Death and destruction are all in a day out on this mother-daughter visit to Vesuvius
We stood on the terrace of our hotel, looking over the Bay of Naples. From this spot in Sorrento, 2,000 years ago, terrified people watched in horror as the vast mountain they called Vesuvio spat black smoke and exploded with fire.
We'd come to see the destruction for ourselves. My eight-year-old daughter, Nancy, is obsessed with the Roman Mysteries novels of Caroline Lawrence, in which the four young heroes are caught up in the disaster of 79AD. We wanted Nancy to learn more about how the four would have lived – and might have died.
Midsummer in Pompeii is hot and dusty, with little shade. But Nancy sped around, excited. She was fascinated by one particular house, which still had a welcome sign on the doorstep, and a statue in the garden. It was just the sort of wealthy home that Lawrence's heroine Flavia Gemina might have lived in.
The citizens of Pompeii died after being covered by volcanic ash, while nearby Herculaneum was incinerated by hot gases that instantly carbonised – and thus preserved – items including bread and furniture on show in the British Museum's new Pompeii exhibition (britishmuseum.org).
In Pompeii, the cooler ash destroyed furniture but cooked living bodies solid, and falling ash settled around them. When the bodies eventually rotted, they left holes that would much later be filled to make plaster casts: Nancy stared, fascinated, at the likeness of a dying dog, and a man curled up in a ball. The British Museum exhibits include casts of a family of two adults and their two children huddled together, and a dog, fixed forever at the moment of its death.
After a long morning walking Pompeii's endless streets, Nancy was exhausted and, in truth, a little bored. But there was more to see, at the top of Vesuvius, a grey misty place that smells of sulphur. There was a real sense of danger around the volcano which added to the frisson of what we had already seen.
In the evening, back on our terrace (on the site, so the hotel claims, of Emperor Augustus's villa) we looked again across the vast bay of Naples at Vesuvius, and read back the words of Pliny the Younger, who witnessed the eruption from just such a spot: "A black and terrible cloud, rent by snaking bursts of fire, gaped open in huge flashes of flames; like lightning, but more extensive. Afterwards, the cloud lowered towards the earth and covered the sea."
A more perfect way to teach history to a young child, I cannot imagine.
• The Grand Hotel Excelsior Vittoria in Sorrento has doubles from £219 a night B&B. Take the Circumvesuviana train from Sorrento and get off at Pompei Scavi)