Pompeii's much-missed sound-and-light tours will resume next week after a year off, officials at the ancient Roman site announced Friday.
"We're happy to announce the resumption of an activity that aroused so much interest and appreciation on the part of visitors in the last few years," Pompeii Superintendent Giovanni Guzzo said.
Italy's first-ever 'son-et-lumiere' tours kicked off to immediate acclaim in 2002 but funding difficulties meant they had to be called off last year.
In their four years up and running they drew hundreds of thousands of extra visitors to the famous ruins.
The one-hour tours in Italian, English and Japanese have a special soundtrack by Oscar-winning film composer Ennio Morricone, synchronised with the light show and mingling ambient noise with a narrative voice illustrating the various highlights.
They climax in the Forum with a dramatic video re-enactment of the catastrophic eruption that buried the city in 79 AD.
Unlike other son-et-lumiere tours in Italy and abroad, the initiative offers visitors not just a simple show but a night-time stroll through the digs that reveals an "unusual, poetic side" of the ancient city, Guzzo recalled.
The tour, designed by Rome creative consultancy firm Otium Negotium, kicks off at the Terme Suburbane, a once-neglected district that hit the headlines in 2003 for a newly uncovered series of frescoes graphically depicting a variety of sex acts -presumed to be an illustration of the services on offer at the local brothel.
It then winds its way up the main road, pointing out the curious cart ruts, craftsmen's shops and famous villas, with the gentle, lulling music of Morricone interspersed with explanatory voiceovers in the three languages.
The grand finale comes in the heart of the old city, the forum, when four giant projectors beam a special- effects-laden video reconstruction of the wrath of the volcano Vesuvius, which smothered the city and its lesser-known but equally fascinating neighbour Herculaneum in ash and cinders.
A total of 500 special lights set up by So.le, a subsidiary of the Italian electricity company Enel, are cleverly hidden so that not even the cables are visible, and artfully angle-poised so there's no danger of visitors being accidentally dazzled.
Entitled Suggestioni al Foro, the event will run from September 14 to November 3, Thursdays to Saturdays.
