was destroyed by an eruption of mount vesuvius in the first century. while a lot of the site was remarkably preserved, many details of life here were lost, including some of the colourful frescoes of the buildings. above the main site is the cacina rustica, a storage place for thousands of fragments of two frescoes destroyed in the initial eruption and damaged further by bombing in world war ii. how many pieces do you think are here? i think here we've get 10,000 pieces of fragments at the moment. this is only a little part because in other storerooms we have more and more in a box that never studied before. the fragments come in all sorts of sizes, from tiny bits of rubble to big pieces. so no—one knows exactly how these frescoes look like. there are lots of missing pieces. it's not like an ordinary puzzle.