If you’re reading this book, it means you’re still alive.

You’re still alive because you have the nature required to avoid being killed. You’re alive by chance, and you’re alive because you figured out what you needed to do to survive. I’m going to give you the instructions for staying alive, because that’s my mission. But first, I need to tell you everything, from the beginning. And it all starts in Naples. My name is Luca. I’m French on my father’s side and Italian on my mother’s. I went to Naples with my half-sister, Laura. Going to Naples was like visiting my second homeland, even though my mother was from northern Italy, the Friuli region. I knew a little Venetian dialect in addition to standard Italian. But living in France, I’d become distant from the language, and when I spoke Italian, everything got mixed up. It created a cocktail of words that native Italians found unsettling to hear, something that would become important in the mission I was entrusted with. In Naples, Laura experienced the same events I did. She witnessed the same scenes, yet she completely missed what was happening—she didn’t perceive it the way I did. I was the only one chosen to give you the key to survival. I wondered why she hadn’t felt what I did. The most plausible explanation was that she didn’t have Italian blood. We shared the same father, but her mother was French. In hindsight, those events only concerned me. I realized that later. I had a connection to a distant past. At first, I was the only one involved, then a million people, then several hundred million. It was overwhelming, but I had no choice—I had to keep going. This mission went far beyond anything I could have imagined. So, I went to Naples with my half-sister because I didn’t know the city, nor Pompeii, nor Mount Vesuvius. For someone from northern Italy, southern Italy was truly a change of scenery—especially when it came to its people. In Friuli, where I’m from, there were some similarities to Naples: the Adriatic Sea, the mountains, and the earthquakes. During the last major earthquake in 1976, nine hundred people lost their lives.

However, there was one major difference: in Friuli, there was no volcano. There was no Vesuvius.