When Mount Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79, fiery avalanches of ash and pumice assaulted Pompeii, displacing some 15,000 inhabitants and killing at least 1,500 more. Volcanic debris “poured across the land,” wrote the Roman lawyer Pliny the Younger, and blanketed the town in a darkness “like the black of closed and unlighted rooms.” Within two […]