Herculaneum

Despite its inferior setting, Herculaneum offers many advantages that Pompeii lacks: a smaller and more digestible site, more complete individual houses and, best of all, fewer tourists. The elegance of the houses, and their decoration, owe much to the taste of the descendants of the original Greek inhabitants. The eruption of Vesuvius in 79AD appeared to have spared the town, and so the devastation caused by the mud slide that followed was all the more terrible. It buried the town under a mixture of mud, lava and ash to the unbelievable height of 65 feet.