In the autumn of 79 AD, Pliny the Younger wrote a letter to the Roman historian Tacitus, detailing the early stages of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. From his villa in Misenum, across the Bay of Naples from the volcano, he described seeing a dark cloud, shaped like an umbrella pine tree, filling the sky over the mountains flanking the northern edge of Sarno River plain. What followed was something that no one in the region was prepared for. A day after Pliny observed that dark cloud, a small tavern…
