♪ Man: This region is full of traces of the past, waiting to be discovered.

♪ Narrator: Just 28 miles from Pompeii, across the Bay of Naples, are the sunken ruins of the Roman port of Miseno.

Dr. Michele Stefanile: It was the main military harbor of the Roman Empire, the basis of the biggest fleet of this time.

♪ Narrator: In A.D. 79, the Roman writer Pliny the Younger is here, visiting his uncle, the admiral of the fleet.

Pliny is just sitting on the terrace of his villa... ♪ when he noticed something strange and amazing.

♪ Big cloud is exploding from the top of the Vesuvius... ♪ creating the shape of a very high pine tree.

[Loud rumbling] ♪ Narrator: Pliny records every detail as he watches the drama unfold.

Today, he lends his name to this deadly type of eruption.

Stefanile: He is witnessing the beginning of a Plinian eruption... [Rumbling continues] ♪ the most famous volcanic eruption of the history.

Narrator: While Pliny watches from safety, for the residents of Pompeii, the eruption is a matter of life or death.

Within hours, thousands will perish as their city is entombed in meters of ash.

♪ Narrator: Two millennia later, a team of archaeologists is removing that volcanic debris.

This is the most ambitious dig in a generation.

The Italian team are excavating an entire new city block on a wealthy commercial street, as they look to write the next chapter of the last moments of Pompeii.

♪ In one corner, they have discovered what was once a commercial bakery.

♪ In a small room close by, they made a shocking discovery.

Buried under the debris were the crushed remains of two women and a young child, all killed by a collapsing ceiling.

[Woman speaking Italian] Narrator: Next door, an internal courtyard connected the bakery to the living quarters of a wealthy townhouse.

It was decorated with frescoes, including what looks like one of the first-ever depictions of a pizza.

Now, the excavation continues.

What more can it reveal about those who lived and died in the eruption of A.D. 79?

♪ ♪ ♪ [Birds chirping] ♪ ♪ [Speaking Italian] Narrator: Led by archaeologist Gennaro Iovino, the excavation has moved to the reception hall, or atrium, right next to the bakery where the bodies were found.

♪ Here, they discovered building materials and tools, indicating that the whole building was under reconstruction at the time of the eruption.

[Scraping] ♪ ♪ [Speaking Italian] Oh.

[Speaking Italian] Narrator: For 2,000 years, this bronze harness lay where it was left.

♪ [Speaking Italian] ♪ Narrator: Gennaro and his team now have evidence of builders and horses on the site just before the eruption, but as they haven't found any more bodies, the question is what happened to them?

♪ Could they have escaped the volcano and made it to safety?

[Wind whooshes] ♪ Man: It's hard to make decisions during volcanic eruptions, whether to stay and guard your property and stay with your loved ones... ♪ or whether to flee.

Narrator: Volcanologist Professor Chris Jackson believes the Pompeiians would have had to act quickly to stand any chance of survival.

Jackson: Within the first hour to hour and a half of the eruption, the column grew from around 14 kilometers high to about 22, 23 kilometers high.

That's about twice the altitude at which a commercial aircraft flies.

♪ [Loud rumbling] Jackson: The rising column, driving everything up skyward, would have caused a zone of low pressure, meaning that the air from the surrounding region was sucked in.

The weather was changed by this volcanic eruption.

The wind would have picked up as the wind swept along these narrow streets towards Vesuvius.

♪ For people fleeing the city, racing down these streets, behind them would have been chaos, ash falling out of the sky.

♪ They'd have seen lightning as electrically charged particles started to interact.

♪ It would have been almost like the end of the world.

But at this moment, people in Pompeii would still have had a chance to escape.

♪ They'd have been disorientated, they'd have been scared, but they would still have had a chance to exit the city through one of the gates.

But any window that was open for the residents to leave was rapidly slamming shut.

[Birds chirping] ♪ Narrator: Experts have never known exactly how many people lived in Pompeii in A.D. 79, but believed it to be 10,000 to 12,000.

However, in 300 years of excavations, archaeologists have only ever found just over 1,200 bodies.

♪ Man: This is only a fraction of the entire population of the city.

If we do not have the entire population in the city, where are they?

