Pompeii has always felt strangely frozen in time. Streets halted mid-step. Meals left on tables. Bodies caught in their last movements. Mount Vesuvius erupted in late August, in the sticky heat of a southern Italian summer in CE 79.
A study is nudging that certainty sideways. Researchers examining the plaster casts of victims say something doesn’t quite fit. Several people were wearing thick wool clothing and heavy layers in the month of August. It seems odd and it’s reopened a long-running debate about the actual date of the eruption and what the weather might really have been like on Pompeii’s final day.
