Marine Gate

Porta Marina

GateItalia · Pompei, Campania, ItalyBuilt 300 BCE · Destroyed 79 CE

Not standing in 117 CE

About

One of Pompeii's seven city gates, on the western wall near the ancient shoreline, connecting the town to its harbor and the Bay of Naples; its double-arched, barrel-vaulted form (a wide arch for animals/carts, a narrow one for pedestrians) is largely a Sullan-colony-era (post-80 BCE) rebuild of an older opening in the Samnite walls. Buried in 79 CE and not fully excavated until 1861 under Giuseppe Fiorelli. Destroyed in the 79 CE eruption of Vesuvius, 38 years before this map's snapshot — included as it's an essential part of the story.

What happened here

The gate is where a town shows itself and where it counts what comes in. Traffic is funnelled between towers into arched passages — the wide ones for carts, the narrow ones for people — and closed at night with timber leaves shod in iron. A customs post takes duty on goods; a clerk records what passes. The outward face is the decorated one, with an inscription naming the emperor and the town, because this is the first thing a visitor reads. Guards are usually the town's own watchmen rather than soldiers. Just outside, the tombs begin; just inside, the shops. In a town whose walls have long stopped mattering militarily, the gate is kept up anyway, for the look of the thing.