing The Last Days of Pompeii in Late Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia ; 16. In Search of Lost Time and Pompeii ; 17. Excavation Photographs and the Imagining of Pompeii's Streets: Vittorio Spinazzola and the Via dell'Abbondanza ; 18. The Getty Villa: Art, Architecture, and Aristocratic Self-Fashioning in the Mid-Twentieth Century ; 19. Pompeii in Roberto Rossellini's 'Journey to Italy' ; 20. The Censorship Myth and the Secret Museum ; 21. Modern Tourists, Ancient Sexualities: Looking at Looking in Pompeii's Brothel and the Secret Cabinet ; 22. Writing Pompeii: An Interview with Robert Harris ; 23. Pompeii, the Holocaust, and World War Two ; 24. Pompeii and the Cambridge Latin Course ; 25. Ruins and Forgetfulness: The Case of Herculaneum