From the Vault: Lessons of Vesuvius, Part 2

In the year 79 CE, the Italian volcano Mount Vesuvius erupted with with the thermal energy of 100,000 atomic bombs. Ashen destruction rained down on Pompeii, Herculaneum, Oplontis and Stabiae. In this Stuff to Blow Your Mind two-parter, Robert and Joe explore this terrifying episode in history and what we can learn from it. (Originally published 2/11/2020)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time to go into the vault for a classic episode
of the show. This one originally aired on February eleven,
and this is part two of our two part series
on the eruption of Vesuvius. Yeah, this one's This one's
a lot of fun volcanoes history, geology. Uh yeah, this

(00:28):
is the second part. So if you didn't listen to
the first one, go back and listen to that one first.
But let's go ahead and dive right in. Welcome to
Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

(00:48):
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
we're back following up our last episode about the eruption
of Mount Vesuvius in seventy nine. You know, Robert, this
is something that I have wanted to do and I
episode about for a long time. I think it was
mainly just because I love those letters of Plenties and
I wanted to read them and talk about them. But
there was a reason that we just recently decided, okay,

(01:11):
it's time to do Vesuvious And it was because of
a new study I read about that set the lava
of my heart flowing anew. And so here we are
because a lot of the really great and shocking research
about Vesuvius is like basically what happened to people's bodies
when when the volcano erupted. Oh absolutely, I mentioned in
the first episode, how I how much, how clearly I

(01:33):
remember looking through a National geographic when I was a
child and and seeing these images of the remains of
uh In Pompeii and Herculaneum. One in particular I remember
was a photograph of this one bit of human remains
that are referred to as ring Lady because it is
the skeleton and you see uh these these rings there,

(01:56):
and it's just like the skeleton emerging from the you know,
half half revealed in the in the ash and soil,
and it was just very haunting. It's this idea of
this place just buried and frozen in time. I'm looking
at this image. Does she have rings on her fingers
but also bigger rings down around her like her elbow? Yes,

(02:16):
I believe so. And I think another photo included in
our notes is rather small, but I believe they're serpents
to their like, you know, um precious metal serpents. Uh.
So you know that all these little details like that,
you know, always were just very intriguing Me's such a
dramatic moment in history, and then to have so much
of it preserved, Yeah, in some cases preserved in a

(02:37):
shockingly pristine way, but in other cases transformed in an
even more shocking way. So this new study that that
I was reading about was by pure Paolo Petrona, published
in the New England Journal of Medicine just this month
or just last month in January actually, so Patroni was
the lead author, but there were a bunch of authors

(02:57):
named on it. And I'm not going to say the
name of the study because that might spoil a little
bit about what happened. But basically, there have been a
lot of modern analyzes trying to understand exactly what happened
to the bodies of the victims of Vesuvius in settlements
like Pompeii and Herculaneum. It's like some of the ones
people are most familiar with, or when essentially the like

(03:18):
the the the ashes that formed around body have been
used as a kind of mold. You know, pour a
substance down in there, let it, you know, harden, and
then when you bring it back out, you have this,
this picture of these these humans from seventy nine at
the basically the moment of death. Yeah. And in a
lot of cases, these people died under circumstances so extreme

(03:41):
that it's difficult to imagine exactly how it would play
out on our soft, fluid filled bodies. Um. This particular
study concerns one such case, which got a good right
up in the New York Times by Jennifer Pinkowski. So
this study looked at one specific body exhumed from the
buried ruins of Herculee Lannium. And this was a man
who was believed to have been in his mid twenties,

(04:04):
and he was found lying on a wooden bed in
the colle Gum august Stallium, which was a building on
the main street of the town away from the waterfront.
And the man's ash entombed remains were discovered sometime in
the nineteen sixties, but more recently researchers were able to
extract a strange object from inside the dead man's head,

(04:26):
and it is a warped, black, shiny fragment of glassy material.
What is it? Well, I mean, if if one worked
out to guess, you might think, well, this must be
a piece of you know, volcanic shrapnel, something that you know,
flying through the air and become it gets embedded in
the skull, right sure. And when I was looking at
images of the fragment, I was thinking exactly along those lines,

(04:49):
because it reminded me a bit of the appearance of
tech tits, which are these gravel sized pieces of natural
glass that are formed from terrestrial material, including things like sand,
and which get rapidly superheated to the melting point during
meteorite impacts. So, like you know, a meteor hits the surface,
it kicks up a lot of stuff as some of

(05:10):
it quickly melts and turns into glass. And natural impact
glass is amazing. I think we talked about it a
bit in our episode about the Kabba Um but but yeah,
just to imagine that, like an object falling from space
hits the surface of the Earth, throws up this big
explosion of debris, and some of that debris gets so
hot from the impact it turns into a shower of glass.

(05:31):
So anyway, the images of this object extracted from the
man's head look kind of like tech tits or kind
of like obsidian, but it also has this crazy complicated
shape and texture with these sharp hooks and crags and
little rounded divots as if created by frozen bubbles. And
so anyway, the authors of this study believe the evidence

(05:51):
tells us what the glassy material is. It's vitrified brain tissue,
human brain turned into glass. Hence the name of the study,
heat induced brain vitrification from the vesuvious eruption in c.
Seventy nine uh and is summarized in Pinkowski's article. According
to pure Paolo Patrona, who is a forensic anthropologist of

(06:13):
the University Federico, the second of Naples and the first
author on the study, again, the man's brain quote turned
to glass as a result of high heat from the
pyroclastic flow, and the victim's skull exploded. Now, this is
not actually the first case of research indicating the heat
from the volcanic eruption caused people's heads to explode. That

(06:34):
that's something that had been established by some previous research. Right.
In fact, one of the older episodes of stuff to
blow your mind I think titled stuff that will literally
blow your mind. That's one of the things we mentioned
as being something that could actually make your your head pop,
would be becoming caught in say a pyroclastic flow like this. Yeah,

(06:56):
not not to be too grim, but I mean, I
think of the comparison to like, and we've discussed our
problems microwaving butter where there's like too much vapor formation,
very rapidly rapid temperature change like that. So, to quote
some text from the study itself, and this was quoted
secondarily from the BBC quote, the detection of glassy material
from the victim's head of proteins expressed in the human brain,

(07:20):
and if fatty acids found in human hair indicates the
thermally induced preservation of vitrified human brain tissue. So first
you'd have extreme radiant heat which would pretty much instantly
ignite fat in the body and vaporized fluid content and
body tissues. What kind of heat are we talking about, Well,
analysis of the charred wood nearby shows temperatures right around

(07:43):
the man probably reached to something like five d and
twenty degrees celsius, which is over nine hundred and sixty
degrees fahrenheit, which I believe is hotter than the average
surface temperature on the planet Venus. Uh. So we're we're
in extreme territory here. And uh And though I should
say that not all experts are convinced that the black
glass is truly the man's brain, because Pinkowski Uh in

(08:07):
her article for The Times, also quote somebody named Christina Kilgrove,
who is a bioarchaeologist at the University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, who's done firsthand research on Vesuvius and of
the brain to glass study. She says, quote, while their
analysis is intriguing, I do not think they've proved its
human brain material, nor nor have they ruled out other origins.

