Vesuvius and Me

It’s not difficult for most Americans, let alone New Yorkers, to recall exactly where they were on the morning of September 11, 2001. Forensic archeologist and Manhattan resident Charles Pellegrino was precisely 800 miles west and 2.5 miles below New York City when the terrorist attacks occurred. But while he was perhaps as geographically removed as possible from the chaos of airplane collisions and falling towers, he was in a sense as close to it as one could be.

When the first plane crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, Pellegrino was submerged in a deep-sea vessel in the very spot where the Titanic sank below the ocean. He was one of few Americans who didn’t turn on a television and watch 9/11 unfold before his eyes, and he was one of even fewer people who spent that day surrounded by the “ghosts” of a catastrophe that had occurred 89 years earlier, one with physical properties and consequences nearly identical to those of the Twin Towers’ collapse. Pellegrino sees things in terms of the big picture, and his latest work, Ghosts of Vesuvius, forces readers to do the same.

Ghosts of Vesuvius provides a chillingly vivid account of history’s most devastating volcanic eruption in AD 79, highlighting its reverberations in the modern world. Oscillating between a dense historical narrative and a reflective journalistic prose, Pellegrino meticulously shapes each reader into an expert on volcanic collapse physics, Roman history, and forensic archeology, all the while illustrating how societies on opposite ends of the historical spectrum resemble each other in ways that are as remarkable as they are frightening.

Pellegrino prefaces an hour-by-hour account of the Vesuvian eruption with comprehensive explanations of relevant scientific principles and historical trends. The early chapters of the book cover everything from a beginner’s guide to volcanoes to a quick brush up in astronomy, not to mention a more than brief summary of earth’s geological development since the Big Bang. He also discusses at length the solidification of an apocalyptic vocabulary by AD 79, accounting for the extent to which religion can play a major role in the drama of disaster, an idea all too resonant in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

Then in a chapter that carefully outlines the eruption trajectory from the initial appearance of collapse columns to a series of deadly surge clouds, Pellegrino highlights the many physical similarities between Mt. Vesuvius and the fall of the Twin Towers. The ubiquity of such parallels, however, never detracts from the mere telling of the story. Relying heavily on the accounts of Pliny the Younger, a critical figure in the documentation of early Christianity, Pellegrino recreates Vesuvius in horrific detail, engaging his audience with a combination of terrifying imagery and scientific analysis. From the raining of volcanic fallout on the city of Pompeii to the final moments before an enormous surge cloud vaporizes the Herculaneans, the reader is immersed in a narrative of smoke, fire, and death not unlike the apocalyptic dogma of the Christian gospels, and also uncomfortably reminiscent of a tragedy he has witnessed in his own lifetime.

The chapter devoted to September 11 pays equal regard to detail. Terms like “collapse column,” “downblast,” and “surge” acquire the familiarity of household names, and once again, Pellegrino reconstructs the event by way of individual accounts. As acquainted as the reader is with Pliny the Younger’s alarming recollection of Vesuvius, so he becomes with the stories of rescue workers and firefighters who risked, and in many cases lost their lives on 9/11. He sees in a team of firefighters moments before the collapse of the North Tower the faces of the Herculaneans as a Vesuvian surge cloud propels them into a state of “instantaneous nonexistence,” and the dozens of flights of stairs World Trade Center victims must descend in order to evacuate become Roman roads packed with “People bewailed by their own fate … some who prayed for death in terror of dying.”

Other interesting topics Pellegrino unearths include: the persecution of early Christian sects; the neoclassical revival of Roman architecture in colonial America; and comparisons between the generations of Nero and Caligula to those which witnessed Hitler and Stalin in the 20th century. His ability to place even the most distant events in a single context exposes historical associations that may have otherwise remained invisible to the natural eye.

While Ghosts of Vesuvius walks the thin line of objectivity, its moral strings are thoroughly intact. Amidst all the scientific discourse and storytelling lingers the ominous notion that unlike the time of Vesuvius, “civilization today creates its own volcanoes.” For Pellegrino this produces the ultimate link: history repeats itself because we let it. He makes us realize that there would be no “Vesuvius” without a “Big Bang,” no “Manhattan” without a “Pompeii,” no Hitler without a Nero; that before we pass judgment on the moral fiber of earlier societies, we must first examine our own regard for humanity, our propensity for cruelty, and our readiness to deal with future disasters.

After reading Ghosts of Vesuvius, it is clear that Pellegrino is neither a scientist, nor a journalist, nor a historian. More simply, he sees how pieces of the world’s biggest puzzles fit together.