They escaped.

What happened to them?

This is just as important to know as it is to know the lives of the people that died in the eruption.

♪ Narrator: Now Professor Steven Tuck of Miami University is attempting to trace survivors in a pioneering new research project.

Tuck, voice-over: Scholars have long thought there must have been people that made it out.

It's just that nobody ever went looking for them before.

♪ Narrator: For the last decade, Steven has combed online databases of Roman inscriptions, looking for clues.

Now he's come to Pompeii to try to prove his theory.

His first stop is a newly discovered tomb on the edge of town.

This Latin inscription holds vital evidence that Steven believes changes the thinking on how many people really lived in Pompeii.

♪ Tuck: So this was found about 4 years ago.

You can still see, attached to the tomb, the remains of the pumice and the eruption material.

♪ Narrator: While the owner's name is lost, the inscription describes his life in detail.

♪ Tuck: The dinners he held, the giveaways of bread, the gladiatorial games, the animal hunts he sponsored.

It's his entire life, defined by his acts for the community.

Narrator: Most intriguingly, the inscription reveals a lavish dinner he gave for all the male citizens of Pompeii.

Tuck: So we've got 456 dining couches with 15 men on each one.

♪ Narrator: Knowing the benefactor hosted nearly 7,000 male guests, Steven believes he can work out Pompeii's true population.

[Indistinct chatter] [Dishware clanking] ♪ Tuck: Every one of these guys has families and wives and kids and enslaved people, which means that there can't only be 10,000 people in the community.

We think that this indicates, probably, a population of about 30,000.

This inscription tripled what we think the populace of Pompeii was.

♪ Narrator: If 30,000 lived in the city, it means over 90% of Pompeiians are still missing.

Tuck: People could have perished outside the city, on the roads, or on the coast.

But, with this vast, much larger number, there may have been thousands and thousands of people that made it out from the city.

There's a lot more people missing than we were aware of.

♪ Narrator: And Steven believes a major clue as to where they went is hiding in plain sight.

Tuck: As you walk around the city of Pompeii, there's some really intriguing evidence that I think of as evidence from absence, and one of those is right at your feet-- tracks in the road.

♪ Many of the roads have these cart tracks in them, indicating, in the last years of the city, dozens, perhaps hundreds of carts and wagons pulled by mules, donkeys-- maybe even by slaves-- filled the streets of the city... [Donkey braying] and then, when they excavated, they found almost none of those.

Almost no carts, very few horses.

All of these are gone, and they're not within the city limits, indicating that perhaps people got out.

♪ [Machinery humming] Narrator: At the dig, Gennaro and his team are still looking for the remains of a horse that had once worn the brass harness.

♪ [Iovino speaking Italian] Narrator: While the horse may have escaped, the team have found another animal, part of a highly decorated roof.

[Speaks Italian] Narrator: These lion heads are ornate gutters, used to channel rainwater.

♪ [Speaks Italian] ♪ [Woman speaking Italian] Mm-hmm?

[Speaking Italian] Narrator: Archaeologist Ausilia Trapani notices subtle differences in the design over time.

[Trapani speaking Italian] Narrator: These lionhead gutters were an integral part of the atrium roof, which was open in the middle.

When it rained, they funneled water into a central tank called an impluvium.

Dicus: As a visitor, you're coming into this atrium, and you look up, admiring the size of this room, and you see even the most utilitarian gutter is highly decorated.

The Pompeiians, and the Romans in general, never wanted anything boring; they wanted an opportunity to express luxuria.

They wanted to express their wealth, and this is also a message.

It tells us that the house was a very established part of Pompeii, and the owners are very established members of society.

♪ [Speaks Italian] [Speaking Italian] Narrator: The more the team dig, the clearer it becomes this building owner spared no expense to decorate his atrium.

♪ [Both speaking Italian] [Chuckling] ♪ Narrator: The solid marble table and fittings all suggest to the team that the owner of this property was a rich and influential Pompeiian.

♪ ♪ [Speaking Italian] ♪ [Speaking Italian] [Claps] ♪ Narrator: Just behind the marble table, in a room at the rear of the site, the team turned their attention to the elaborately decorated walls.