(08:28):
The fatty acids they identified are typical of vegetable or
animal fat or hair. So apparently, you know, once you
start achieving temperatures that potentially turn all kinds of organic
material into glass, you create some room for confusion. Maybe
this is some kind of other organic material that trified, right,
and then again this is like, these are special circumstances

(08:49):
to create this, these forensic remains. So it's difficult to
compare these to other cases. Now, that's not the only
study to come out recently about grim death scenes and
these hounds. There was another one I was looking at
that was revising some earlier research about how some people
had died when their their remains were found within these
stone houses that were along the shores at Herculaneum that

(09:12):
were sort of known as the boat houses, to appear
that people died crowded inside. I think they had probably
crowded into the buildings for shelter. The buildings got closed
up and then got superheated, and the question was how
did the people die inside? And again it's a very
grim scene, but it looks like it sort of turned.
The buildings provided some insulation from the flow of what

(09:33):
was happening outside, but just gradually heated up and sort
of worked like an oven. It's kind of horrible to imagine.
Oh yeah, so yeah, they they managed to avoid like
instant cooking but instead got slightly more gradual cooking. Yeah,
now is luck with habit? There was There was another
very recent bit of news concerning the eruption of Vesuvious.
In January, number of news sources ran a story about

(09:56):
the possible discovery of Plenty the Elder's skull. What yes,
um in one of the better red ups that the
one I was looking at, in fact, was Katherine J.
Woo's This two thousand year old skull may belong to
plenty of the elder published on smithsonian dot com. Okay,
what's the case here? Alright, So this, this latest wrinkle
in the story comes of via Italian researchers regarding one

(10:21):
of some seventy skeletons buried together in the aftermath of
the eruption. So this particular body that they're looking at,
or really particularly particularly we're dealing with a skull and
job bone. Uh, they were found to have the body
that it's associated with found to have heavy or heavily
ornamented short sword in its possession, and jewels, all of

(10:43):
this becoming of a person of means. Perhaps they speculate
a high ranking naval officer. Now, these remains were unearthed
about a hundred years ago, and engineer Gennero Matrone theorized
that this might be plenty, but there was no way
to really explore this any further. Um, you know, it's
just kind of circumstance, like, hey, we found a this

(11:06):
this body looks like it was somebody of of means.
The most famous person of means to have we know
died uh in the eruption of Vesuvius is of course
Plenty of the Elder, so he's thought, I think this
might be him. So fast forward to the twenty one
century and the skull and the jaw are now in
the possession of Rome's Museum of the History of the

(11:27):
Art of Medicine, and using DNA sequencing technology, researchers found
that it was the skull of quote, a man who
could trace some of his lineage to Italy and who
likely died in his forties or fifties. Now Plenty would
have been fifty six, so it's possible. The jaw, on
the other hand, turned out to be from a different
individual of North African heritage. Okay, so it wasn't even

(11:49):
from the same head as the rest of the skull.
So all of this is still very uncertain. This is
not a this is not they're not really hitting it
out of the park with this one. I think you
can fairly say, yes, it sounds possible that this particular
skull could have belonged to Plenty of the Elder, But

(12:11):
narrowing it down to just a you know, a man
who could trace some of his lineage to Italy and
who likely died in his forties or fifties. I mean,
obviously they're going to be other individuals in that category
that died with the eruption of Vesuvius. Yeah, this is interesting,
but yeah, I'm far from convinced. So again to go
over to the evidence, he would have been in the

(12:32):
right age bracket, but a lot of people would have been.
He would have been an Italian man, but a lot
of people there would have been, And he had some
he had some possessions indicating that he was rich, right,
an ornamented sword and jewels. But again, so the argument
is like, well, this was the kind of stuff that
you might expect to find upon a naval officer, to

(12:55):
to find upon you know, somebody liked plenty of the elder.
But that's about as far as we can really go
with it. Yeah. Yeah, this reminds me of other cases
where we've talked about on the show before, where people
kind of like, you're so eager to take one fact
or character or place from a historical narrative and try
to connect it with physical artifacts on on often a

(13:17):
very tenuous basis. Like I remember in our episode about
Lot's Wife where we discussed the dead Sea region and
the tendency to take a rock or salt formation, and
people would say, that's a Lot's wife. Um, And like,
even so, even if you were someone who believed the
you know, destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah story as as
history and believe the whole Lot's Wife thing, why would

(13:38):
you expect an individual rock you come across to actually
be her? Right? Yeah, the idea is of course endlessly
attractive to be able to have this physical proof of
Plenty of the elder and individual who factors so heavily
into this particular historical narrative. But also it's just such
an uh an important figure in the you know, the
historical writings. Yeah, I think it speaks to a kind

(14:00):
of human tendency of like the characters we know from
literary sources, whether it's history or mythology. They're like friends
and you know the same way that you walk through
a crowd and you yearned to recognize people. You know,
you see somebody and like, oh is that Jeff, No
it's not him, but your your brain went there for
a second. Is that Plenty skull? Oh? Way, what it
might be somebody else, but still it feels it feels

(14:23):
special for a second there, Yeah, it does. So I
guess I'd say the evidence here not even close to decisive.
But if you want to imagine maybe it's plenty skull,
I guess there's no harm in that, right and now.
And on the same hand, I don't want to criticize
this more recent research because because clearly they were they
were following up on this much earlier speculation where this
goes like I think it's plenty, and they said, well,
let's let's apply some science to this. Let's what we

(14:47):
can we can discern from the bone of the skull itself,
and yeah, this is what they figured out. Yeah, you
can find out more that's either consistent or not consistent
with what somebody has already claimed. Yeah, and if they
found that it was, you know, the skull of a
of a woman in her eighties, then it probably wouldn't
have been plenty, right, or with the the the entire
like the skull and the job oone had both turned

(15:09):
out to have North African origin, that would have also
been a firmer no, yea, So instead we just have
a lingering maybe all right, On that note, we're going
to take the possible skull of plenty of the elder,
and we're gonna place it up in the shelf and
we're going to drink coffee from it. Yes, and we
are going to take a quick break, but we will
be right back and we will continue to discuss the

(15:30):
lessons of Vesuvius. Than all right, we're back. So there
are all these genres of things that archaeologists have uncovered
at at the settlements that were ruined by the eruption
of Vesuvius, especially like Pompeii and Herculaneum, and there's no
way for us to talk about all of the discoveries.

