Good evening!
We are in one of the most important
archaeological sites of the world:
Pompeii.
We're in one of
the most important sites of Pompeii:
the big theater.
2000 years ago, you had
a thousand people watching
anyone on the stage.
But do we really know Pompeii?
Well, yes.
We've seen so many movies,
read so many novels
telling us about the big volcano,
telling us about the lava,
the lava flows and everything.
Well, in fact, there are many myths
to be cleared up.
First of all,
we didn't have any volcano visible at all.
And that is something that
can be shocking, but if you speak to
and have a lunch
maybe with a vulcanologist,
or an anthropologist,
or an archaeologist,
he will tell you
so many truths about Pompeii
that you will really be surprised to know.
First of all,
so we're talking about volcanoes.
Today it's a towering volcano.
But at the time of Pompeii,
it didn't exist,
for the simple reason that it started
to exist that day of the eruption.
From that day, it started to grow
and become what we see today.
So, what could the Pompeiians see?
Very simple.
There was a small mound with a crest.
And you can still see it today.
It's exactly where the big volcano
is sitting today.
And, if you could see it at that time,
you could have seen so many woods
You could have seen, I don't know, deer
Pompeiians would probably go there
to collect wood, pick up mushrooms,
make love.
It was a friend that betrayed them.
So, that's the first thing: no volcano,
the first myth to clear up.
And then, another thing is the lava.
You didn't have a single drop of lava
getting to Pompeii. Not a single one.
But, gases, ashes, lapilli, and so on.
So, that's another myth.
And we will see what happened exactly.
The third myth is about
the date of the eruption.
We know that everything happened
the 24th twenty-fourth of August,
in 79 A.D.
But how do we know that?
But, we know that because
Pliny the Younger wrote that in a letter.
He was a witness.
Actually, if you try to see,
there are at least seven witnesses,
seven survivors of the eruption.
Today, I would also like
to spend some time
to answer one question, that is:
"Would we have survived the eruption,
had we been there
almost 2000 years ago?"
So, Pliny the Younger said
that everything happened
on the 24th of August.
But how do we know that?
I told you there was a letter.
This letter, though, is not here anymore.
It vanished in time.
But, in the Middle Ages, the monks started
to write some copies of that letter.
And so we have three families
of that old letter made by monks
who were writing copies
and another one would copy the copy
and so forth.
But, of course, they would make mistakes.
So, is the date right or not?
Well, if you see the different letters,
you will see that they are different dates
One says "Nine days before
the Calends of September,"
which is the 24th of August.
Another one says, "Nine days before
the Calends of November,"
which is the 24th of October.
Where is the answer?
Well, the answer is buried here,
in the strata of Pompeii.
In fact, archaeologists have been finding
nuts, have been finding chestnuts,
dates, dried figs,
which are not really summer fruits,
but rather you find them in the fall.
And they've been finding
so many little clues
about the warm weather.
For instance, people were dressed up
with very warm clothes,
with scarves, for instance.
So, that means that, probably,
it was a very cold climate,
which makes more sense
if it is around November.
The one interesting clue, though,
is about wine.
In the diggings,
in the decades in the past,
archaeologists found some big jars
containing wine.
So, what the Romans would do
is that they would have grape harvests,
and they would collect grape juice,
put that in those big, gigantic jars
called dolia.
And they would wait ten days
for it to boil, to ferment,
and then, twenty days
just to check that everything was okay.
And then they would cover
and seal everything.
And that's exactly
what the archaeologists found.
So, as a matter of fact,
grape harvest was over
at least from a month.
And that would probably tell you
that the date of the eruption
was around the end of October.
So, 24th of October makes sense.
So, that, of course, is no definite proof,
but that's interesting to see that
such a known site like Pompeii
really is still an open site
with many discoveries to be done.
Another myth to be cleared up is that
Pompeii, we always see that in the movies,
was a city with wealthy people,
with banquets, gladiators, and so on.
Well, that's not the truth.
In the day of the eruption,
it was a city full in crisis.
There was no running water,
no running water,
So, no bathhouses, the thermae.
You didn't see anyone having fun
in the thermae, because
you didn't have water.
There was one therma working
which had its own reservoir of water.
So, maybe people would go there.
But, there was a big crisis.
