Pompeii as a Dark Tourism Site: The Frozen City

Abstract

Dark heritage concept becomes more popular during the last years than before especially in the field of heritage studies. This widespread encouraged what is known as dark tourism. As it is going to be discussed in this paper, the dark heritage or tourism concept include any destruction, catastrophe, and death cases. Travelling for the purpose of seeing dead or death sites become very popular and carry a special type of interest. As seen in our presented case study, Pompeii is an attractive destroyed city which catches the attention of thousands of visitors who eager to travel to see the life in this site as it was. The site of Pompeii is a unique site in its components and catastrophic and sudden destroy by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A. D. This in turn makes this site very remarkable and important dark heritage tourism site along with its importance to the scholars due to its richness that reflected the lifestyle of the ancient Romans. Among the aims of this study is to discuss the concept of dark heritage and tourism and its importance to the recent tourism programs and heritage studies shedding the light on the site of Pompeii as very successful and important model for dark tourism in Italy.