There are various versions of this one filling my mailbox ... this one is the incipit of a piece in the Times:

VESUVIUS, the volcano that obliterated Pompeii in AD79, has the capacity to make that event look like a sideshow, volcanologists have found.

Nearly 4,000 years ago it erupted far more violently, destroying the area of present-day Naples and sending a Bronze Age population fleeing for their lives.

Michael Sheridan, of the University of Buffalo, and a group of Italian colleagues investigated the remains of the eruption, called the Avellino catastrophe after a village that bore the brunt of it.

They studied the well-preserved remains of Nola, another village about ten miles (16 km) northeast of Vesuvius, where volcanic deposits overwhelmed the settlement 3,780 years ago. They also found evidence that thousands of people fled as the eruption began, leaving footprints solidified in cooling ash.

Most apparently escaped. Close to Nola the scientists found skeletons of a man and a woman under a metre-deep bed of volcanic debris. The ground was littered with fragments of rock up to 4 in (11 cm) in diameter that showered down at 150 mph in a lethal hailstorm.

Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team say that before the eruption the population of the area would have been low — only a few tens of thousands, compared with today’s millions. The fact that thousands of paths can be traced in the ash, all travelling north-northwest away from the eruption, indicates that most had time to make an escape.

Some people returned later and tried to set up settlements again, but the lack of archaeological evidence indicates that they failed, and that the land proved to be uninhabitable for hundreds of years.

A similar eruption today would bring extreme devastation, extending into the densely populated areas of Naples, according to the team. Within the city, they report, there is a bed of ash up to 9 ft (3m) deep, the result of the eruption 4,000 years ago.

Computer modelling shows that the same event today would be capable of overrunning Naples and causing total devastation in a region up to eight miles from Vesuvius.

... more. I'll gather all the versions in this weekend's Explorator, of course ...