8:00

Do you want to just walk me through it? Should we

8:02

just play it out? All right. Pompeii

8:04

is a city right along the coast

8:06

of the Bay of Naples. It's a

8:08

beautiful location. I sound like a real

8:10

estate agent. But, you know, it's

8:12

a gorgeous location down there in southern Italy along

8:15

the coast. If you don't mind volcanoes, it's great.

8:17

It keeps the property values down. Okay, so this

8:19

is 79 AD. On

8:21

August 24th in the morning, there were

8:23

earthquakes, but these were common occurrence. So

8:25

no one really paid attention to them.

8:28

Probably just felt like a normal day. Right.

8:30

If I were to walk down the street

8:32

in Pompeii, the main drag, what

8:35

would I have seen? You would have seen

8:37

a long street with

8:39

two lanes flanked by sidewalks.

8:42

Many of the shops would have taken over

8:44

part of the sidewalk. They move the things

8:46

they're selling out there or the wine bars.

8:48

People take over the sidewalk and part of

8:50

the street as they're all crowded out there.

8:52

And it's a very densely populated, very lively

8:54

place. In the backdrop

8:56

of all this, less than 10 miles northwest

8:58

of the city, sat a

9:01

large green cone-shaped mountain. And

9:04

on this day, at about one o'clock

9:06

in the afternoon, if you

9:08

were taking maybe a midday break, having

9:10

some fish, some wine with friends at a

9:12

sidewalk cafe, and happened to glance

9:15

up at this mountain, you'd have seen the

9:17

top of it just

9:19

explode. It's

9:22

just pulverized and blown straight into the

9:24

air. This massive dark

9:27

column of rock and gas. Rising

9:30

up about 20 miles into the atmosphere. Towering

9:33

over Pompeii, higher than modern airplanes

9:35

fly. Oh my God. So high,

9:37

in fact. It takes several hours

9:39

for that material to rain down

9:41

fully. So most of it at

9:43

this point is just hanging

9:46

out up there in the air.

9:50

Huh. Which

9:52

means, if people looked at

9:54

that and then said, I

9:56

think it's time to leave, they would have

9:59

three, four hours. exactly

30:00

like the bottles that Skaras

30:02

had used at Pompeii. And this

30:05

one has weirdly similar branding.

30:07

It's the same labeling formula. In black

30:09

or red ink. It says the flower

30:11

of Garem of

30:14

Putiolanus. Putiolanus?

30:17

Well, what's Putiolanus? Putiolanus just means

30:19

the guy from Putioli. The man

30:21

from Putioli. So

30:24

it's like a guy from Putioli that's making

30:26

this stuff. Yeah. I

30:28

mean, it sounds like a

30:30

rip off. Like somebody that's capitalizing on

30:32

this brand that people used to love

30:34

and is hearkening back to that. Yeah.

30:37

So it could be, right? Could be

30:39

that someone's ripping off this guy's branding.

30:41

Yeah. No. No? No. Because

30:43

as Steve continues to dig for

30:46

names, he comes across an epitaph.

30:48

A group epitaph. And?

30:51

And? And guess

30:54

what family he finds? Oh my

30:56

god. The Ambricciuses. Ambricciuses?

30:59

That's right. Survivors. Wow.

31:01

And it's like, yes,

31:03

there's somebody. There's somebody

31:05

someplace. Wow. So that Alice Ambriccius, Scaris

31:08

guy. He doesn't seem to have made

31:10

it out, but his family did. And

31:12

one of the young men. Probably Scaris's

31:15

grandson. Is named Putiolanus. Like they named

31:17

him after their new hometown. And he

31:19

grows up to become. The Garem king

31:22

of Putioli. Succession of the Fishsauce kingdom.

31:24

It's a new heir. Yeah. And

31:27

now that he's looking in towns north of

31:30

Vesuvius, Steve starts finding survivors

31:32

all over the place. Six people in

31:34

the little city of Nucaria. A person

31:36

in Aquinum. Two people in Beneventum. A

31:38

little cluster of five or six people.

31:40

Over here. A couple dozen. Over there.

31:43

Three families that moved to this small

31:45

community in the mountains. There were three

31:47

merchant families. They all made it out

31:49

to Putioli. Two families who owned private

31:51

banks. Both settled at Cumie. He found

31:53

rich people, poor people. Some of them

31:56

had been well off at Pompeii and

31:58

desperately poor later on. There's one story

32:00

of a woman. She makes it out

32:02

also to Putioli. Who marries a gladiator?

32:04

Called Aquarius. He's a water-themed gladiator. Whoa.

