Two millennia before anyone called it street art, the people of Pompeii were already at it: scratching jokes, insults of enemies, declarations of love and raunchy drawings into the city walls.
Now, in a narrow corridor that once joined two theatres, an international research team has put advanced digital imaging to work to decipher graffiti that had been worn to the edge of legibility, recovering 79 inscriptions never before seen.
The findings come from a project called Bruits de couloir (Corridor Whispers) — co-ordinated by Louis Autin and Éloïse Letellier-Taillefer of Sorbonne University in Paris, with Marie-Adeline Le Guennec, a professor of ancient Roman history at the Université du Québec à Montréal.
Letellier-Taillefer, an archaeologist studying the theatres of Pompeii, mentioned in passing to Le Guennec how struck she was by the quantity of graffiti in the corridor. Le Guennec, who was finishing her PhD on ancient Roman inns, was in turn struck by how similar they were to graffiti in working-class accommodation. The two decided to further investigate graffiti as a form of popular communication.
That conversation led to two rounds of field work. In 2022 and 2025, the team produced a comprehensive rereading of some 300 inscriptions on the corridor’s walls, along with 79 new discoveries — including a near-lost fragment of intimacy: a declaration of love toward someone named Erato.
“The Erato graffiti is fragmentary, so we don’t know who actually loves Erato. Unfortunately the name of his or her lover was destroyed by time,” Le Guennec said.
Erato was one of the nine muses in Greco-Roman mythology and associated with love poetry. In ancient Rome, it meant “beloved.”
“It’s a name that freed people or slaves would have,” she said, “because slaves used to be rebaptized by owners with stereotypical names, and Erato was one of them.”
The declaration was also expressed in slang used by working-class Pompeiians, Le Guennec said.
Lives of ordinary people depicted in graffiti
The scrawled name reflects what graffiti capture and historical records and remnants of sumptuous villas often do not: traces of enslaved, impoverished and ordinary people that overwhelmingly populated the ancient world.
Among the findings are scenes of gladiator combat, portraits and drawings of animals, ships and the ubiquitous phallus that appears across the Roman world.
“In the Roman culture, sexual attributes were symbols of prosperity and fecundity, so it’s not unusual to find them in a more comical way, with some exaggeration,” Le Guennec said. “There’s a lot of feminine sexual representation, too.”
The graffiti, she said, is also a window onto class and gender in the ancient city. Women appear in the inscriptions but rarely in posthumous tributes and even rarer as authors, she said — a quiet measure of access to education.
Disaster struck Pompeii, located near Naples in southern Italy, in AD 79, when Mount Vesuvius erupted, burying the ancient Roman city and its residents under volcanic ash and pumice.
It is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and home to the Archaeological Park of Pompeii.
Lorna Bieber, a visitor from New York, said the corridor felt strangely close to the present.
“It’s wonderful that common people were reacting just the way that people do now. That they were playful and obscene and funny and wanting to leave their mark,” she said, “never imagining that hundreds and hundreds of years later, other people who have done graffiti are taking a look at it.”
Corridor’s drawings unearthed with new technique
The corridor itself ran between Pompeii’s Teatro Grande, where audiences sat through hours of Greek-style drama, and the smaller Odeion, used for music and recitations. Spectators passed through it during breaks; commercial people moved through it on errands; soldiers, enslaved people and citizens leaned against its walls. Its surface criss-crossed with the casual marks of them all.
Yet actually reading the marks has been challenging. Many were so faint that earlier scholars had dismissed them as random scratches. The team’s breakthrough was a photographic technique called Reflectance Transformation Imaging or RTI.
A flat surface is photographed dozens of times under shifting light. A computer then turns the resulting shadows into a 3D digital model. Researchers can move a virtual light across that surface, and the faint inscriptions — invisible to the naked eye — leap into view with startling clarity.
The team worked at night, inside the corridor itself, using an RTI acquisition dome built by the French imaging firm Mercurio Imaging.
For Pompeii archaeologist Giuseppe Scarpati, who works on-site, the drawings on the corridor walls are themselves a kind of map of the daily world that surrounded them.
“Pompeii sat closer to the coastline 2,000 years ago than it does today, with ships continually moving in and out of its port,” he said. “What people saw they drew.”
Across the broader archaeological site, uncovered some 230 years ago, more than 10,000 graffiti have been recorded.
However, Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director general of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, calls the corridor one of the most important spaces in the once-buried city.
“It’s a huge help in filling in the gaps of the ancient world,” he said.
Artificial intelligence was not used in the corridor’s analysis. But Scarpati notes that the park recently used AI to render an image of the remains of a man fleeing the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 with a large terracotta bowl he likely used to protect his head from falling volcanic material.
Scarpati said he is curious about what such tools might one day do for the graffiti. “I can’t wait to see some of these graffiti brought to life by AI,” he said.
In June, the Bruits de couloir team plans to launch a public digital platform that will combine photogrammetry of the corridor with the high-resolution RTI data and the entire epigraphic record.
Anyone with a screen will soon be able to step inside the ancient corridor and put an ear to its 2,000-year-old whispers.
