At the early hours  of this fateful day, unknowing to the dwellers of Pompeii, the towering cone Vesuvius had chosen them this day to be a monumental preserve- an unalloyed experiment. About 12 hours of the eruption of Vesuvius it had ended what that begun. The city was plummeted with living stones and pumice, buried in ash and then sealed with boiling lava-which later allowed archaelogists to uncover the city when they started to dig some 250 years after. But the Unsuspecting Vesuvius did not know that one last brave of the pen would see the act for what it is, the Greek writer Pliny was among the Romans of Pompeii and he gave the first eye-witness account of a volcanic Eruption:”a dark and horrible cloud was coming up behind us as we were fleeing, spreading over the earth like a flood” and so they drowned in the fiery flood.

Today the ancient city is a historical site. when it was excavated some 15,000 bodies were exhumed in pristine order , at least for bodies 250 years old, using a process known as plaster casting archaelogist were able to reveal the anguished expressions on the faces the dead. The city and its artifacts were also preserved.