32:07

Yeah. He even finds this whole neighborhood in

32:09

the city of Naples. Built just for the

32:12

people from Herculaneum. Like it's like Chinatown or

32:14

something, but it's like little Herculaneum. Oh. The

32:17

map he made just filled in with

32:19

all this life. These

32:21

people suffered tragedies. They became

32:23

refugees. They fled. They

32:25

moved into these new communities. You know, they

32:28

named their kids after their new communities. They

32:30

make religious dedications. They run for public

32:32

office. They establish businesses. You

32:35

know, they really

32:37

just pick up. I love

32:39

that. Yeah. OK, so all in all, how many people

32:41

did he find? Well, it took him 10 years

32:43

to come through the names in 48 communities.

32:47

OK. And I found survivors in 12 of

32:49

the 48. So in

32:51

total? A couple hundred named individuals.

32:54

OK. Which, I mean, wow, people

32:57

even survived. Yeah. But then, sorry,

33:00

not to burst your bubble. No, not at all.

33:02

Not at all busted. But that leaves what, like

33:04

48,000 people that are still unaccounted

33:07

for? That's right. But what he sort of

33:10

slowly started to realize is like, well, let's

33:12

say my house gets destroyed in, I

33:14

don't know, a volcanic eruption today. I'm

33:17

going to go move in to my parents' basement.

33:19

I'm going to where my relatives are, right? Like

33:21

I'm going to where there's a couch I can

33:23

crash on, where there's a roof I can say

33:25

under. You know, you go where they have to

33:28

take you in, right? Like that's probably most people's

33:30

first impulse, right, is to find family,

33:32

find relatives somewhere else. And so

33:34

those people are invisible in the

33:36

inscriptions because they're

33:39

the same family name. They don't

33:41

change the profile of

33:43

a community. You

33:45

know, it's not a new family name moving into a community.

33:48

And I think that's where the vast

33:50

majority of the people went. Now what

33:52

he believes is most people got out.

33:55

The majority of people survived. And

33:59

almost always with their families. Wow.

34:06

I do find it just so tantalizing. Like

34:08

it makes you just want to know the

34:10

rest of the story. Like what

34:12

happened to those people? How did they get

34:15

out? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. I would

34:17

love to know some of these details of

34:20

what happened between the eruption and people

34:22

resettling somewhere. Yeah. You know, what routes

34:24

did they take? What

34:26

occurred, you know, what traumas did they undergo,

34:28

you know, on the way out? Yeah. It

34:30

must have been just a terrifying experience. And

34:34

we simply don't know. But

34:36

we know people went back to their

34:38

families. You know, they

34:40

went through the dark shouting their names at each

34:42

other, as Pliny tells us in his letter. And

34:46

they connected up and only then did they flee.

34:50

I don't know. I find it

34:53

quite moving. Yeah. So

35:06

that's, yeah, that's the story. What do you

35:09

make of that? You

35:11

know, so my family's Pakistani,

35:15

like I grew up in the US, my parents

35:17

grew up in Pakistan. My

35:19

grandparents grew up in India. And like,

35:22

you know, the partition of India was like

35:24

this giant traumatic thing that

35:26

like, I don't think my family really

35:29

even has its arms around, like, all

35:31

the ways in which it impacted us. But

35:33

like, there's so much that gets lost in

35:36

a big traumatic move like that. And

35:39

I feel so cut off from

35:41

even just like the lives that

35:43

my grandparents had in India, that

35:46

like, I would kill for anything,

35:48

like who they were hanging out

35:50

with and what they were doing.

35:52

And you know, any crumb is

35:54

like gold. Yeah. Yeah. I

35:57

mean, I mean, and that's that's basically

36:00

why I ended up making that fish sauce with

36:02

Samin. I mean, really

36:04

what we're doing is we're time traveling.

36:07

Yeah, I mean, that's what I think

36:09

is so magical about food. Again, chef

36:11

Samin Nasrat. I mean, even in the span of

36:13

your own life, you eat stuff and you travel back to like

36:15

the first time you had it or so many meaningful time

36:17

you had it. And so this is another way

36:19

that we get to go have a sensory experience

36:21

that people were having, you know,

36:23

2000 years ago. That time we almost

36:26

died from a volcano. Exactly. But

36:28

it's true that I can't, like

36:31

I can't stop imagining. It's

36:34

just one day out of the blue, no warning.

36:37

Boom, you lose your home,

36:39

not just your home, you lose your entire

36:41

hometown. You can never go back to it.

36:44

You can never walk down the streets you

36:46

walked on as a kid. And then 20

36:48

years later, you're

36:50

resettled in a totally new

36:52

place, totally new life. And

36:56

you're grocery shopping and you see

36:58

on the shelf, the

37:00

flower of Garam and

37:03

you buy it and you take it

37:05

home. You open the bottle

37:09

and you taste it. Okay.

37:41

All right. Okay.

37:50

Let's open it on three. One, two,

37:53

three. Oh

37:55

wow. Oh wow. This is smelling stronger

37:57

than it was. Oh,

38:03

okay. I

38:05

went real deep. I went nose into the jar.