(15:50):
A lot of them are just things about like, you know,
everyday Roman life. You know, the way the houses are preserved,
things about how the kitchens would have run, and stuff
like that, because you have all the stuff still in there. Yeah.
One of the things about the past that and then
we've touched on this plenty of times before, is you know,
it's the everyday stuff that is not always preserved in

(16:11):
say the history books or in you know, religious art
or what have you. And and that's often the most
interesting thing, like how did the common people live, How
what did people eat, what did they drink? Well, how
healthy were they? But like the common information like that
is not the kind of stuff that is usually thought
notable to be recorded by historians of the time because

(16:32):
common life is not interesting to them at least because
it's common might be interesting to us for which it's
unusual and unknown. Instead, the things that historians are likely
to record are the unusual events, you know, the wars
and everything like that. Yeah, yeah, the the the the
dramatic moments, etcetera. So or and indeed with the with

(16:53):
Vesuvius and its eruption, like you know, that's we have
this wonderful account that it survived and provides all these
these details about the this other than the unnatural horror
that fall, the falls, the cities that exist in the
area surrounding the Volcanic mountain. But you know, Plenty is
not taking a lot of time to talk about what
he ate for breakfast that morning, right, So I think

(17:13):
he does say his uncle had a light luncheon. You
don't say what it was. But one of the amazing
genres of things that archaeologists have uncovered at Pompeii that
is definitely worth looking up. If you haven't seen. It
is the some of the surviving original artwork, which in
some cases is preserved in a strikingly vivid and colorful way.

(17:34):
Oh yes, yeah, these are definitely worth looking up, and
some of them are you know, it's it's one of
these things where it makes you really think about trying
to put yourself in the shoes of the of these
people who lived in se And so there are things
that make perfect sense, like, yeah, of course you'd want
to live in a uh, in a in a space

(17:54):
that is uh, you know, has rich decoration. But then
you ask, well, why this painting, particular fresco, etcetera. Well,
I'm thinking if it happened to my house and future
archaeologists were digging it up, they'd be like, what does
it mean that he had a poster for the film
Attack of the Crab Monsters on his wall. Clearly he
thought it was a great film, or he he realized

(18:15):
that giant psychic crabs were holy creatures and were to
be venerated in the home is a kind of a
household god. They might think this is a religious artifact.
But so one of the fresco is that I wanted
to talk about was something I was just reading about
from a site called Reggio five Reggio v uh, I
assume that means five and not just the letter V,

(18:37):
which is still under excavation. And this is a well
preserved fresco that appears to have been in the basement
of a large building, underneath the stairwell. I don't know
if that contributed to how well it was preserved. It
might have, might have, But it depicts the end of
a fight between two gladiators of fighter types that we
can actually identify based on their weapons in their armor

(19:01):
in the painting. So one is of a type known
as the Murmillo and the other is a of a
type known as the three X or the Thracian. So
I was looking these up in a book called Gladiators
at Pompeii by Luciana Jacob Belly from two thousand three,
and she writes of the mrmal O that he had.
So the name of the Mrmalo type fighter originally comes

(19:22):
from a marine fish, the Murma, which had an image
of this fish was drawn on this type of fighter's helmet.
So this fighter would have a very scary looking helmet. Actually,
so it's got a visor that closes over the face,
and it's got kind of a chain pattern like chain
link pattern across the visor um and then of course
it depicts this fish. And then the gladiator would fight

(19:45):
bare chested or sometimes where something known as the subla gaculum. Uh.
And then he'd have his right arm protected by something
called a manica, which I've seen depicted as like a
kind of a sleeve of padding laced up around the
right arm, which was the sword arm. So you'd hold
your short sword called a gladius in the right arm

(20:05):
with that laced up with this padding, and then in
the other hand you would have a rectangular shield called
a screwed them that's about one meter high. And as
we've discussed in the past talking about gladiators on the
show Roman Gladiatorial Combat. You know, it's not unfair to
compare it to the film adaptation of The Running Man.
You know, it's there's theatrics here, there's mythic symbology involved here. Uh.

(20:30):
So it's a it's it's not merely there's there's a
mix of function but also just mythic form and entertainment. Yes,
and there's another element of it that comes in, which
is just like ethnic representations like the Romans would have
some fighter types that were supposed to represent sort of
like exotic foreign types of warriors who the fighters might

(20:53):
not necessarily actually be from those regions, but they say,
the other fighter in this not the Mermalo, but the Thracian,
you know, So that's like a type of person. And
so this is supposed to be modeled after the idea
of a Thracian warrium. Well, I'm not sure if it
would actually in any accurate way represent what the Thracians were. Like. Yeah,
I mean, this is actually something you see reflected even
in some I think contemporary examples, but definitely in twentieth

(21:16):
century examples of professional wrestling. Yes, where various, and this
is something you would see in different parts in pretty
much everywhere that pro wrestling was slash is popular. So
talking about Mexico, Japan, the United States, uh, those three anyway,
you would often see depictions of other nationalities uh in

(21:37):
different enemy roles, and of course you see all manner
of xenophobia and UH and racial stereotypes and cultural stereotypes
embodied in those forms. Yes, and you know a funny
thing that I was reading about with Roman gladiators that
like sometimes gladiator types would go out of style as
as certain ethnic groups were more are comprehensively incorporated into

(22:02):
the empire. So like earlier on, you would have a
type of fighter that was basically the gallic fighter, you know,
like this is our this is our parody of the uh,
I don't know what you want to call it, you know,
their parody or their understanding of like the the ethnic
gall as a warrior as gall than goal. Today, modern
like France basically became a more fully incorporated part of

