Unearthing Pompeii

What is it about Pompeii that fascinates us so after all this time?

"It paints a picture of a very specific moment. And, it paints a picture of life, a very exciting, vibrant life," Francesca Madden, who is the curator of a new exhibit about Pompeii tells CBS News correspondent Cynthia Bowers.

On Aug. 23 79 AD, Pompeii was a prosperous, cosmopolitan seaport, a destination for merchants and pleasure seekers alike.

Its streets and markets rang with the hustle and bustle common to big cities of today. But what its citizens and those of nearby Herculaneum had no way of knowing was that Mt. Vesuvius was about to erupt.

"Those people would have had virtually no chance, virtually no warning. They must have thought the gods were out to get them or something," says geochemist Phil Janney.

A little after 1 p.m. of August 24, Vesuvius exploded, sending a massive plume of rock and ash 18 miles into the sky.

For two terrible days, death rained down. Pompeii, and most of its 20,000 citizens were buried alive in up to 10 feet of rock and ash. But this horrific aerial assault was just the beginning.

The volcano was also spewing super-heated gas, which roared down the mountainside.

These are called 'glowing avalanches,' you can imagine them as being something on the scale of about the largest tornado that we've encountered in modern times, traveling down the slope at 80 miles an hour at enormous temperatures of 12-1,300 degrees Fahrenheit," Janney says.

The people of Pompeii who weren't buried alive were simply incinerated. By August 26, all the sounds of city life had been silenced. Pompeii simply vanished, not to be found for more than 1,500 years.

When archaeologists finally got to the heart of Pompeii in the mid-19th century they uncovered a forgotten city that had escaped the ravages of time and man -- buried treasure that provided the best existing record of what life was like in the Roman Empire.

Fast forward to today where artifacts from the ancient city are on display at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History.

Tina Cervone, director of the city's Italian Cultural Institute, helped bring the Pompeii exhibit there.

It's the first time her government has allowed this extraordinary collection to travel to this continent. And she hopes it will entice Americans to travel there to see the rest.

"There is something in Pompeii which fascinates everybody in the world, starting from children to adult," Cervone says. "We think that the United States is a place where we can attract people and we want to attract people."

"Artifacts at this exhibit aren't just on display. They help tell the stories of individuals caught up in a catastrophe beyond their comprehension. For example, these medical instruments, easily recognizable as a doctor's kit, tell us that even caught in a rain of fire and ash was breaking loose around him one man went out fully believing he could make a difference," Cervone says.

Nobody believed this would be the end of their world.

"A lot of them carried keys, and to me, that's such a poignant symbol. Because a key represents a home, and it represents the home that you might be able to come back," Cervone says.

But for exhibit curator Francesca Madden, these human casts are the most heartbreaking items recovered from Pompeii. They capture living, breathing people in the moment of death.

"The emotions that you see, that you sense through the exhibit are emotions that you and I can relate to. We might relate to their culture or their language, or their traditions," Madden intimates.

Pompeii's importance is hammered home, particularly now, in the aftermath of Asia's devastating Tsunami and hurricane Katrina.

Janney, the museum's geochemist, ever the scientist, finds in Pompeii lessons yet to be learned about the power of nature then and now.

"Its very discomforting to realize that everything you know, everything you're familiar with, may be gone in the space of a day, or two days time," Janney says. "I think people really need to understand that there are disasters that can occur, and we've had many of them recently, that are outside of the range of anyone's experience who's alive."