38:07

Okay. Oh boy. Okay.

38:10

Okay. Okay. We're ready? I'm

38:13

ready. I'm ready. I'm

38:15

ready. I'm putting some on my tongue right now. Oh,

38:17

oh, it's very, I mean, it's very salty. It's not

38:19

really that gross. It's not that gross. No, no,

38:21

no. It just tastes salty. It tastes a

38:24

little like umami. It's like a, you know,

38:26

like sometimes you're playing in the water as a kid at

38:28

the beach and a huge wave comes. And

38:30

then, and then like it knocks you over and you're like losing

38:32

your breath. And like, you have to swallow some water. Yeah.

38:36

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

38:40

Yeah. Yeah. And it

38:42

was kind of seaweedy water

38:44

or something. This

38:46

episode was reported

38:49

by the American

38:52

Science Foundation in

38:54

New York. It

38:58

was reported by me, Lutef Nasser,

39:00

with help from Annie McEwen and

39:02

Aketi Foster Keys. It was produced

39:05

by Annie McEwen. My culinary

39:07

shenanigans with Samin were recorded by

39:09

Adam Howell, voice acting by Brendan

39:11

Dalton, original music and

39:13

sound design by Jeremy Bloom, hosting

39:16

help from Sara Khari, fact checked

39:18

by Emily Krieger, edited by Pat

39:21

Walters. And I doubt anyone's

39:23

going to want to try it, but we're going to link

39:25

to the recipe for Garam. And

39:27

I also have a giant jar of it

39:29

in my house that I'm trying to get rid

39:31

of. Before

39:34

we go, before we

39:36

sign off here, real quick at the end,

39:38

I just wanted to shout out a podcast

39:41

I've loved for many, many years. And it

39:43

feels right to promote it at the end

39:45

of this particular episode of ours, because it

39:47

is a podcast about history, about science, but

39:49

more than anything about food.

39:51

It's called Gastropod. It's so charming, but

39:54

also encyclopedic about food history. So for

39:56

example, I just had the question, has

39:58

Gastropod done an episode? episode about Garam.

40:01

And of course they

40:03

have. It's in their episode about the history

40:05

of ketchup, which I probably shouldn't have, but

40:07

I just took 45 minutes out of the

40:09

middle of my workday to re-listen to it.

40:12

And it was so good. Did

40:14

you know, for example, that way before

40:16

anyone ever thought to put a tomato

40:18

in ketchup, it was a fermented fish

40:20

sauce? Whatever condiment

40:22

or snack or dessert or ingredient that

40:25

you love, there's probably a gastropod about

40:27

it. One of my favorite all time

40:29

episodes of theirs, better believe it's butter,

40:32

is about the margarine wars.

40:35

Don't just take my word for it. The New York

40:37

Times, Wired, Ted Talks, all of them have chosen gastropod

40:39

as one of their favorite podcasts. Yeah.

40:42

So subscribe to gastropod wherever you get your

40:44

podcasts. That's it for us. Thank you so

40:47

much for listening. Guys,

40:50

I'm shaking the fish sauce. Who wants to help

40:52

me? Okay. So no one's helping

40:54

me shake this fish sauce. Shake it. Shake it.

40:57

Shake it. Shake it. Shake it. Shake

40:59

it. Shake it. Shake it. Shake it.

41:01

Shake it. Shake it. Do you want

41:03

to shake it with me? Why not?

41:05

Oh, come on now. It's not gross.

41:07

Come here. Okay. Look, I'm

41:09

taking a little smell. Oh.

41:15

Hi, this is

41:17

Danielle and I'm in beautiful Glover, Vermont,

41:19

and here are the staff credits. Radio

41:23

Lab was created by Jad Ebbumrod

41:26

and is edited by Sorin Wheeler.

41:28

Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are

41:30

our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe

41:32

is our director of sound design. Our

41:35

staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy

41:38

Bloom, Becca Bressler, W.

41:41

Harry Fertuna, David Gable,

41:43

Maria Paz Gutierrez, Indu

41:46

Nianusam Bumdum, Matt Gilti,

41:48

Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson,

41:51

Valentina Powers, Sara Khari,

41:54

Sarah Sandbach, Ariane

41:56

Wack, Pat Walters, and

41:58

Molly Webster. Our

42:01

fact checkers are Gyan Kelly,

42:03

Emily Krieger, and Natalie

42:05

Middleton. Hi,

42:18

this is Ellie from Cleveland, Ohio. Leadership

42:21

support for Radiolab Science Programming is provided

42:23

by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation,

42:26

Science Sandbox, Assignments Foundation Initiative,

42:28

and the John Templeton Foundation.

42:32

Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by

42:34

the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. On

42:43

Notes from America, we have conversations with

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