Noted Classics professor Mary Beard visits the sewers and cesspits of Herculaneum, it being one of the two Roman towns buried by the famous eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE.

A lot of the sieved organic remains are now being studied in Oxford, and they certainly show that the residents were consuming  eggs, nuts, figs and sea-urchins.

Read more about ongoing archaeological work there at Blogging Pompeii.

Most urban dwellers in the Roman empire lived in apartment blocks called insulae, from the Latin word for island.

Watch a  video-recreation of an insula in the Iberian city of Conímbriga (YouTube).

Nova Roma, a group “dedicated to the restoration of classical Roman religion, culture and virtues,”  has its own YouTube channel.

Style note: My headline attempts to copy the BBC News style, wherein certain words are set off in [Am] single quotation marks/[Br] inverted commas  for no discernible purpose except to express some sort of arms’-length, looking-down-the-nose Beeb-oid attitude.