The artefacts are of such significance that they need to be kept under special conditions for insurance reasons, and are currently being stored at Bristol museum, where they are being photographed and catalogued on an online database.

Experts are piecing together the clues, and the findings will be presented by the British Museum at a launch event, likely to take place around the end of the year.

Around Naples, volcanoes and tourism are intimate friends. Pompeii, which receives around three million visitors a year, was destroyed by the devastating 79 AD eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Yet the ascent to the crater of that sleeping (but very much living) giant is the most popular ‘nature’ activity in Italy: an estimated 700,000 people trekked to the top in 2016.

And although the Solfatara fumaroles in Naples’ western outskirts are more of a niche attraction these days, they were fixtures on the 18th and 19th century Grand Tour. They also claimed the most recent tourist victims of seismic activity on earlier this month, when an 11-year-old fell into a pit of boiling mud after crossing a safety barrier. His mother and father met the same fate attempting to save him.

This tragic accident - alongside this week's warnings that Mount Agung on the holiday island of Bali could be poised to erupt - underlines the danger of underestimating the power, and unpredictability, of seismic phenomena. And yet as the history of Vesuvian eruptions demonstrates, even those who live in close proximity to the volcano, and those whose job it is to ensure their safety, often ignore or play down the risks.

For Giuseppe Mastrolorenzo, a volcanologist at the Osservatorio Vesuviano, which monitors seismic activity in the Bay of Naples area, the next eruption of Mount Vesuvius could be huge: as big as the famous 79 AD blast that destroyed Pompeii, Herculaneum and a string of other towns on the seaward skirts of the volcano – if not bigger.

And yet the Italian government’s Vesuvius emergency plan, last revised between 2014 and 2016, is based on a model that has “no scientific foundation”, according to Mastrolorenzo. The plan assumes a moderate “sub-Plinian” type of eruption, rather than the more devastating, explosive “Plinian” variety – named after writer Pliny the Younger, whose uncle died in the 79 AD eruption.

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