In 79 AD, the city of Pompeii, located at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, suffered one of the most devastating natural disasters in human history. When the volcano erupted, columns of ash, toxic gases, and superheated pyroclastic flows enveloped the entire city in just a few hours, burying thousands of lives under thick layers of ash.

Victims died almost instantly from temperatures exceeding 300 degrees Celsius, many of them collapsed while running, holding their children, or covering their faces to avoid the suffocating gas. Over time, their bodies decomposed, leaving behind voids in the hardened ash.

By the 19th century, archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli had developed a method of pouring plaster into these voids, recreating the shapes, postures, and even facial expressions of Pompeians in their final moments. Those plaster statues are not art, but “portraits of death” – silent witnesses telling the story of a city frozen in time.

The images of plaster corpses, from the elderly, women, children to animals, shocked the world with their brutal and touching realism. Today, stepping into Pompeii, people not only see ancient houses, walls and roads, but also feel the closeness to human fate – fear, love and helplessness before nature.

Pompeii is not only an archaeological site, but also a reminder to humanity of the fragility of life, of the destructive power of the Earth, and at the same time a testament to the ability of archaeological science to restore historical memory. It is this combination of human tragedy, ancient age (79 CE) and modern 19th-century technology that has created one of the world’s greatest cultural-archaeological treasures, where past and present meet in haunting silence.