Gabriel Zuchtreigel, Director of Pompeii: Archaeology is the most democratic form of history

The Interview

BBC

News, Government, Politics

4.3 • 537 Ratings

🗓️ 12 January 2026

⏱️ 23 minutes

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Summary

Michael Berkeley speaks to Gabriel Zuchtreigel, Director of Pompeii in Southern Italy, one of the world’s most important archaeological sites.

History, he says, comes alive through archaeology, helping us to appreciate our shared humanity with those who lived thousands of years ago, and providing a more democratic way of learning about the past. Mount Vesuvius, the volcano that erupted and buried Pompeii in ash and pumice, did not distinguish between the wealthy and the poor in its victims.

Gabriel Zuchtriegel was appointed Director of Pompeii in 2021, and has since begun a major excavation, and made a number of significant finds. But it is walking around the site at night, emptied of the crowds, that he feels the ancient city come alive. It is as if, he says, the inhabitants only left a few minutes ago.

The Interview brings you conversations with people shaping our world, from all over the world. The best interviews from the BBC, including with artist Doris Salcedo and author Sir Salman Rushdie. You can listen on the BBC World Service on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 0800 GMT. Or you can listen to The Interview as a podcast, out three times a week on BBC Sounds or wherever you get your podcasts.

Presenter: Michael Berkeley Producers: Clare Walker and Lucy Sheppard Editor: Justine Lang

Get in touch with us on email TheInterview@bbc.co.uk and use the hashtag #TheInterviewBBC on social media.

(Image: Gabriel Zuchtreigel Credit: Ivan Romano/Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts.
0:05.9	Hello, I'm Michael Barclay, BBC presenter, and this is the interview from the BBC World Service,
0:13.5	the best conversations coming out of the BBC, people shaping our world from all over the world.
0:20.8	Today we are spending trillions on war and peanuts on peace. Wind power. people shaping our world from all over the world.
0:24.3	Today we are spending trivians on war and peanuts on peace.
0:27.8	Wind power in the United States has been subsidized for 33 years.
0:31.2	Isn't that enough? Solar for 25 years. That's enough.
0:37.2	I don't have army. I don't have missile rockets. I have my body. I have my voice.
0:41.3	I love singing and so my goal was always to do better and better at it.
0:46.2	I was still in an induced coma in hospital when the world was defining me.
0:50.4	For this interview, I met Gabriel Zuchriegel,
0:56.2	director of one of the world's most important archaeological sites, Pompeii and southern Italy,
1:02.6	the ancient Roman city that was buried in ash and pumice, when nearby Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79. You're going to hear about the power of archaeology to teach us about our
1:10.4	past in the way the written records
1:12.7	cannot. How did enslaved people live? How did, you know, prostitutes live? How did the poor
1:19.8	live? How did their apartments and houses look? That's something where the written sources are
1:26.4	really, really scarce and tell us very little.
1:30.6	But in Pompeii, you get everything.
1:32.8	And so you can try to reconstruct the society as a whole
1:37.3	and also make some assumptions on the numbers and the social stratification.
1:44.8	In this conversation, Gabriel Zuchtregel also tells me about the lengths people will go
1:49.4	to steal artifacts from Pompey, as well as the rumoured curse that sits upon anyone who does so,
	...

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