And another thing is that, well,
you didn't have a lot of people
like in the old times in Pompeii
because you had a lot of earthquakes.
Earthquakes were a signal
of the eruption coming, getting close
like the magma was pushing
and provoking those earthquakes.
So, many people, especially aristocracy,
had gone away.
You had new people, new rich,
former slaves, the liberti, so called,
who would buy fancy houses
and they would live there.
But, you didn't have
the old society of Pompeii.
You didn't have running water.
Running water was not there,
because probably the aqueduct
was broken in some places,
maybe due to earthquakes,
maybe due to the swelling of the soil,
of the earth.
We don't know exactly.
So, as you can see, there are
many myths to be cleared up.
So, let's go to the day of the eruption.
What happened exactly?
And let's try to answer the question,
"Would I have survived?"
Well, first of all, let's go to that day.
If it was the 24th of October,
it was a Friday. Clear sky.
We know that because
one of the witnesses,
who was living 30 kilometers
away from here, saw everything.
So, imagine that it was probably,
we don't know, of course,
the end of October,
clear sky, maybe,
you know, a very cold morning,
and then, what happened?
Well, we know from the letter
of Pliny the Younger
that everything started,
more or less, at noon, lunchtime.
Well, vulcanologists found some clues
that everything happened slightly before.
Well, Pliny didn't see that;
he was 30 kilometers away.
But, probably, the volcano started
to open, crack open in that morning.
Because, you see, that small,
well, long mound,
similar to the back of a whale,
that betrayed the Romans,
was not a mound.
It was a volcano, a very old volcano,
silent volcano, that had not erupted
for the last centuries.
So, no one knew it was a volcano.
But that morning, it woke up.
And it started to crack open
and exactly, let's say,
the first hours of the morning
were terrible.
People, let's say, started to gather
in the Forum, which is, you know,
it was the central place,
central square of Pompeii.
Everyone would gather there
in the morning, usually,
just to get information,
to meet friends.
It was just like a tv set of that time.
And they started to gather.
And they saw something weird.
That very low mound was covered
with a kind of fog, let's say,
with ashes that had covered
one of the sides.
It looked like it had snowed.
And they started to speak,
one with the other,
"What happened?"
Well, some people probably came
from the countryside,
telling strange things,
telling people, "Well, you know, there,
we hear noises like thunder.
There is a strange smell of sulfur
just from that mountain."
But, then something happened.
The whole thing started to explode.
The mouth got opened and you had
a gigantic column of ashes, vapors,
going up in the sky.
It would reach more than
32 kilometers of height
in the hour, which is three times
what, actually, a jetliner can reach.
So, just imagine people seeing
that column going high in the sky,
just staring at something.
They didn't even know what a volcano was.
Well, this is just the beginning
of the tragedy.
If you think about that column
going up and expanding in the air,
that's what Pliny the Younger tells us,
you can imagine like a big stain of ink
getting bigger and bigger,
covering the sun.
And then, people started
to hear something.
It was just a noise of grail,
a noise of something falling.
Actually, you had the lapilli.
You can see them all around us.
Lapilli? What is a lapilli?
It is a very, very small rock,
but very light.
It floats in the water.
It's just like a piece of cork.
It doesn't really kill you.
But, it is something falling from the sky.
What is it?
Well, just imagine
a bottle of champagne.
You open it, you have foam coming up.
But if you see in the lower part
of the bottle, the wine is still watery.
I mean, you still have wine.
But as the wine goes up in the neck,
it transforms itself into foam.
And that's exactly what that volcano did.
The magma in the magmatic chamber
was magma, but as it came up,
it was just like a foam,
solidified foam, that turned out
to be those lapilli falling.
So people started just to see,
to hear that, those pieces of rock,
very small and very light,
hitting the tiles.
But they were not the killers.
So, I asked myself,
"Why didn't the people go away?"
Well, if you go and see
the strata of the lapilli,
you will see, you find rocks that big,
gigantic, big rocks
coming from the volcano,
coming from kilometers,
really, killers, like meteors,
falling from the sky.
Actually, in Ercolano,
which is not too far away from here,
in the past a skeleton of a man
without legs was found,
and close to him
there was a big, gigantic rock
fallen from that volcano.
And then, so people, just imagine,
started to see those rocks coming down,
smoking rocks, hitting the roofs,
making holes in the roofs.
