If you lived in Pompeii, August 24 in the year 79 AD would have been a good day to be out of town. Around noon, Mt. Vesuvius began pouring tons of ash into the sky. It had been rumbling for a few days but no one thought much of it. As the ash piled up in Pompeii the people must have started to panic. The entire town was rising and the sea which came up to the wharfs outside of town seemed to recede. And the ash just kept on coming.
Vesuvius had other plans in store for Herculaneum, just down the road from Pompeii. While Pompeii was being slowly covered with ash, Herculaneum was engulfed by sixty feet of boiling mud! This pyroclastic flow quickly buried the small town.
Bad news for the two coastal towns would be a boon for archeologists 1500 years later. Once Herculaneum and Pompeii were rediscovered and excavated, they provided a window into life during Roman days. People were going about their daily lives when the disaster struck. Columns were being built, roadways were being repaired, bread was baking and gardens were growing. The lucky escaped. The slow, stupid, lazy and plain unlucky were buried in ash or boiled in mud. Archeologists must have had a field day when the remains were unearthed.
The ash and mud preserved the floor mosaics and wall frescoes even as they crushed and burned the roofs of the buildings. Once the streets were excavated the towns came back to life, at least through the eyes of imaginative scientists and lucky tourists, like us. The really good stuff, the best mosaics and frescoes and statues, are in the Archeology Museum in Naples. But the homes, the forum, the basilica, the bars, the theaters, the food stalls and the brothels give testimony to the lifestyle of the rich and famous, the poor and unknown and everyone in between. And over it all looms the active volcano Vesuvius, the bad boy that exploded nearly 2000 years ago. When it will choose to act up again is anyone's guess.
