The (really) old and new meet in Naples

Naples, Italy

POMPEII'S interior designers made the most of the earthquake. After it hit in AD 62, they renovated wrecked villas with vibrantly coloured narrative frescoes that were, it turns out, incredibly long-lived. The eruption of Vesuvius - the volcano that many of them thought was a mountain - only 17 years later in AD 79, both sealed the city's choked inhabitants in a pumice-and-ash time capsule and preserved the wall paintings that scholars have come to identify as examples of the fourth Pompeian style.

Now, nearly 2,000 years later, some of that art is prominently display…