Although there are many works dealing with Pompeii and Herculaneum none of them try to
encompass the entire spectrum of material related to its reception in popular imagination.
Pompeii's Ashes surveys a broad variety of such works ranging from travelogues between ca.
1740 and 2010 to 250 years of fiction including stage works music and films. The first two
chapters provide an in-depth analysis of the excavation history and an overview of the
reflections of travelers. The six remaining chapters discuss several clearly-defined genres:
historical novels with pagan tendencies and those with Christians and Jews as protagonists
contemporary adventures time traveling mock manuscripts and works dedicated to Vesuvius.
Pompeii's Ashes demonstrates how the eternal fascination with the oldest still-running
archaeological projects in the world began developed and continue until now.
