The mountain exploded in August 79 AD. The ensuing lava flow engulfed two entire cities (Herculaneum and Pompeii) and smothered a third, Stabiae, with poisonous gas. The darkness that the clouds of dust and smoke created was, in the ones of an eyewitness, “. . . not the dark of a moonless or cloudy night, but as if the lamp had been put out in a closed room.”
Tags: eyewitness, Herculaneum, Mt. Vesuvius, Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger, Pompeii, Stabiae