Pompeii Is Limiting the Number of Tourists Who Can Visit the Site
The archeological park is the latest attraction trying to curb overtourism.
We usually hear complaints about overtourism from a city’s residents, recently in places like Amsterdam, Venice, or Barcelona, where locals got so frustrated with tourists they whipped out spray guns. But the latest site to curb overtourism is totally unpopulated. Beginning November 15 if you want to enter Pompeii Archaeological Park, you’ll have to be one of the first 20,000 to try.
Obviously that’s still a massive number, and you’ll probably get in. According to a spokesperson, attendance averages around 15,000, meaning people would only get turned away on the busiest days. But the attendance cap follows after the number of visitors surged, with 2023 attendance numbers breaking pre-Covid records at over 4 million. Records were broken again this October, when 36,000 people visited on one day. That was the first Sunday in October, when entrance was free.
The bigger numbers also brings a greater likelihood of bad behavior, like when a Kazakh tourist was caught carving his name, “Ali,” into a building in the protected UNESCO Heritage site, and was fined for damages and restoration work. Or when a British tourist did the same thing to another Pompeii building a couple months later, except he said the initials he carved belonged to his daughters.
“We are working on a series of projects to mitigate anthropogenic pressure on the site, which can be a risk both for people, for example in the event of an earthquake, and for the heritage, which is so unique and fragile,” Pompeii Archaeological Park director Gabriel Zuchtriegel has said.
Volcanoes have also become tourist destinations in themselves. And why not? These massive rumbling beasts with lives churning below the surface are fascinating. People travel everywhere from Sicily to Iceland just to get a glimpse of the slow molten lava that, on rare and terrible occasions, obliterates everything in its path with shocking speed. Such was the case with 1,150 citizens in the Italian city of Pompeii, frozen in time in ash and rubble. The eruption that destroyed them also preserved them.
And of course people want to see the current dusty tableau of a city they lived in, a time capsule of the final moments after Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE exploded in smoke, ash, and toxic vapor, in an eruption lasting two days. About a third of the site has yet to be excavated and it continues to the closest archaeologists can get to reconstructing daily Roman life. New DNA evidence is also correcting false narratives of these ancient actors. Despite all odds, Pompeii is constantly evolving.
With this new system, tickets will be personalized with your name and, beginning April 1, time slots will be introduced. The cap comes shortly after a new 5 Euro entry fee for the Pantheon, put in place in 2023, and the endorsement of Rome’s Mayor Roberto Gualtieri of a 2 Euro entry fee to visit the Trevi Fountain, currently undergoing restoration (which would make for some pricey wishes).
If you do for some reason get turned away, might we suggest the nearby town of Herculaneum, a smaller city buried in the same eruption but a much less popular attraction, and doable in a couple of hours. Or you can visit one of those Italian volcanoes that’s constantly rumbling, and always putting on a smoke show. Just watch out if she decides to blow.