Just yesterday, archaeologists announced the discovery of new frescoes in Pompeii—thirty to forty A.D., depicting the initiation rites of Dionysus’s devotees. Perfect timing. Fausto Puglisi, for his part, had already decided that his latest Cavalli outing would center on Pompeii—the ancient pleasure palace of a city, decadent and doomed in equal measure, smothered in volcanic ash nearly two millennia ago. It was love at first sight for him, or so the story goes—he first visited as a child, and it stayed with him, the way ancient beauty and sudden catastrophe tend to do.