(22:23):
the Roman Empire. That type of fighter fell out of
fashion and was replaced by representations of ethnic groups that
were still more considered outsiders or others. Yeah, it's a
it's an interesting way to think about the you know,
that space where where sport and war meet, and they

(22:43):
meet more directly in gladiatorial combat obviously, but you see
this in other types of sporting entertainment out there, even
like full on team sports. Uh. You know, there's this
idea that instead of two nations going to war, they
go to game. Uh. And that you know, that's ultimately
part of the spirit of even the Olympics, which are
again often uh you know, held up as an example

(23:06):
of nations coming together in peace and uh, and I
think certainly certainly fulfills that that need for the international community.
And yet at the same time, it is about my
country and your country going head to head, and we're
going to see which one has the has the right
stuff to to emerge victorious at the end. Yeah. But
at least in the case of the Olympics, it's like

(23:27):
people actually from the original countries coming together to compete.
It would be a different thing if you were just
like wherever somebody actually came from, you had them depicting
a person from a certain country, and then in that
you would see more of a parallel in say twentieth
century American professional wrestling. Yeah. So jacob Elli writes about

(23:48):
this other type that the second type in the Fresco
the Thracian quote. The Thracians armor included a small, strongly convex,
squarish shield known as a parmula a manica. Again, this
is an arm band like this like padding laced up
around the sword arm uh and two high leggings often
decorated up to the knee. The weapon most typical of

(24:08):
this gladiator was a short sword, either curved or angled,
called us Sika, so like you have a little kind
of curved scimitar thing, and she writes that even the
helmet was unusual usually be decorated with this tall decorated crest.
So in the fresco, it's a battle scene, and it's
at the end of the battle, and the Mermalo fighter

(24:28):
stands victorious, holding his sword in his right hand and
holding his shield high in his left, and the Thracian
is bent over, badly wounded, bleeding from wounds on his
wrist and his chest. He's disarmed, his shield is lying
on the ground next to him, and he's making a
sign with his left hand, and it's not clear exactly

(24:48):
what that is, but some historians and archaeologists thinks that
that he's possibly appealing to the audience for mercy with
this sign, and we don't know if the fight would
have ended with mercy or execution. That's interesting because then
it then also not not only you're wondering about what
he's depicted in the art, but then why is it depicted,
Like why is this image celebrated? Are we celebrating the

(25:10):
presumably the valiant warrior that has fallen and is is
appealing for for mercy? Like saying, hey, I put up
a good fight, didn't you, And and maybe the people
looking at the art can be like, yeah, even if
you lose, if you put up a good fight, there's
there's grace and honor in that. Or yeah, is it
about the other guy, Like yeah, defeat the other of
combatant at all costs and maybe they'll beg for mercy,

(25:32):
but you still want right, Is the purpose of the
artwork to be like, look at this Thracian loser? Yeah?
Uh yeah? And according it gets even more interesting because
according to Massimo Osana, director General of Pompei's Archaeological Park,
this building was probably both a tavern and a brothel
that was frequented by local gladiators. So Reggio five is

(25:54):
very near to another side that's believed to have been
a barracks for the fighters, So the gladiators would have
had their barracks nearby, they would go for I guess
recreation at this tavern in brothel, and inside the tavern
and brothel where the gladiators go, there are scenes on
the walls of gladiators killing each other, and it's like,
is that what they would have wanted to see? Or
is that what they just had to put up with. Yeah,

(26:16):
like who who decorated this space? I don't It's so
interesting trying to understand what would motivate people to to
decorate buildings in certain ways in the ancient world. You like,
you can't again the same thing we were talking about, like, like,
how would a future civilization understand the spirit with which
I hang up a poster for a trashy nineteen fifties
sci fi movie? Like do they like do they have

(26:39):
the level of complexity and imagining my mind that says, okay,
this had something to do with like love of horror movies,
but also a sense of irony and you know, like
or would they just have to assume I guess this
is just like a religious artifact or something. Yeah, yeah,
there's some of there's there's so many generalities to potentially
apply to that situation. And then and then it's going

(27:01):
to get you know, very specific about the individual whose
house it is. Of course, in this case, it is
a you know, again more of a less a public
space for the gladiators that are assembled there. But then
you have to again question who decided that this is
what should be on the wall? And then what is
the intended meaning of that, Like what are they trying
to enforce or celebrate? Right? Is it valiant? Is it funny?

(27:23):
Is it honoring them? Is it scaring them? Like? What
if they put that that image up at work here?
Like how would we take away from that? It's like, oh,
I don't know. Why are they both podcasters? So I
don't I don't know what's happening. So again, we're not
gonna be able to get into anywhere close to all
the studies that discuss what daily life was like in
Pompeii or Herculaneum prior to the eruption of Vesuvius and

(27:45):
seventy nine CE. But but I do want to discuss
just a few quick ones, and these are all relatively
recent that shed some interesting light on everything. So the
first one I want to talk about is a two
thousand seventeen University of Southern Denmarks studdy that looked at
the drinking water situation for the Romans of Pompeii and
they found that while yes, lead pipes which they used

(28:08):
would sometimes poison the water, of the issue here is
they would quickly calcify, so you would only be dealing
with high toxicity levels after they've been initially installed, or
when you've had to make some repairs. So so the
lead would from time to time poison you, but that

(28:29):
the toxic chemical element antimony would have been more of
a factor. It was mixed with the lead, and it
was a more It was also more common in the groundwater,
as is typical of areas of volcanic activity. So this
would have, according to the researchers quote, lead to daily
problems with vomiting, diarrhea and liver and kidney damn. So um,

(28:53):
I mean, it's yeah, it's it's it's it's terrific to imagine.
But but but it does shed a little a little
more light, like what does it what does it mean
to have amazing and really advanced plumbing in uh in
seventy nine se Well, it probably being poisoned part of
the time, especially in this area. Well it makes me think.
So Pompeii is basically a rich town. It's kind of

(29:15):
a resort region. A lot of successful elites live there
poisoning themselves with diarrhea pipes, and it reminds me of
the raw water trend from a couple of years remember that.
So a lot of like rich tech world kind of
people decided they were going to pay fifteen dollars a
gallon for untreated drinking water full of giardia. I haven't
looked it up. Is that like, is that still a thing?

