This is the book to get if you are visiting Pompeii (which I did!)- buy it when you first get there and carry it around with you. The houses are numbered and you can travel with the books and learn more about everything you're seeing as you walk because everything's numbered so you can go right to the book. The book has pictures of things as they are and illustrations of how they looked before. It's an excellent resource for anyone interested in Roman life. My only complaint is that in the illustrations of street scenes, the women's clothing is completely wrong. If you want to know what women's clothing looked like, look at the many pictures of frescos in the book. ( )