The land around Vesuvius is a vast palimpsest. On the surface, underground and even beneath the sea of the modern city of Naples and its surroundings, the memory of history is etched into tunnels, walls and fissures, the remains of women, children and men — statues, buried cities. Only thin layers separate contemporary and ancient life, and the past puts its stamp on the present: on archaeologists, scholars and tomb raiders, on firemen and schoolchildren, tourists and sailors, the devout and the indifferent.