Italy travel: Pompeii. Most of our Perillo Tours Familia is visible in this segment, as we meet a resident of Pompeii. You can see the anguish, as he was caught in the painful last gasps of life. Wow. Mt. Vesuvius had been proclaimed an extinct volcano by the experts of the day, so the eruption was quite a surprise to the residents of Pompeii. They didn't have time to escape. With some clever techniques, archaeologists were able to pour plaster molds of the residents of Pompeii where they died.