♪ [Speaking Italian] Narrator: Hidden under layers of hardened ash is an ornate fresco.

♪ [Speaking Italian] ♪ [Overlapping chatter] Narrator: After being buried for 2,000 years, the exposed painting is vulnerable to the weather.

[Birds chirping] [Rolling thunder] Only after they have protected it from the rain can the team begin the restoration.

[Distant chatter] [Man speaks Italian] [Speaking Italian] Narrator: This is a scene from the Greek myth of Achilles, the famous hero of the Trojan War.

[Speaking Italian] [Both speak Italian] Man: The paintings had a social function in this society, and you could show off your knowledge of Greek mythology.

The basic message is, you know, "I've made it, I'm part of this local elite" not only financially, but also culturally.

♪ Narrator: Gennaro thinks this room was the main office from where the wholesale bakery was run.

♪ Clients and guests would have been greeted first by the impressive fresco, and then by the manager, sat behind his imposing marble table.

♪ [Speaking Italian] If you were a client, coming into this house to visit with this owner, you are going to see him seated behind this gleaming, white marble table.

But there's also a separation; he's keeping you at a distance from him.

You are not of his class, and he is still going to separate himself from you, even in the most public part of his house.

♪ Narrator: Meanwhile, the hunt continues for solid evidence that people could have survived the eruption.

Professor Steven Tuck is joined by local Naples art historian Ann Pizzorusso to look for clues in one of Pompeii's storerooms.

Hello.

Tuck, voice-over: Visiting the repository of objects in Pompeii is, I think, a really important part of this research because it gives us the opportunity to analyze objects of daily life.

This is the sort of material that doesn't normally survive, and it enables us to really understand these people and to reflect on their lives.

♪ So much bronze!

Any other museum in the world... Pizzorusso: Oh, my goodness!

3 of these would be all they would have.

Ha ha!

I know!

3 of these.

♪ Narrator: Lead archaeologist Alessandro Russo is showing Steven a collection of pots that once belonged to a famous Pompeiian family.

Pizzorusso: Very curious.

Well, they may not look like much, but these are incredibly interesting vessels.

They're plainware, but each of these is a vessel that held garum.

Narrator: Garum was a popular Roman condiment made from fermented fish.

[Russo reading aloud in Latin] [Tuck reading along] So the flower of garum... Scombri.

Of mackerel, so we know it's what it's made out of.

Pizzorusso: Yeah.

Narrator: Crucially, the vessels don't just list the ingredients, but also who produced the garum.

[Reading aloud in Latin] Scaurus, and this is the third name of Aulus Umbricius Scaurus.

This is just amazing.

Narrator: One-third of all garum vessels found in and around Pompeii bear his name.

Tuck: Aulus Umbricius Scaurus is the most successful producer of fish sauce in Pompeii, and reading the names on it really takes it away from just being another piece of pottery.

Suddenly, I identify with them as human beings, and I think about and I worry about, "Did they get out?"

♪ It's a rare name in the entire Roman world, and that combination of first name Aulus and family name Umbricius is unique to Pompeii.

♪ Tuck, voice-over: So, searching these databases of Roman inscriptions of Latin names, I got a hit, and I found a name... and, with Ann's help, tracked down this particular inscription in a former factory that's now an office building.

Narrator: Steven has come to Pozzuoli, 17 miles northwest of Pompeii.

♪ ♪ Ta-da ♪ Oh!

There we are.

Oh... "Aulus Umbricius."

This is the first time I've seen that name, Aulus Umbricius, outside of Pompeii.

♪ Narrator: Although this isn't Scaurus' headstone, it is his unique family name, and Steven is convinced this inscription commemorates a direct descendant.

♪ "Umbricia Justa, the daughter of A. Umbricius Magnus."

So, this must be a son of Scaurus, and so she, the deceased, is the granddaughter.

Narrator: Dating to about 20 years after the eruption, Steven believes this headstone is proof that members of Scaurus' family survived the disaster.

It says she lived a number of years-- "Quindecim," 15.

15 years old.

Pizzorusso: Huh.

Oh.

That's--that's kind of heartbreaking.

♪ Narrator: While Steven can't say for sure what happened to the girl's grandfather, Scaurus, he's convinced that the location of this inscription is a clue as to his fate.

