Pompeii’s walls have been talking for 2,000 years. Now, new imaging has made some of those faint voices readable again.

In a narrow corridor that once joined two theatres in the ancient city, an international research team used advanced digital imaging 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, or 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 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, said she was struck by how similar they were to graffiti in working-class accommodation. The two decided to investigate graffiti as a form of popular communication.

That led to two rounds of field work. In 2022 and 2025, the team produced a rereading of about 300 inscriptions on the corridor’s walls, along with 79 new discoveries, including a fragment of 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.”

Le Guennec said the declaration was also expressed in slang used by working-class Pompeiians.

The graffiti include scenes of gladiator combat, portraits and drawings of animals, ships and phalluses.

“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.”

She said the inscriptions also show class and gender in the ancient city. Women appear in the inscriptions but rarely in posthumous tributes and even more rarely as authors.

Pompeii, near Naples in southern Italy, was buried in AD 79 when Mount Vesuvius erupted, covering the city and its residents in 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 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.”

The corridor ran between Pompeii’s Teatro Grande, where audiences watched Greek-style drama, and the smaller Odeion, used for music and recitations. Spectators passed through it during breaks, while commercial people, soldiers, enslaved people and citizens also moved through the space.

Many of the marks were so faint that earlier scholars had dismissed them as random scratches. The team used a photographic technique called Reflectance Transformation Imaging, or RTI. A flat surface is photographed dozens of times under shifting light, then turned by computer into a 3D digital model. Researchers can move a virtual light across the surface to make faint inscriptions visible.

The team worked at night inside the corridor, using an RTI acquisition dome built by the French imaging firm Mercurio Imaging.

Giuseppe Scarpati, a Pompeii archaeologist who works on-site, said the corridor drawings reflect the daily surroundings of the city.

“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 about 230 years ago, more than 10,000 graffiti have been recorded. Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director general of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, said the corridor is one of the most important spaces in the 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 analysis. But Scarpati said 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.

“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 combining photogrammetry of the corridor with high-resolution RTI data and the full epigraphic record.

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