ON a ravishing afternoon in early May, Museum Victoria director Patrick Greene picked his way along the fire-scorched stones of the city where on August 24, AD79, time stopped dead.

The British archeologist made his first visit to Pompeii, a 44,000sqm slice of lost time that has only recently begun to show its age, in a spirit of professional homage. But he returned in May as something of a power in the archeological world, for next year Greene willbring Pompeii, or at least a good slice of it, toMelbourne.

Italian authorities, pledging to repair degraded buildings and improve tourist facilities, this month declared a state of emergency at the UNESCO World Heritage site, located near Naples, raising the possibility that Pompeii the touring show will be a marked improvement on Pompeii the tourist destination.

As the afternoon crowds thinned and Greene strolled in the shadow of the volcano's shattered cone through the remains of richly decorated villas, bath houses, communal latrines and temples to deities Venus and Isis, Jupiter and Jove -- the chaotic jumble of Roman culture high and low -- he found himself viewing the ruined city with an eye to his Australian audience.

"Roman olive oil and wine everyone knows about," he says. "But the citizens of Pompeii were also fond of a fish sauce made from the crushed and fermented intestines of anchovy and eel, which they sloshed on their food vigorously. Think of it perhaps as Roman ketchup or Vegemite. In fact it probably divided the population in a similar way."

As Greene made his way along streets whose narrowness often surprises the visitor, the remains of Pompeii's takeaway food shops and numerous taverns brought to mind Melbourne's lively bar culture, while the graffiti and election slogans that daub the city's walls evoked a boisterous public spirit. Pompeii may be a dead city but it is certainly not silent.

"It's also clear that the people were obsessed with gladiatorial contests and sport," Greene says. "We have our own version of those called the AFL. In fact, the spectacles were followed with such passion that the stadium was closed down for 10 years by the civic authorities following a riot between fans."

The sickening violence of the blood sports was peculiarly Roman, Greene adds, but the intense tribalism they provoked among the citizenry "brings us right up to the present".

The people of Pompeii also enjoyed a distinctly liberal attitude to what we would regard as pornography: adorning the city walls are outsized phalluses and renderings of lovers, including a fornicating faun and goat. Some of this was designed to please a restricted circle of connoisseurs, but from classical Greek times on, the elephantine phalluses were as common as garden gnomes, of a particularly arresting kind.

More than any other Graeco-Roman archeological site, the Vesuvian cities invite parallels with the art of photojournalism, for what we see here is the classical world stripped bare. For centuries after the rediscovery of Greek and Roman antiquity in the mid-to-late 18th century, bone-white temple friezes and antique statuary fuelled the dreams of philhellenes and shaped the tastes of the European aristocracy. But along with the decorative arts, Pompeii offers up the everyday: the brothels, pie stands and a lively entertainment district.

Like some macabre paparazzo, Vulcan the city's destroyer feeds our vouyeuristic tastes. Priests, plebs and at least one aristocratic woman, who seems to have been carrying on with a gladiator, are preserved in their final moments. The tragedy offers truth in its awful clarity and at great human cost. It is reality archeology.

This sense of gritty realism makes Pompeii a story with a unique appeal to modern tastes, while placing it at the centre of a broad-based revival of interest in classical antiquity. As Greene acknowledges, a recent museum audience poll found that Melburnians were more interested in the ancient world than any other subject, even dinosaurs. They are not alone: the core of the Pompeii exhibition is now touring the US.

At the same time, contemporary culture is awash with specialist, generalist and fictional treatments of Pompeii, Roman civilisation and its Greek precursor. In schools, too, ancient history is on the rise. More students in NSW study the ancient world than the modern. At the universities of Sydney and Melbourne classics are booming at a time when the traditional humanities are on the wane. The pulse of a seemingly dead subject is steady and strong. The classical world, yet again, is being reborn.

One of those contributing to the surge in classical curiosity is the superintendent of Pompeii, Pier Giovanni Guzzo, from whose office the touring exhibition originates. The Melbourne show, set to open in June next year, will differ from the US one, he says, by focusing much more intently on daily life. Though they share the same title, A Day in Pompeii, the American exhibition is more heavily slanted to the tragic narrative of AD79: the death and destruction of a city.

