This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
When Vesuvius buried Pompeii in 79 CE, it also sealed a counter that still held the last of a business day. In Regio V, archaeologists excavating in 2019 and 2020 found a thermopolium, a Roman hot-food and drink stand, frescoed with a Nereid riding a seahorse and, more tellingly, a still life of the animals plausibly on the menu that day: mallard ducks, a rooster, a dog curled in a corner where it likely did not choose to be. Bone fragments recovered from the deep terracotta jars set into the counter point to pork, fish, snails and sheep, sold hot to customers who ate standing in the street, exactly as street food is eaten today. About eighty such counters have been identified across Pompeii, which tells you something the frescoes alone would not: this was not a curiosity but ordinary infrastructure, the fast food of a Roman city where many apartments had no kitchen of their own to cook in. The instinct to sell a hot, quick meal to a person passing by is not a modern convenience layered onto old cities. It is one of the oldest patterns a city produces, wherever the population outgrows its home kitchens, and Pompeii preserved a single, unusually vivid frame of it.