♪ In Roman times, Pozzuoli was called Puteoli, and Aulus Umbricius Scaurus might have had good reason to be here on the day of the eruption.

♪ Tuck: In Roman times, there were these regional markets that would occur every 8 days and in different locations.

Narrator: Traders from neighboring towns would gather to sell a range of commodities-- wine, millstones, and food.

Tuck: And, most interestingly, a businessman wouldn't go by himself, but take his entire household.

[Girl laughs] Narrator: Following the traditional dating of the eruption, Steven has discovered that Puteoli might have hosted one of the regional markets on the day of the disaster.

He believes traders from Pompeii could have been there, safe from the volcanic fallout.

[Distant rumbling, people shouting, dog barks] Tuck: Scaurus might not have been at home in Pompeii, but he and his family had been at Puteoli instead.

Narrator: Steven's discovery reveals that some of Scaurus' family probably did survive the eruption.

But the premature death of his 15-year-old granddaughter shows that tragedy was never far away.

Tuck, voice-over: This is incredibly moving to me.

It gives me a great sense of connection to them as individuals who have made it out from this tremendous tragedy, and now have suffered more personal tragedy.

[Woman weeping] ♪ Dicus: Evidence of life in the region after the eruption is incredibly important.

We think about the end of Pompeii.

We don't think as much about continuity, that people had their homes here, they had their identities here, and if they survived, they were not gonna go too far.

They were gonna be in this region to reestablish their lives.

♪ Narrator: Meanwhile, in the atrium, the team have cleared out all the pumice and volcanic material in the impluvium, an ornamental tank used to collect rainwater... and they have discovered it has a remarkable plumbing system.

♪ [Speaking Italian] Narrator: Further excavation has revealed something even more intriguing.

[Iovino speaking Italian] Narrator: The evidence suggests that the bakery and wealthy residents sourced their running water directly from the neighboring building.

♪ [Iovino speaking Italian] Narrator: But what was the next-door building used for?

When it was partially excavated in the 19th century, archaeologists found a deep basin, instead of the usual shallow impluvium, leading some to conclude this was a specialized Roman laundry known as a fullery.

[Indistinct chatter] Narrator: But Alessandro isn't convinced.

[Russo speaking Italian] Narrator: Working out if this was a fullery will help the team discover more about the whole building complex, so Alessandro has asked Dr. Miko Flohr, a world expert in Roman fulleries, to take a look.

Just a few blocks south of the dig lies the Fullery of Stephanus, one of the best-preserved examples in the Roman world.

♪ Flohr: Pompeii is the only place where you will get the full picture of the fulling process.

♪ [Camera shutter clicks] ♪ Narrator: The fullery was the Roman equivalent of the dry cleaner's.

It was here rich Pompeiians brought their expensive clothes to be cleaned.

Flohr: As a fuller, you need to have the technical capacities to make sure that these garments stay as beautiful as they used to be, that the colors come out as bright as they were before.

♪ Dicus: What they used to actually clean the garments was pretty nasty stuff.

In fact, they would use stale urine that had a bleaching property, and so you can imagine these laundry-mats with a big pot of urine right there that they would dump into their basins to wash the clothes in.

♪ Narrator: Original Pompeiian wall paintings, now at the Naples Archaeological Museum, reveal the fulling process in fascinating detail.

[Rhythmic splashing sounds] Flohr: In the fulling stalls, where they do the first phase, where they stand with their feet in the chemicals and do the treatment of the clothes.

[Indistinct chatter] ♪ Flohr: In the second phase, you'd try to get rid of those chemicals, so you rinse and you make sure that everything is washed out, the chemicals and the dirt.

The third phase requires the most skills.

[Equipment clattering] Clothes are being finished, and that means that their surface is being pressed.

It's being treated so that it becomes smooth, and that make the clothes quite warm and comfortable to wear.

[Clattering continues] ♪ Narrator: Miko joins Alessandro at the building adjoining the dig site to work out if this really was a fullery.

[Speaks Italian] [Distant chatter] Uh...puzzling.

[Both chuckle] Having seen kind of the fulleries of the city, this kind of looks to me as something really different.