Author of an important book on the Vesuvian cities, Storia e paesaggi della citta antica, Guzzo inhabits a darkened, book-crammed and pipe smoke-filled room on the excavation site at Pompeii. His bright, slightly wild eyes sparkle above a donnish beard as he explains how the intellectual and popular strands of the Pompeii story intersect to "make sensation".

For Guzzo the ruins at Pompeii, Herculaneum and nearby Stabiae, Boscoreale and Oplontis -- in antiquity the Bay of Naples was one long crescent of habitation -- contain "all the ancient material" snap-frozen in time. If not for the work of antiquities hunters 17 centuries later, nothing would have been disturbed. In contrast, ancient cities with continuous civilisations, such as Rome, Athens and Istanbul, are great archeological layer cakes. "Even the pope in Rome used the ancient marble for his palace," Guzzo adds.

The site has also been what Guzzo calls a fixed point in the European cultural imagination: a mecca for writers such as Goethe, Chateaubriand and Shelley, a must-see on the Grand Tour and an inspiration for artists and designers, ceramicists and architects. Its discovery contributed to the birth of neoclassicism, the mania of the Napoleonic court and the inspiration for regency style. "It was on the minds of the cultured peopleof England," Guzzo says. "And England madeAustralia."

But there is a more basic side to the Pompeii experience, which the superintendent expresses simply in his no-frills English, assisted by muchNeapolitan agitation of the hands: "Death -- at Pompeii there are many morti -- is anemotion. A universal emotion. Si. And a personal emotion."

Pompeii not only illuminates the refined and the vulgar, the elite and the plebeian, upstairs and downstairs, it unites these social strata through the democracy of death.

Where nearby Herculaneum was swallowed whole by a slow-moving stream of liquid fire that allowed most of its citizens to escape, Pompeii's end came with a great groaning of the earth followed by the roar of the eruption and then, after a time, a clatter of volcanic pumice and ash. Next came the volcano's poisonous breath, air made viscous with dust and ash, and the crashing columns and masonry. Some of the citizenry were simply trampled to death in the pitch dark. In all, about 2000 people are believed to have perished, one-tenth of the city's population.

For Greene, among the most poignant objects disinterred from Pompeii are the plaster body casts of the victims caught in their death throes: a mother and her daughter, a girl clutching a mirror, a man and his dog, a beggar with surprisingly good quality sandals.

In 1864 the head of excavations realised that the lava had embraced the form of its victims so snugly that it preserved their most intimate contours, in some instances even the delineations of pubic hair. By filling the cavity formed after the body's decomposition with liquid plaster the dead could be re-animated, in a sense, and an August day in the 79th year of the Christian era brought back to life.

"As an archeologist I find these casts extraordinary," Greene offers, "and as a museum director particularly challenging. We're familiar with terrible pictures of China and the human dimension of that catastrophe. These allow us to see Pompeii not just as a buried ruin but as a human tragedy."

According to Steven Ellis, a University of Sydney-trained archeologist and assistant professor of classics at the University of Cincinnati who has been involved in the US version of A Day in Pompeii, the exhibition's fresh slant on ancient urbanity explains something of its attraction.

"We all live in cities and can relate to the experience of walking its streets, looking into windows, stopping for a drink, watching the world go by," says Ellis, who completed a doctoral thesis on Pompeii's wine bars. "And this explains why people from China, North Africa, Australia and Europe all respond to the experience ofPompeii. Compare it to the Egyptian pyramids, for example, which are much more of an alien experience."

At the same time, Ellis observes that US audiences at the exhibition have been much more interested in the death of Pompeii than its vivid and flourishing life. Whether this is the psychic aftershock of 9/11 or an expectation fuelled by too many Hollywood disaster films, he will not say. And yet violence and destruction are, he admits, "part of the story's mass appeal".