(29:36):
Or did that go away? I hope it went away,
but but I don't know. We'll have to say, maybe
we'll do an episode on that. Maybe we'll get them
as a sponsor. Who knows. UM. Now, a couple of
other study. Both of these other studies I'm going to
talk about our University of Cincinnati studies. UM Okay, there's
a teams there that have been working UH in Pompeii,
and both of them have really concerned, like refuse what

(29:59):
we can learn, not so much from the the artistry
that has survived or the human remains that we can
look at, but digging around in the trash, looking in
the sewer pipes and trying to solve the riddle of
you know what they ate, what they how they lived
and UH and you know how they disposed of their trash.
So there's two thousand and twelve University of Cincinnati study

(30:21):
looked at a question that has come up in archaeology
concerning trash uh in Pompeii. Why was there so much
garbage littered among the tombs? So one theory was that
we saw garbage dumped in tombs and at grave sites
that had been damaged by previous earthquakes in the vicinity,
and therefore they had been abandoned. And since this was

(30:43):
an abandoned you know, grave area that wasn't used anymore,
people decided what would have dump our trash here? Right?
Yesteryear's graveyard is today's dump. Yeah, And we see shades
of this in today's society. Right. You have you have,
say a house that's under repair or it's you know,
it's there's something, there's nobody's living there. One person dumps
some garbage there, and then suddenly other people were dumping

(31:05):
old couches and what have you. And there may be
signs to try and prevent people from doing it. But
now this is a place where garbage accumulates. Yeah, it's
the RLO three principle, you know, the Thanksgiving Day mask here? Okay,
is this from Alice's restaurant? Yeah? Okay, yeah, yeah, or
they find when you find garbage somewhere, you figure that's
where you put the other garbage on top that's that's

(31:27):
that's part of the human experience. However, in this particular study,
Allison Emerson argued that the Romans of the time they
simply had a more casual approach to trash. So she
points out that there's no evidence for any kind of
a centrally managed system for garbage disposal, and so life
was probably just lived in close proximity to the refuse

(31:50):
that created, especially in the alleys, the streets, roads, cemeteries,
and tombs as well. Plus one thing that she drives
home is that coombs at the time, like these were
places you didn't want your tomb. Just today we think of,
oh where do I want to be buried? Where do
want my remains to go? I wanted to be a nice,
quiet place that occasionally be visited by children or families,

(32:13):
but for the most part is just left to the
squirrels and the birds. Uh So, Emmerson argues that this
was not the Roman way you wanted to be remembered.
Uh So, your tomb needed to be seen, Your tomb
needed to be in a place that was going to
be highly trafficked. Uh And so these tombs would have
been high traffic spaces, which meant people would probably be
littering everywhere that they would be leaving graffiti, etcetera. And

(32:37):
that was I mean, that was just part of it.
Like this is, you want to be seen, you want
to be remembered, You need to be in a living space.
Living space means graffiti and garbage. Oh yeah, this is
common in the ancient world. It makes me think of
the Chattelhoya situation where people would literally bury the remains
of their ancestors in the floor of the house where
they lived. Yeah, you want to be near the living

(32:59):
that's that's part of the whole equation here. And they
would often keep body parts of the like maybe keep
their head covered in plaster, just on the shelf. Now,
another University of Cincinnati study came from and this one
looked specifically at the drains, cisterns, and the trains of
Pompeii to learn what people ate. And it's interesting we've

(33:21):
we've talked about how yes, there were definitely some very wealthy,
uh members of Roman society in the area. This was
a very rich part of the Roman Empire. At the
same time, there were, of course commoners, there were people
lower down on the socioeconomic spectrum. And so in looking
at the the these remains, these vestiges of of the

(33:42):
of these diets were they were able to find these
clear socio economic divisions. So for instance, they looked at
one area and they found grains, or they found the
remnants of grains, fruits, nuts, olives, lintels, local fish and
chicken eggs, as well as minimal cuts of more expensive
meat and salted fish that had been imported from Spain.

(34:04):
And so this would have been you know, um, this
would have been the the the food of of people
lower down on the socioeconomic spectrum, the workers throughout the
regular people, yeah, eating you know, the staples, but then
occasionally having something a little more fancy. But then of
course there were the richer areas, UH, and here they
found more imports from outside Italy, such as various shellfish,

(34:29):
sea urchins, and I love this detail, even delicacies that
included the butchered leg joint of a giraffe and UH
Professor Steven Ellis points out that the bone quote represents
the height of exotic food and is underscored by the
fact that this is thought to be the only giraffe
bone ever recorded from an archaeological excavation in Roman Italy, So,

(34:53):
as far as we know, the only bone from a
giraffe ever found in Italy at the time, and it's
in it's underneath the restaurant. Now, some of you might
be wondering, Well, you might think to yourself, well, it
wouldn't even occur to me to eat a giraffe, which
is a giraffe taste like? Well, there's a wonderful article
you should read on this. This was published in New

(35:15):
York Magazine in februaryeen titled What does Giraffe Meat Taste Like?
By Adam Martin, and basically Martin says that, you know,
descriptions are gonna vary, but on one hand, you'll see
it described as a very tender meat that is served
extra rare and it kind of melts in the mouth.
Other accounts have said that it's an intensely flavored, lean

(35:38):
meat like that of a tender horse, so like horse meat,
except not as tough, and another source said that that
giraffe meat was tough and chewy, but also flavorful. Now
I would have guessed like tough and gamey. Yeah, I
mean it's a wild animal. Yeah, this is not like
the kind of the breeds of cattle that are bred

(35:58):
for meat. Yeah, yeah, I felt the same. And of
course a big part of this too is like it's exotic, right, people,
And this is the reason why rich Romans would have
potentially ordered this on a menu. It's like, what do
you have? What are your specials today? Well, we have
the leg of a giraffe, you know, exciting. I've never
had that before. I will try it and then I'll
have some cost on how I respond to the taste. Now, Martin,

(36:22):
does our drive home though? That? Okay? Yes, there are
examples of modern giraffe meat that have been obtained legally, uh,
certain like from calling efforts in certain places. But if
you but don't use this as license to go and
try and obtain giraffe meat because it's also giraffe meat
is going to bring with it a high risk of
being harvested unethically. So ultimately it's not worth it because

