Pompeii: the greatest tragedy of the ancient world | Alberto Angela | TEDxPompeii

Alberto Angela told about the greatest tragedy of Pompei on 79 A.D.

Alberto Angela accompanied his father, Italian TV announcer Piero Angela, on his trips ever since he was a child, something that allowed him to learn many European languages and to acquire a cosmopolitan culture. After being a student in France, he enrolled in a course of Natural Sciences at the University "La Sapienza" of Rome, finally graduating with 110/110 and a prize for his thesis. He also studied at multiple American universities, where he took courses of specialisation from Harvard, Columbia and UCLA and further focused on palaeontology and paleoanthropology. Once out of university he started working in the research field participating in paleoanthropologic digs in various places in the world, among which were Zaire, Ishango, Tanzania, Olduvai and Laetoli, Sultanate of the Oman, Mongolia, and the desert of the Gobi.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

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)