As joint leader of an American dig at Pompeii's Stabian Gate, Ellis is working at the leading edge of archeology there. He describes how previous generations had released the site from its aspic of volcanic material, halting their excavations at the floor level. But the latest work is an archeological journey down through Pompeii's own ground zero into its early history, and a reconstruction of the forces that shaped the city.

"We've gone past the floor layer to find out how shops, houses, workshops and businesses worked," he says. "In one of our sites we've been able to see how on adjoining buildings one family thrived economically while the other went into decline. The wealthier family actually expands on to its neighbour's land, opening up a restaurant there. We find the remains of all sorts of foodstuffs: in effect, the menu.

"This included many types of fish, pigs killed quite young, and something very curious: a knee bone that nobody could identify. We had to take it to an archeological zoologist. It turned out to be the remains of a giraffe that may have been shown in the spectacles and later butchered."

Meanwhile, ongoing excavations at nearby Oplontis, Boscoreale and Stabiae are widening our contemporary gaze to the luxurious mansions of the Roman elite. In fact, these were some of the first structures to be excavated under the Bourbon monarchy that ruled Naples in the 1750s, but with the discovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum they became, in effect, sideshows.

Last year, an exhibition of frescoes from the luxurious villas of Stabiae opened at the Hermitage in St Petersburg, and Greene is considering whether to incorporate some of these art works into A Day in Pompeii.

The Australian Museum in Sydney is also considering a show for 2011-12 put together with the help of Guzzo's office and titled In Stabiano: Exploring the Ancient Seaside Villas of the Roman Elite.

Stabiae has a unique part in the Vesuvian story as it was on the beach here that the natural historian Pliny the Elder -- who in AD79 led the Roman fleet towards the conflagration in an attempt to rescue local worthies, and also simply to eyeball the phenomenon -- succumbed to smoke, fumes and exhaustion. His last moments are immortalised in a famous letter from his nephew Pliny the Younger to the Roman historian Tacitus. It records the "umbrella pine" of cloud erupting from Vesuvius, the "broad sheets of fire and leaping flames" spreading across the mountain's flanks, the shower of ash and pumice, the sulphurous fumes and, above all, the fear and confusion.

Angela Vinci, director of exhibitions at the Restoring Ancient Stabiae Foundation, looks each morning on to the beach where Pliny met his fate from her apartment at Castellammare di Stabia. She is keenly aware that whereas the travelling exhibitions focused on Pompeii are concerned with the life and death of a city, the unique concentration of luxury villas found at Stabiae offers a more rarified experience of Roman high art. "They are about six and all are set on the edge of a cliff, facing the sea," she says. "It is only possible to visit part of three of them as the site is just partially excavated: we are really living the excitement of discovery and continuously updating our knowledge of them.

"In these villas the owners did not just spend their time with public activities or business, but cultivated their own personal cultural inclinations, depending on their personalities and their intellectual curiosity. An effort was made to arrange the villas with rooms and spaces adapted for conversation and entertainment and the walls were decorated with stimulating conversational subject matter.

"When completely excavated, each villa will be a kind of essay on Roman painting," she adds.

As the cities and villas destroyed by Vesuvius continue to yield their secrets, the impression grows of our fraternity with ancient Rome. Pompeii is at once a disaster film, a piece of photojournalism, a work of reality archeology, a city like ours, inhabited by people like us. The parallels even carry into our political discussions, in which the US figures as the new Rome on the cusp of its calamitous fall: Romans-R-Us.

But Salvatore Settis, director of the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and author most recently of The Future of the Classical, warns that our fraternal instincts towards this ancient civilisation are seriously flawed because they assume affinities, taking them for granted. "Thereby we are in the process of creating a fast-food antiquity, easy to deal with because it mirrors our own world," he says.

The discontinuity between the first century Roman world and our own is, ultimately, just as important as the continuity. For in many ways the ghosts of Pompeii are our ancestors. But in many others -- not least in their appetite for blood sports, their tolerance of slavery and the quaint uses to which they put phallic imagery -- they remain perfect strangers.