So people started to go away.
They started to do
what you and me would have done,
that is, going back home,
looking for the people we love.
And just, it was panic everywhere.
As a matter of fact,
that was a time when
you would have your life saved.
If you had fled,
if you had gone away from Pompeii,
you could have survived.
Why? Because the lapilli
started to accumulate in the soil
for hours. But after two or three hours,
it was that straight up lapilli,
more or less.
After that time, you couldn't
see anything outside Pompeii.
You couldn't see the roads,
just like when you have a heavy snow.
You couldn't see anything.
So, where could you go?
And another thing is that you had
like a fog coming down.
It was actually like a,
imagine a desert storm.
You had like ashes coming down.
You couldn't see
more than one or two meters.
And these ashes were containing
pieces of glass, actually,
that were actually
hurting your windpipe.
So you had to breathe with a cloth
dipped in water.
It was really a nightmare.
So it is normal to think
that people just hid in their houses.
What happened then?
Well, the lapilli started to accumulate.
Once they reached something like a meter,
a cubic meter, there would be
an equivalent of six men as weight.
So you had the roof starting to collapse.
Actually, one-third of the people
found dead in Pompeii
died due to the collapsing of the roofs
or the floors.
Probably you had also earthquakes
in that process.
So people were in the houses, screaming
asking for help.
No one could see anything.
It was like the end of the world for them.
And that, for twelve hours.
Twelve hours later
say, at one o'clock in the morning,
let's move and go to Ercolano.
Ercolano is another town,
very close to the sea,
between the sea and the volcano,
which is about six kilometers
away from the volcano;
Pompeii is about eight kilometers away.
So when archaeologists started to dig
through the strata in Ercolano,
they couldn't find dead people.
All you see are scattered skeletons.
So everyone thought that
the inhabitants of Ercolano had escaped,
escaped somewhere.
They had actually managed to survive.
But once the archaeologists
reached the beach
and got to the arches, the arcade
where, usually, the fishing boats
were parked, just like [in] a garage,
they found three hundred skeletons.
They all died in a single moment.
When you see those skeletons,
you realize something: they all died
without defending themselves.
It's just as if something
had unplugged life from their bodies.
Just, boom!
And what happened,
and the vulcanologists will tell you that,
is that the gigantic column
going up in the sky,
at a certain time, couldn't stand,
and it sat on itself,
it just went down
and transformed itself
into deadly avalanches
made of gas and ashes,
coming down at a speed of
one hundred kilometers per hour,
with a, let's say, a heat of between
five and six hundred degrees Celsius.
So, that killed the people instantly.
If you want to think what happened,
just imagine being on the shore
and watching in the night
the volcano, the red part,
let's say, of the eruption,
was instantly being covered by
that avalanche that's coming down.
You couldn't see anything.
But, you know, vulcanologists
would tell you, maybe you could see
some flare, something like
a flock of red, hot bats
coming toward you.
And people were instantly killed.
The fact that you have the bone
in contact with the ash layers
means that skin, organs, muscles
got vaporized in a matter of a second,
a few seconds.
So people died violently.
Let's go back to Pompeii.
It's morning.
People hear that things are changing.
Probably you don't have
the rain of lapilli anymore.
So they wouldn't go away.
But you have so many lapillis,
it's impossible to open the door.
So, actually, people go outside
from the roofs
and they start to run away.
But at that time,
the volcano does the same thing again,
sits on himself and transforms his column
on those deadly avalanches of gas.
The first one stopped
right at the suburbia of Pompeii.
The second one kills
anyone on the street.
And that's what you see
are those people, you see
in those glass frameworks.
These are the people
killed in that moment.
And the third one would come again
and break down walls,
open the roof and kill people inside.
And then there is another one,
the last one, that is so powerful,
it goes all the way,
even at thirty kilometers away
and Pliny the Younger,
the one that wrote that letter,
was almost afraid to die.
He was staying at thirty kilometers away.
So this is what happened
exactly in Pompeii.
So what you see today
is a place that probably
don't tell you much
about these problems, this atmosphere
that happened.
But when you find yourself
in front of one of those bodies
inside the glass frame,
just remember that
these are not statues.
These are not petrified people.
These are people in the process of dying
in that intimate moment of their life.
And we, I guess,
should pay respect to them every time.
Thank you.
(applause)