We have a Pompeii flip-book that has pictures of the buildings as they are now and overlays of clear plastic that has them as they were when they were still standing, so you can flip back and forth to see how grand they were.
Pompeii must have been like Palm Springs or Beverly Hills. The money that was in that place was astounding................
And an older seafront community by the time it was subsumed into the Roman Empire. The House of the Vettii was about 200 years old when it was buried by the eruption, and like the house in this video, was under renovation to some extent. The Vettii were brothers I think, freedmen, who'd made it into the big time, and the Bay of Naples had been rocked by what turned out to have been a precursor quake in 62, so they probably bought it cheap.