Pompeii’s interior designers made the most of the earthquake. After it hit in A.D. 62, they renovated wrecked villas with vibrantly colored narrative frescoes that were, it turns out, incredibly long-lived.

The eruption of Vesuvius, the volcano many of them thought was a mountain, only 17 years later in A.D. 79, both sealed the city’s choked inhabitants in a pumice-and-ash time capsule and preserved the wall paintings that scholars have come to identify as examples of the fourth Pompeian style.