Flohr, voice-over: So my starting point was skeptic.

I came across a lot of places where people had found 2 or 3 basins, and then they thought, "This should be a fullery."

Distant man: No, no, no.

Flohr: Oh, wait.

May I comment on this?

Woman: Sure.

Yes.

I think this is really fascinating.

This is where my fullery alarm bells started ringling a little bit.

They made a big drain that was coming right from there, from the part that has not been excavated yet.

Very clearly, this was an enormous quantity of water.

♪ Flohr: This is not your normal drain.

This is a serious drain.

[Speaks Italian] Yes.

If it uses these quantities of water... [Chuckles] it can be a fullery.

Narrator: With this drain closely resembling the one at the back of the Fullery of Stephanus, Miko believes that this could be a fullery.

It's a discovery that provides the team with valuable insights into the owner of the complex, as running this sort of high-class laundry was a gateway to the upper ranks of Roman society.

♪ Flohr: The private clientele of fullers predominantly consisted of people with above-average socioeconomic means.

It gave you a way into society that made it possible to participate.

Pompeii was a wealthy city.

It was also a sharply unequal city... [Camera shutter clicks] but it meant that life was relatively good for fullers in Pompeii.

♪ Narrator: It seems the owner of this site was managing not one, but two successful businesses-- a laundry and a bakery-- linked by a sophisticated plumbing system.

But who was this entrepreneur?

Gennaro has found a compelling clue at the base of this bakery millstone.

♪ [Speaking Italian] ♪ [Speaking Italian] Narrator: The team, having uncovered initials that could belong to the owner, hope they can soon identify his full name.

Meanwhile, Steven is also searching for names to provide hard evidence that people survived the eruption.

He's focused on two successful wine merchants who lived in this ornate Roman townhouse.

Tuck: They were freed slaves.

They were essentially nouveau riche.

They become very wealthy and prominent only after the earthquake of A.D. 62.

♪ Narrator: We know their family name, Vetti, thanks to a personalized stamp probably used to mark their possessions.

Tuck: Aulus Vettius Restitutus and Aulus Vettius Conviva.

Narrator: While this stamp is a reproduction, archaeologists found the original in the Vettis' luxurious residence.

Tuck: These stamps are really important for identifying home ownership.

They're relatively valuable to an individual, but in the greater sense, in the running and screaming of an eruption, they're the sort of thing that gets left behind as you're grabbing your gold and your household gods and so on.

♪ Narrator: Steven's found an ancient Roman gravestone that bears the Vetti name.

It's located 12 miles north of Pompeii, in the back streets of the small town of Nola.

Tuck: Hunting for these inscriptions has been really an intriguing part of the entire process.

So many of them are not in museums.

They're in sometimes curious, unexpected places.

[Pizzorusso reads in Italian] Here we go.

♪ Ecco.

Ecco.

Ah!

Narrator: This inscription dates to roughly 20 years after the eruption.

Tuck: Look at it.

Look at this.

Tuck and Pizzorusso: "Vettia Sabina."

Tuck: "Vettia Sabina," telling us that members of the Vettius family survived.

And it gets better.

We see the name of our husband, "Marcus...Tullius Dionysius."

Dionysius.

I like that name.

Yes.

Another Pompeiian name with a completely different social profile, so he belongs to an old-money family that had been prominent for decades.

And she belongs to a family, which is, we would say, nouveau riche, you know, recently wealthy.

It's, um, it's almost Jane Austen here.

So I think this is a clear sign of survivor intermarriage.

Right.

They get out and they intermarry.

Narrator: The inscription tells Steven that Sabina and her husband met as refugees in the years after the disaster.

[Water flowing] ♪ But just as they were rebuilding their lives, tragedy struck.

♪ Tuck: And then the final line, of course, is her age.

She died at the age of 24... Pizzorusso: OK. 3 months, and 22 days.

OK.

So, yeah, she died, I would say, at 24, unexpectedly.

Pure speculation here.

What do you think, childbirth?

Maybe.

[Birds chirping, water flowing] ♪ Tuck: Even the people that own this building where the inscription is had no idea what it said or--and certainly not what it meant.