(36:46):
it's not it doesn't sound like it's gonna taste great,
and you don't want to go around trying to order
yourself up a leg of giraffe for the barbecue. Uh.
If you're going to have to contend with the fact
that it it might be obtained on ethnic I wonder
how many pounds of meat you get out of side
of giraffe. I mean, it's it's quite a bit. This. Uh.
This article by Martin goes into that a bit. How

(37:07):
sometimes they're poaching. There's there you'll see poaching of giraffes,
because if you land a giraffe, it's worth like, it's
as much meat as you would get from say, sell
several say in Paula or gazelles or something. Um. That
being said, it's going to be probably tough and weird. Yeah. Now,
if you were one of those people thinking like it
would never occur to you to eat a giraffe, I

(37:28):
was thinking like that, this this really indicates that you
do not have a Roman elite mentality. Because we've discussed
on the show several times. Uh, the Romans ate everything,
you know, like, oh, look at this interesting exotic animal.
Get the butcher knife. Uh. They were they were really like,
let's try to eat that culture. Uh. And apparently another

(37:50):
thing I was reading about is that they loved the
rare delicacy of flamingo tongue. I was reading about this
in Food of the Ancient World by Joan P. Alcock
or she writes quote flamingo's tongue was a great delicacy.
Emperor Vitellius in a d. Sixty nine presented the Goddess
Minerva with a dish containing peacock brains, pike livers, pheasant brains,

(38:14):
and flamingo tongues, which he afterward eight, which is great.
You know you have to present it to Minerva and
then you know, chow down yourself because Minerva is not
going to eat it. Now I feel above two minds
on all of this, because on one hand, yes, they
are all these wonderfully really exotic sounding things with the
Romans eight. And yet if you had to decipher, like

(38:35):
which which menu of possibilities is more exotic and uh,
you know it depends on wider you know, geographic sourcing.
Is it this restaurant in Pompeii where the giraffe leg
was was served? Is it even the the available menu,
say it even any given time in Rome itself? Or

(38:57):
is it what you might get at the largest Whole
Foods or Arby's your What's the restaurant with the colossal
menu cheesecake factory? You know, like like if you like
trace the origins of all those things and see it
as see cheesecake factory as a restaurant of empire. Is
it ultimately a larger empire by far than that of

(39:18):
the even like the richest table setting in the Roman Empire? Well,
I mean you clearly drive home that like some of
our judgments about these kinds of things are completely arbitrary,
you know, about like what is an exotic extravagant food
and what is just normal food? Like the Roman poet
Marshall was actually he lamented the idea of eating flamingo tongues.

(39:40):
I don't know why exactly, it's it's what's so bad
about flamingo tongues compared to the other stuff. But he
was generally attacking, you know, like, uh, certain Roman elites
as decadent, decadent epicureans or whatever. But there's this couplet
that Marshall wrote that I found translated in a book
called The Flamingo Smile by Stephen Jay Gould, And so
Marshall wrote, my red wing gives me my name, but

(40:04):
epicures regard my tongue is tasty, But what if my
tongue could sing? Well, I think it sounds like what
he's getting at is a basic truth. The flamingo is
a beautiful animal that we love to look at. It
is it is different from other varieties of bird that
we might behold. And and that's why generally you go
to a zoo, what's the first thing you see? Flamingos.

(40:25):
They're like the standard greeters at it so many different
zoological parks. I mean, flamingos are weird. They are beautiful
like that. I love the way they eat with their
heads upside down, you know. In this book, Gould goes
on to write about the about how the flamingos tongue
has special texture and taste because of its unique evolutionary

(40:47):
function that, unlike most birds, flamingos are actually filter feeders.
They're more like billen whales. And they dip their heads
into the water turned down to and they open up
their mouths and they've got these little, uh, these hair
like things called lamelay. And then the tongue here the
part that the emperor would eat. It serves as a
kind of pump to like rapidly suck water in and

(41:09):
out of the mouth through the filters. And this pulls
in all the you know, weird little bits and life
forms that the flamingos ultimately survived based on. But that
it's this strange morphology that apparently made it so delicious
to uh to Roman epicures like Vitelius. Well, you know
it's I guess it's possible it had a special taste

(41:29):
or special texture, uh that that made people want to
eat it. But you get the impression that it's mostly
like here is a unique animal. Uh, serve it to me. Well,
I just want to say, as an addendum, Vitelius did
not last long. He he was only emperor for less
than a year. Uh. He he lost a power struggle
to Vespasian, was dragged out of hiding by a mob

(41:51):
of his enemies and beheaded in the streets of Rome.
And uh, I attached a picture for you to look at.
I don't know if you've seen this artwork, but it's
called Vitelius drag through the Streets of Rome by the
Populace by George Rossia Gross. He looks like he's having
a bad day. Yeah, yeah, that is a yeah, that's that.
That is a bad day for sure. But maybe he
should have served giraffe to Minerva instead, and his luck

(42:12):
could have changed well, I think even today it would
probably be just political death for most politicians to to
suddenly publicly eat the tongue of a of a flamingo,
or or eat a big chunk of giraffe at the
Iowa State Fair and fried flamingo tongue on a stick. Yeah,
I don't know. Well, okay, and now I'm second guessing myself,

(42:32):
But all right, on that lovely note, we will take
one more break, but when we come back, we will
return more specifically two volcanoes than alright, we're back. So
we mentioned earlier how the slopes of Vesuvius, you know,
once more, are home to vineyards and and uh in
human populations. The area around Vesuvius is highly urbanized today,

(42:57):
but authorities have established a red zone as ownA rosa
to be evacuated if signs indicate that an eruption is
likely sona rosa. That sounds so nice, yeah, I mean,
or or it sounds like like a horror movie, doesn't
It kind of could be a jello like Lazona rosa. Yeah. Now,

(43:17):
the general consensus is that if these signs were to
prevent themselves, we'd have about two weeks notice on an
eruption but there are a lot has been written about,
like the the actual preparedness in place for an event
like this. So Lee Marshall wrote about this topic in
a September seen article for The Telegraph, pointing out that

(43:42):
again at the time, seven hundred thousand people lived in
this red zone of Vesuvius and while there there was
a finalized evacuation plan and it was still in the
process of coming online in se Uh. But according to
one Francisco Emilio Barelli regional Council for the Green Party,

(44:05):
quoted in a November two thousand nineteen euronews dot com article,
exercises regarding evacuation, we're no longer being carried out. And
in that article Filippo Pultronieri pointed out that other urban
areas near volcanic areas are also highlighted for insufficient planning,
namely the island vacation destination of Iscia and Uh and

(44:28):
also of Flagrian Fields, which is another another area in
that region that is known for its volcanic activity. Lee Marshall,
writing at the time, pointed out quote the notorious SS
to six S eight dual carriageway between Naples and the
Sarentine peninsula design not only to relieve congestion but also
provide an escape route from the volcano is still not complete.

