Not anymore. There are many ways for a human being to die after a volcano erupts, and a blast like the one Vesuvius unleashed in 1780 B.C. provides a grim inventory of almost all of them.

in the shadow of the great volcano. The villa’s exact whereabouts were eventually lost. Given its reported proximity to Vesuvius, most archaeologists presumed that the A.D. 79 eruption that ...