You could hear the shrieks of women, the wailing of infants, and the shouting of men," wrote Pliny the Younger, the most eloquent eyewitness to the explosion of Mount Vesuvius on Aug. 24, A.D. 79. "Many sought the aid of the gods, but still more imagined there were no gods left, and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness for evermore."

That darkness returns in "Stories from an Eruption: Pompeii, Herculaneum, Oplontis," which runs until Aug. 31 at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples. Not only did glowing avalanches of volcanic ash and rock bury the cities (the eruption is estimated to have killed at least 2,000 inhabitants), they also preserved them as time capsules of the wealth and sophistication of ancient Roman life. "The difference in this exhibit is that we did not start out with objects," says Pietro Giovanni Guzzo, who, as superintendent of archaeology for the Vesuvius area, conceived the show. "We started out with the people."

In the exhibit, victims are shown amid their belongings — savings, jewelry, statuettes of gods they clutched for protection, a piece of sculpture or a painting from their homes — at the final moment of their lives. "We wanted to reconstruct, mainly with recent finds, the reality of Pompeii at a precise moment — the eruption," says co-curator Marisa Mastroroberto. "This is a new approach, neoromantic if you like, but based on facts."

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An IMAX-type evocation of the eruption mounted in the atrium of the museum introduces the visitor to the power of Vesuvius — the rumbling, ripping and cracking of the earth, fiery rains of ash and pumice, thick clouds of searing poisonous gases. Ascending the darkened staircase, uncannily lifelike plaster casts of human victims are shown in the moment they fell, some gasping and choking as they were asphyxiated by gas so hot it burned their throats. Pompeiians were buried under four meters of ash, and after their bodies disintegrated, they left cavities in the hardened volcanic rock. When archaeologists in the 1860s poured plaster into the hollows and broke them from their mold, the resulting figures were astonishingly detailed, grasping a piece of cloth to their mouths or crying out in their final moments of desperation.

One of the show's major contributions is that it brings together new discoveries, historical excavations carried out since the 1750s and artifacts collected by the Bourbon kings of Naples. Perhaps the most disturbing element in the show is a fiber-glass cast (3.5 m by 3 m by 1 m) of 32 skeletons recently discovered in a boat shelter on the original level of the beach in Herculaneum. The victims were overcome by fiery noxious fumes and boiling mud. Almost 300 skeletons have been found in boat shelters on this beach. The people huddled inside, hoping to escape by sea if the roaring turbulence of the tide subsided. Their belongings — gold jewelry, a nest egg of silver and gold coins, household items, keys, the medical kit of a surgeon who brought only his instruments (scalpels remarkably similar to those used today), a soldier's sword and a leather sack of work tools — are shown in crude steel display cases as distorted and crooked as Pompeii must have seemed during the two-day eruption.

Many ancient frescoes are exhibited for the first time. Three complete dining rooms have been reconstructed with nine walls of frescoes from a villa in Moregine, a suburb of Pompeii, where the Emperor Nero visited. Another reconstructed dining room from a villa in nearby Terzigno — its entire length opening onto a portico — features extraordinarily fine frescoes of mythological scenes in Pompeii's architectural style. The owners sold their estate to a wine and olive-oil producer after the earthquake of A.D. 62, an omen of the eruption to come.

The show also includes an incredibly detailed scale model from 1879 of the excavations with a retrospective of paintings, literature and film clips — even a psychoanalytical study by Sigmund Freud — inspired by the eruption since Pompeii's rediscovery in the 18th century. "We wanted to bring in the resilience of the imaginary," says Mastroroberto. "Pompeii is a metaphor for the human condition, the uncertainty, the forces of nature. It is an inexhaustible source of inspiration." Art is long, life is short, this exhibition proves. But as Vesuvius, just visible from the museum, reminds us: volcanoes live longer still.

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