Italy yesterday declared a state of emergency at the ruins of Pompeii, proclaiming the action "a great act of love for the culture of the country".

A special commissioner will be appointed with a mandate to resolve what the heritage minister, Sandro Bondi, said was an intolerable situation at one of the world's top tourist sites. The daily Corriere della Sera this week deplored the squalid conditions at Pompeii, where visitors run a gauntlet of hawkers and self-appointed car park wardens to a vast and poorly signposted complex with no restaurants and just three toilet facilities.

Bondi said the commissioner, appointed for an initial one-year period, would be someone "with authority, strong [and] capable of having cultural sensibility". He said the responsibilities of Professor Pietro Giovanni Guzzo, a government official, "are not being touched in any way". Guzzo would continue to be responsible for preserving the site's archaeological remains, though it was not immediately clear if he would also continue to control its budget.

Pompeii was buried, and largely preserved, under six metres of ash when Vesuvius erupted in AD79. Pliny the Younger, who witnessed the eruption, likened the cloud from the volcano to a pine tree: "It rose into the sky on a very long 'trunk' from which spread some 'branches'. Some of the cloud was white, in other parts there were dark patches of dirt and ash."

The excavation of Pompeii's buildings has provided generations of visitors with a unique glimpse into the world of classical antiquity. The head of the regional tourist authority, Claudio Velardi, who has pressed for more commercial involvement, said the government's decision was important and courageous: "If we all work together, in a few years, we can turn Pompeii into a site capable of welcoming millions of tourists in decent conditions, with adequate information, efficient services and usable routes [through the site]."

Pompeii has been hit by a fall in tourism to the Naples area since the onset of the latest refuse emergency. According to official figures, the number of visitors last month was 13% down on a year earlier. The region as a whole lost more than 20% of its tourism.

Extraordinary commissioners are becoming a favourite device of Silvio Berlusconi's fledgling third government, which has already appointed one ad hoc administrator for the Naples refuse crisis and three more for what the Italian media terms "the gypsy emergency". Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, an archaeologist and director of the British School at Rome, said the key to preserving Pompeii would be a "programme of continuous maintenance."