Théophile Gautier (1811–1872)

Pompeii, the dead city, doesn't wake up in the morning like living cities, and although it has half flung back the sheet of ashes which covered it for so many centuries, even when night fades, it remains asleep on its funeral bed.
[...]
It's a strange sight, in the azure and pink light of the morning, this corpse of a city overwhelmed in the midst of its pleasures, its labours, and its civilisation, and untouched by the slow dissolution of ordinary ruins; you can't help believing that the residents of these minutely preserved homes are about to emerge from their dwellings wearing their Greek or Roman clothes; the chariots, whose ruts you can still see on the flagstones, will start rolling along once more; the drinkers will walk into the thermopoles where the mark of their cups still stains the marble of the counters. You walk as if dreaming through the past; you can read, in red letters, at street corners, the posters advertising that day's shows! - but the day is one that passed more than seventeen centuries ago.