My research, it's really about telling the stories; not just the disaster or the destruction, but of the survival, of the rebuilding of lives.

Narrator: Steven's research is proving for the first time that for some, there was life after the eruption.

But to survive, people would have had to overcome incredible odds.

Just fleeing the city would not have been enough.

[Birds chirping] The difference between life or death was knowing which way to run.

♪ Jackson: So, as Vesuvius continued to erupt, the residents here at Pompeii had decisions to make.

♪ And many of them made what seemed like the logical choice at that time, to go southwards towards the Bay of Naples, towards the sea.

♪ But that was the wrong choice because the sea at that time was dangerous for two reasons.

One is it was coated in pumice, and also, the wind was blowing onshore towards Vesuvius, meaning it had been difficult to almost impossible to sail away from trouble.

Counterintuitively, what they really needed to do was head northwards, around the volcano, and then westwards towards Naples, so it's a cruel irony that our natural instinct, really, is to head away from danger.

♪ ♪ Narrator: Steven believes the survivors who headed north probably stayed in the area, so he and Ann follow the northern escape route to Naples.

♪ Tuck: Of course, return to Pompeii is impossible.

The city is leveled.

It is destroyed.

The survivors from Pompeii aren't just that.

They aren't just survivors; they're also refugees.

They need to settle somewhere.

♪ In the area north of Vesuvius, in the two decades after the eruption, public infrastructure skyrockets.

♪ All of this new infrastructure really seems to give us great evidence for larger populations, and that, really, I think, opens up the possibility that more people did survive.

♪ Narrator: Back at the dig, the team have made an exciting discovery, unearthing multiple large fragments of a highly decorated fresco.

♪ They believe it came from the upper floor of the building.

Like most houses in Pompeii, the upper floors collapsed and were destroyed in the eruption.

Alessandro and Ausilia carefully reconstruct the beautiful fresco.

♪ [Both speaking Italian] Narrator: In the center is an exotic religious ceremony set in the Middle East.

[Both speaking Italian] [Russo speaking Italian] ♪ [Russo speaking Italian] Narrator: The surprise here is that the artist didn't paint this fresco on a wall, but directly onto a ceiling.

[Both speaking Italian] Narrator: This kind of artistry far exceeds anything else found in the dig so far, and the team believe that only the super-wealthy-- just the top 1% of Pompeii's population-- could have afforded this painting.

[Speaking Italian] ♪ [Machinery rumbling] Narrator: Nine months into the dig, the team are beginning to get a vivid picture of what life was like in this building complex.

♪ This richly decorated atrium connected a commercial bakery, run by enslaved workers, to the wealthy living quarters upstairs.

Next door, the same owner ran a specialized laundry, catering to an upscale clientele.

♪ The team have found evidence that the eruption interrupted major renovation work, as a team of builders were refurbishing the living area with sculpted roof gutters, highly decorated fresco walls, and expensive marble furniture.

This is a place where rich and poor were living and working side by side.

[Iovino speaking Italian] ♪ Jackson: Several hours after the volcano had started to erupt, the ash column had continued to grow.

♪ And it's estimated that it reached about 32 kilometers into the air.

Eventually, in the middle of the night, there was a change in the eruption behavior.

There would have been a pause.

Ash was still falling, but maybe at a lower rate.

At that moment, people maybe thought that the eruption had finished.

The residents of Pompeii may have actually taken heart from that.

But what people did not know is that magma was no longer being taken from the upper part of the magma chamber below Vesuvius, but from deeper depths, where there were less volatiles, less water, less gas to drive the eruption.

[Thunder] This meant the volcano was unable to sustain the eruption column anymore.

♪ The upward thrust of the volcano wasn't enough to keep all of that material suspended.

And as that eruption column collapsed, it formed something much more deadly than ash-- pyroclastic flows.

♪ Jackson: For the people who'd made the decision to stay, to hide indoors during the earliest phase of the eruption, it was too late to exit the city itself... [Birds chirping] where people who maybe thought they'd escaped the worst of the volcanic eruption were only then finding out exactly how bad things were gonna get.

♪ ♪ To order "Pompeii: The New Dig" on DVD, Visit ShopPBS, or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS This program is also available with PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video ♪