Pompeii: Inside a Lost City at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra depicts life in the flourishing Roman city of Pompeii before it was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE.

It pictures an ancient city frozen in time, eerily preserved by volcanic ash. It also tells the story of the city’s rediscovery in the late 16th century and the archaeological excavations that have been underway ever since.

The exhibition’s representation of a natural disaster that has reached timeless proportions has the potential to say a lot about the risks and costs of the urgent environmental crises facing humans today.

It offers a crucial opportunity for contemporary audiences to look at a lost city from the perspective of a world on the verge of collapse, but could have done more to consider what this level of destruction might mean now.

The exhibition’s main intention is to create human understanding across millennia. “Beauty and fashion were no less important in the 1st century CE than they are today”, says one wall-text.

A highlight for many visitors will be the authentic, vividly coloured frescoes recovered from the site. A wide curved screen plays a montage of digital images in situ near a selection of tiny clay pots holding the remains of pigments the painters used immediately before the eruption.

The exhibition is split into three parts. The first emphasises domestic life before the eruption. The second explores the remains of Pompeii and documents the work of researchers bringing the site and its fragments back to........

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