Pompeii's grand baths unveiled, with hidden tragedy Magnificent thermal baths designed to be the jewel of Pompeii but destroyed by a volcanic eruption before they could be completed open to visitors for the first time after a painstaking excavation. Marble pillars and blocks lie where they were abandoned when the city was submerged by pyroclastic flow from Mount Vesuvius in the 79 AD disaster. But excavators also found a victim of the disaster, the skeleton of a child who had sought shelter there in vain.\\n IMAGES AND SOUNDBITES