2,000-year-old love note and gladiator fight scene revealed on Pompeii wall

A 2,000-year-old love note and an illustrated gladiator fight scene were among ancient inscriptions recently discovered on a wall in Pompeii, an archaeological park. announced this week

Conceived as the graffiti of its time, the inscriptions also included stories of daily life, sporting events, passions and insults, carved on a passageway that connected Pompeii’s theater district to one of its main roads. The wall was excavated more than 230 years ago, but around 300 inscriptions engraved on it remained hidden until new technology enabled researchers to identify them.

The efforts to uncover the writings were part of a project called Corridor Rumors, led by Louis Autin and Éloïse Letellier-Taillefer of the Sorbonne University in Paris and Marie-Adeline Le Guennec of the University of Quebec in Montreal, who collaborated with the Archaeological Park of Pompeii. In two waves in 2022 and again in 2025, researchers used a variety of archeological imaging and computerized techniques to resurface the lost messages.

“I’m in a hurry; be careful, my Sava, make sure you love me!” reads a resurfaced inscription on the wall, according to the archaeological park, which said the writings “attest to the vitality, diversity of interactions and social forms that developed in a public space so frequented by the inhabitants of ancient Pompeii.”

Once a vibrant Roman city in what is now southern Italy, Pompeii was buried Under a pile of volcanic ash and pumice after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. The catastrophic event left the area frozen in time. Now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Pompeii has become a popular tourist attraction as well as a source of ongoing archaeological exploration.

“Technology is the key that unlocks new rooms in the ancient world, and we need to share those rooms with the public,” Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the archaeological park, said in a statement about the latest discoveries. “There are more than 10,000 writings throughout Pompeii. We are working on a project to protect and improve them, an enormous heritage. Only the use of technology can guarantee the future for all this memory of life lived in Pompeii.”