If being covered in 16 metres of lava wasn't bad enough, it's been discovered at least one victim of Mt Vesuvius' AD79 eruption had their brain turned to glass.
And scientists want to melt it down.
Thousands died when the legendary volcano blew its top, being choked by ash, hit by falling rocks and masonry and buried in lava.
But at least one poor soul also had to suffer having his brain vitrified, scientists have claimed. Pier Paolo Petrone of the University of Naples Federico II was looking at a skeleton dug up in the 1960s when he noticed "something shimmery in the shattered skull".
He told news agency AFP he was "pretty sure this material was human brain", and testing confirmed it contained proteins and fatty acids from not just a brain, but his hair.
The remains were found at Herculaneum, northwest of Pompeii but still within range of Vesuvius' fury. Molten lava 520C hot swept over the resort town.
"The high heat was literally able to burn the victim's fat and body tissues, causing the brain to vitrify," local archaeological officials said.
Vitrification occurs when a liquid substance - in this case a melted brain - is cooled so quickly it hardens without forming crystals. Scientists call the result glass, though it's not the same as the glass we're generally familiar with.
"If we manage to reheat the material, liquefy it, we could maybe find this individual's DNA," Petrone told AFP.
The results of the study were published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
If being drowned in molten rock and having your brain frozen sounds awful, take some solace in the fact some of the other victims at Herculaneum were probably already dead before the lava arrived, poisoned by toxic gases.
A separate study, also released Friday (NZ time), found many of them weren't subjected to the same extreme temperatures.
"The people hid for protection, and got stuck," said Tim Thompson of Teesside University.
The proof is in the presence of bone collagen in the remains - it would have been vaporised had they been hit with lava.
"What was interesting was that we had good collagen preservation but also evidence of heat-induced change in the bone crystallinity. We could also see that the victims had not been burned at high temperatures."
Well, not as high as 520C, as the guy above endured. These particular victims might only have been exposed to temperatures around 240C - "relatively cool" as far as lava goes, the scientists said.
"The residents saw the eruption and had a chance to attempt to escape," said Dr Thompson.
But they failed, as did around up to 20,000 others.
That study was published in the journal Antiquity.
