It all began, as things often do when you’re a child, with a story. Last spring, a book called “Pompeii…Buried Alive!” became the subject of intense fascination for my daughter, Stella, and her little brother, Leo. One minute the Amazon delivery guy was at the door; the next, all the two of them could talk about was the demise of this southern Italian town — the cataclysmic 79 A.D. eruption of Mount Vesuvius, the 10-mile mushroom cloud, the population of 16,000 mummified under 16 feet of ash.

Taken on its own, this apocalyptic history would not have convinced my husband, David, and me to book a trip to Italy — far from it, in fact.