Q: Do we know how and when Pompeii was destroyed?
A: The only eyewitness account of the eruption that we have comes from Pliny the Younger (the nephew of naturalist and naval commander Pliny the Elder), via letters that he wrote 17 years after the disaster, describing the eruption of Vesuvius. And it is from him that we get a timeline of what happened during those fateful days.
There had been earth tremors in the days leading up to the eruption, but no one seems to have paid much attention to them. Vesuvius had last erupted in something like 1600 BC, so when it emitted a huge plume of ash and volcanic debris into the sky, no one had any idea what was happening. Over the
