Pompeii: The City That Died in Seventeen Minutes

Episodes

1. 01 Episode 1: The “Mother” Who Was a Man Free2:06 Ancient DNA overturns Pompeii’s most emotional family portrait—and exposes how easily plaster became legend.
2. 02 Episode 2: The City Built at a Crossroads Locked1:54 Before Pompeii became a tomb, geography made it a crowded gateway between the sea, farmland, and the wider Roman world.
3. 03 Episode 3: The Column That Reached the Sky Locked1:50 A seemingly light fall of ash becomes a towering eruption visible across Campania.
4. 04 Episode 4: The Roofs Began to Break Locked1:47 As meters of pumice accumulate, Pompeii’s houses turn from shelters into traps.
5. 05 Episode 5: The Cloud That Entered the House Locked1:38 Inside Casa di Stabianus, the eruption proves that walls cannot stop a pyroclastic current.
6. 06 Episode 6: Seventeen Minutes of Deadly Air Locked1:48 Modern modeling reveals how a relatively weak, low-temperature current could still make survival impossible.
7. 07 Episode 7: The Bodies the Ash Erased Locked2:22 Pompeii’s victims disappear underground, but the hardened deposits preserve the spaces their bodies occupied.
8. 08 Episode 8: The Void That Became a Body Locked1:53 Fiorelli’s plaster method gives Pompeii’s absent victims faces, clothing, and postures the world can see.
9. 09 Episode 9: The Hands That Remade the Victims Locked1:41 Medical imaging exposes incomplete skeletons, structural alterations, and the restorers who helped author Pompeii’s most famous poses.
10. 10 Episode 10: The Chemistry Trapped in Plaster Locked2:02 Portable X-ray technology searches the casts for biological truth but finds heat damage and plaster contamination in the way.
11. 11 Episode 11: The Bracelet That Told the Wrong Story Locked2:12 Ancient DNA separates jewelry, posture, sex, and kinship—and dismantles the supposed mother-and-child tableau.
12. 12 Episode 12: The Sisters Who Weren’t Sisters Locked1:51 A second beloved interpretation collapses as genetics reveals sex, ancestry, and a far more cosmopolitan Pompeii.
13. 13 Episode 13: The City That Refused One Story Locked2:20 Pompeii’s lasting value lies not in a single frozen narrative, but in an archive that can be questioned again and again.