Pompeii

Have you ever been to Pompeii? Wait, do you know about it? It's an ancient Roman city that's been completely covered by ash and pumice after a particularly violent eruption of a nearby volcano, Mount Vesuvius. It's often mentioned together with the city of Herculaneum, which suffered the same fate, but I suppose Pompeii is slightly more famous1. I was in elementary school when I went there with my family, if I'm not remembering it wrong. I was a kid who loved Greek and Roman mythology, but was very disinterested in history, buying into the notion that it's boring and no one is actually into it. As an adult, I see it's very weird to like mythology and ignore history, but it stems from a lie I believed throughout all my school years: history is not about people. "We study history not to repeat past errors"? Yeah, but we're not like people in history. It feels very stupid to write this. Are we really letting kids believe it? Let's get back to Pompeii. Nowadays, together with Herculaneum,…