(44:50):
Construction of the road started incredibly in the eighties. So
in that article, Marshall contended that the locals were more
inclined to take solace in religious faith than in emergency planning.
Now this was obviously written a few years ago, and
I was looking around trying to find any confirmation that
s S two has actually been completed and is you know,

(45:11):
in operation. I couldn't find any articles about it. Some
of them were, you know, in Italian, somewhere translated into English.
So if we have any Italian or Italian speaking Italian
reading listeners out there who want to set the record straight, uh,
we would love to hear from you. But based on
I was looking around, like Google Maps. If you look
a Google Map inquiry for a route between Naples and

(45:33):
the Sarentine Peninsula, it initially only provides a route via
SS three, sixty six and forty five, which travels right
between the ocean and the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. So
like not a good place to be. So that sounds
like a roughly herculaneum zone. Yeah, yeah, like and like, yeah,
you don't want to be between Vesuvius and the ocean. Yeah,
this is this is definitely in the red zone. Um.

(45:55):
But the more I when I look closely, it looked
like you could actually route you on s S two
six if you drag the route around with your mouse cursor.
So I personally cannot tell to what degree like that
is now a valid option to deal with the evacuation. Okay,
we have had an official Google Maps fail getting out,

(46:16):
but but to whatever degree you know this is finally
in place, etcetera. Like what I'm trying to to drive
home from those articles that that I cited there is
that you know, we still live. We still have people
living in high concentration in areas near active volcanoes. And yes,
even with modern science we may have again two weeks

(46:38):
notice on a pending eruption. But that's two weeks to
sometimes move a very large number of people out of
the danger zone. It, I mean, it makes you start
to wonder more broadly about like what are the kinds
of risks that human settlements should be tolerant of, because
it's clear, you know, they are all kinds of places

(46:59):
where are there are different risks of natural disasters that
are going to come with different severity, different frequency. I mean,
I don't know how exactly you compare say, like densely
populated areas around a volcano that you know that sometimes
will erupt, hasn't had a majorly destructive eruption, and while
but you know probably is at some point in the

(47:21):
indeterminate future going to erupt again. Uh, and you know
that would be massively destructive versus I don't know, like
having civilizations in like a tornado zone where each you know,
each tornado is that tornadoes are going to be more regular,
They're gonna happen every year. Each one is less destructive
than a volcanic eruption. But they're just coming in these
constant waves, and you just hope one doesn't come near

(47:43):
your house. Yeah, and then you have to what degree
are you leaning on emergency preparation or even again religious
faith to deal with that probability? Yeah, I guess, I
just mean, I don't know how to do the math
on you know, how to compare those types of risks, well,
I mean it, you know, the big one, of course,
is residing in coastal regions that are gonna be affected

(48:04):
by hurricanes, you know, and in some cases the I've
read that the best advice is like, well, if your
home is destroyed, like, do not rebuild it. You need
to move further inland. Um. So you know there there's
a version of this for for various different environments around
the world, I mean, even places where the risk is
not as notably catastrophic. If it's just say, and a

(48:28):
region that is highly susceptible to the ravages of drought.
You know, Uh, it doesn't look as good on a
painting the drought, you know, reaking habit compared to that
of a volcano. But still it can be extremely deadly
and has proven deadly many times in the past. So
the suvious has been described as the most densely populated

(48:50):
area of active volcanism in the world. But here are
a few others of note. Um. One is Cotapaxi, Ecuador,
which is actually a volcano. I hope to in the
in the not too distant future. Uh, three hundred thousand
people I've also seen it listed his three hundred twenty
five thousand live relatively closely nearby. A last eruption was

(49:13):
and it was mostly steam. But it is an area
of a frequent discussion with these and but on top
of that, it is also supposed to be just a
very beautiful location and fun fact, Alexander von Humboldt attempted
to climbate in eighteen o two. Oh, okay, I must uh,
that must be described in that book about him. I
like what I recommended this in our summer reading many

(49:35):
years ago, The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wolf. Fantastic
book about Alexander von Humboldt. If if you haven't read it,
you should. All right, here's another one, Katla, Iceland. This
is near the town of vic and it last erupted
in nineteen eighteen. Uh. Katla is even larger than e
figil Agical, which disrupted European flights when interrupted in So,

(49:58):
I've been to the town of I stayed in a
hotel near Vick one time, and I remember having a
conversation with the guy. The hotel I think was basically
this guy's house and it's sort of been expanded out
to have hotel rooms in it. Uh. And I remember
talking to this guy who ran the place, and he
was like showing us a map of the area on

(50:19):
the wall and just sort of talking about like you
know how, Yeah, here's what happened the last time the
volcano erupted, and it will erupt again at some point.
I don't know. It was strange. I mean, he he
must have just had a different attitude about this different
emotional relationship to the idea of his home being destroyed
by a volcano, because he didn't seem all that concerned

(50:39):
about it. He was just sort of matter of factly
explaining that at some point there will be a geological
event that will completely destroy his home. And uh, I
don't know if his matter of factness was just something
about this guy in particular, if more people would seem
more upset by the idea, or if like living in
a place like that kind of forces you to make
peace with it in a way that I don't know,

(51:01):
you're just like, yeah, that will happen at some point. Yeah,
I mean probably a little bit of both, right. Yeah.
A few other places of note. There's uh uh Sakura, Jima, Japan,
near the city of Kegoshima. That's a six hundred thousand people.
There's Mount Etna that we mentioned earlier. Then there's also Papocotta, Petal, Mexico,
And this is near Mexico City itself. And of course

(51:22):
one of the big concerns with all these is not
you know, it's not necessarily it's not only who are
in the danger zone, but then having to deal with
people from the danger zone, refugee crisis, et cetera. Now
you might be wondering, you know, why do we find
so many people living near some of these volcanoes. So
we've already touched, you know, on the the advantages of say,

(51:44):
the volcanic soil and all, and the geological advantages to
some of these locations, and you know, again on one level,
which just part of the human experience, part of living
on a volatile planet where various regions offer threats like hurricanes, tornadoes,
earthquake strouts, blizzards in more um. According to the U
S Geological Survey, not counting ocean floor volcanoes, which are

(52:06):
is where we find most of them, uh, there are
fifteen hundred potentially active volcanoes worldwide, five hundred of which
have erupted during historical time. Some of these are more
remote and perhaps only threatened a limited number of people,
such as say the two hundred people who live on
the remote Japanese island of Agoshima in the Philippine Sea.

