A Town Beneath the Mountain

Pompeii was a prosperous town of perhaps eleven thousand people on the Bay of Naples. Its streets were lined with bakeries, laundries, taverns and fast-food counters, and its walls were painted with election slogans.

Above the town rose Vesuvius, green with vineyards. Nobody thought of it as a volcano. In AD 62 a strong earthquake damaged many buildings, and seventeen years later the builders were still repairing them.

The townspeople did not know that the earthquake was a warning.