(52:28):
This particular volcano last erupted in the eighteenth century, killing
half the population, and today UH people live inside the
volcanic crater depending on its geothermal power. And you can
you should look up a picture of this. It's spelled
A O G A s h I M A, and
they had some of these images. You can you see

(52:50):
the whole volcanic island and you can pinpoint um, you know,
the signs of human habitation within the crater. And again
it's just kind of a reminder of what it means
to be a human in UH. You know, on a
planet the is subject to to to upheaval like this.
And then of course they're the Hawaiian islands, which are
of course products of volcanic activity. The islands themselves were

(53:11):
created by eruptions, and then ideal bays and harbors or
you know, often the remnants of the calderas with Vesuvius,
the region is beautiful and economically valuable because of the
volcanic formation of the surrounding region, and on top of that,
the volcanic soil, like we mentioned in the first episode,
rich ideal for orchards and vineyards. And it's a vacation
destination as well. But isn't like the most active volcano

(53:33):
in the world in Hawaii. Yeah, Kilauea on the Big
Island is is quite active. Yeah, and uh and it's
it's really it's worth looking at because there's a there's
a wonderful two thousand eighteen New York Times article by
Simon Romero titled Hawaii's volcano country, where land is cheap
and the living is risky. And I thought this, this
is really telling to again getting that question of why

(53:55):
do people live in close proximity to uh to volcanoes sometimes?
Um so in this particular situation. Obviously, Hawaii is beautiful.
I love Hawaii. I have when I've visited. I've been
fortunate enough to visit a few times, and uh and
I always love it. I never want to leave when
I am there. But here's the thing. There's limited land there,

(54:18):
and the way that land is used is oftentimes controversial.
On top of this, there's a severe housing shortage and
very little affordable property, and uh, you know. Ramero writes
that the economic factors alone have led some on the
Big Island to live ever closer to the wrath of
this this beautiful but active volcano. In this article, which

(54:38):
I do recommend reading and full of, the author speaks
with one UH, an individual by the name of jaris
dreaming um musician, So that's thus the colorful name UH.
And he's an individual who purchased some one hundred acres
of land for a hundred thousand dollars. And the reason
it was so cheap was because it's very close proximity

(54:59):
to active lava flows. So not just the possibility of
volcanic activity, but the the visual like the clear of
volcanic activity of moving lava um another example. I just sorry,
I just had a question. How does real estate law
deal with lava flows that like change the outlines of land?

(55:21):
That's that's a great question. Yeah. Yeah, So like if
you say, if you own land and then it gets
paved over by lava flows, I assume you still own
I don't know how you measure it, like roughly the
same land with the same borders. What about if so
lava flows create new land going out into the ocean
where it was previously, Like who gets that land? I

(55:44):
don't know. That's a that's a good question. I'm thinking.
I'm imagining that in most of the situations that we'd
be able to look at, it would not be like
an individual's land. I don't know that, would it be
whoever owns the shoreline that it extends from, I guess.
But then all so i'm I'm I'm pretty sure that
would be off limits anyway, Like you wouldn't be able

(56:05):
to They wouldn't let you even try to build an
active lava um. For instance. An example that Romero brings
up in this particular article is that a ninety eruption
buried a hundred homes in Kalapana in uh In, Hawaii,
on the Big Island, and today you'll find dozens of
not to code homes that have been built atop the

(56:26):
same flow field. So it's I mean, you know, this
is the place was buried. Now there is new land there,
and you know, apparently nobody's supposed to officially be living there,
but there's available land there in a place where available
land is scarce, so of course people are going to
move there despite the risks. I mean, it's kind of
like I think about haunted houses a lot, especially when

(56:48):
when topics of like home values come up and and
so forth. In part because I find those topics of
dreary and depressing and I want to retreat into fantasy.
But also I'm like, I would put up with a
ghost of you know, I if it meant uh, you know,
lower lower mortgage payment and whatnot. I maybe I'd even
invent the idea of a ghost if it resulted in that.
You know, um so, oh yeah, can you get a

(57:11):
discount that way, like call up your bank and say, like,
nobody told me this house was haunted. I want to
I want to reduce my mortgage. Yeah, I mean, Plus
the other side, the other way of looking at it
is that you know, a ghost is much safer than
an act of lava flow in your backyard, So I
would be all for it. You know what this makes
me think is we could do a whole other episode
sometime on the theology of volcanic eruptions. Oh for sure, Yeah, yeah, yeah,

(57:36):
the various divine interpretations of the eruptions, the mythological reasons
given for the eruptions. That would be cool to get into. Yeah.
We didn't even really touch that, dude, And I think
the most we did was discussing how there were stories
of the rumblings of Vesuvius being tied to tales or
acculles fighting monsters or giants in the earth. Yeah. Probably.

(57:58):
I think that has something to do with the naming
of her Pullennium. Yeah, like the idea that it was
founded by her Achilles. Yeah. And of course in uh
in the culture of Hawaii you find the tales of
of Pale the volcano deity. So yeah, there there would
be a lot of rich territory to discuss there. So
maybe we'll return if everybody's into the topic of volcanoes,

(58:18):
there's a lot more to discuss. There's a like one
area I'd like to come back to potentially would be
to discuss volcanic winter discussed the year without summer. Yes,
that would be uh, I think a good one to
return to. We'll be back in the meantime, just like
the lava flows will be back, Yes they will. It's
an active world in the meantime. We would love to

(58:39):
hear from any of you, especially if you out there
have if you live or have lived in an area
of volcanic activity, definitely right in and let us know
what it's like. If you have, if you can answer
our questions about the highways surrounding Vesuvius. We'd like to
hear from you as well. Have you visited some of
these places we we'd love to hear from you about

(59:00):
that as well. Uh. In the meantime, also check out
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(59:23):
like to get in touch with us with feedback on
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Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeart Radio's How
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(59:45):
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