VESUVIUS
WONDERS OF THE WORLD
THE MOST FAMOUS VOLCANO IN THE WORLD
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Profile Books Ltd
3A Exmouth house
Pine Street
Exmouth Market
London EC1R 0JH
www.profilebooks.com
copyright © Gillian darley, 2011
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Typeset in Caslon by MacGuru Ltd
info@macguru.org.uk
Designed by Peter Campbell
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Clays, Bungay, Suffolk
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 84668 3176
eISBN 978 1 84765 4267
The paper this book is printed on is certified by the © 1996 Forest Stewardship Council A.C. (FSC). It is ancient-forest friendly. The printer holds FSC chain of custody SGS-COC-2061
To Susannah and Michael
‘Many men, many opinions, as one of the ancients said, before my time’
William Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone
‘Live in danger. Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius.’
Friedrich Nietzsche
Introduction
CHAPTER 1 Early Days
CHAPTER 2 Miracle or Science?
CHAPTER 3 William Hamilton – made by Vesuvius
CHAPTER 4 Romantics
CHAPTER 5 Making Vesuvius
CHAPTER 6 Real Geology, New Focus
CHAPTER 7 Vesuvius and the Wider World
Visiting Vesuvius at home and abroad
Further Reading
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Index
Map of the Bay of Naples showing Vesuvius and the major sites around it, both ancient and modern names given where relevant.
Thunder rolls, smoke billows, flame spurts from the volcanic crater. Lightning zigzags in the dark. The dramatic effects are reflected, even enlarged, in the water below. But this is not the Bay of Naples but a featureless stretch of north eastern Germany. The Vesuvius that has sat in landscape gardens at Wörlitz, near Dessau, since the late eighteenth century will never erupt without warning.
An eruption is arranged every five years, twice on a single weekend, to impress the dignitaries from UNESCO, regional politicians and the locals. A splendid dinner is served on gondolas as the company is rowed through a watery maze of lakes and canals, under fancy little bridges from which the next course or a handful of rose petals come down. The destination is the ‘Stein’, the artificial island on which this Vesuvius sits. Out there are a small open air theatre (a miniature of the amphitheatres at Pompeii and Pozzuoli) and a little house, the Villa Hamilton. The creation of a prince made heady (and somewhat extravagant) by the infinite possibilities offered by the ambitious intellectual climate of the Enlightenment, the beguiling memories of his travels and the services of a wholly sympathetic architect, his Vesuvius was, and is, designed to flare up on a regular basis.
We’ve managed to buy tickets for Sunday 22 August 2010. But tonight, even the ingenuity of the portly Professor of Pyrotechnics at Cottbus University isn’t equal to the elements. Thunder crashes come from every direction but the lurid greenish tinge in the night sky and flares of lightning are not of his making. The moon, such a key part of the effects the previous evening, is masked by cloud, then by cinematic sheets of rain. Storm and artifice play out their game, and storm wins. With difficulty each fully-laden gondola is forced to disembark and more than two hundred disappointed people disperse into the pitch darkness, like the fugitives from Pompeii. In the distance, the crater at the summit of the volcano still valiantly spews flame into the howling wind and driving rain, but the promised lava flow has been aborted and the full moon stays hidden.
Even in imitation, even under duress, a mountain with flame in its belly is thrilling. Judging from what they saw, or knew, the ancients believed that active volcanoes contained maddened giants confined by the gods to the nether regions and shifting angrily about. Equally, there was an anthropomorphic view, in which the volcano became a living, breathing organism, its effusions and ejaculations the result of circulating liquids and gases. Eruptions wracked the ‘body’ with spasmodic and violent reactions – a kind of geological epilepsy – the mountain spewing out matter and changing temperature at will, before settling back into long intervals of relative stability. Even the rational Sir William Hamilton, the elder statesman of Vesuvian studies, often referred to ‘him’ and ‘his’ ugly moods. From the seventeenth century onwards, people had been continually clambering up the flanks of the intermittently furious monster. They discovered that Vesuvius tended to reflect their mood and many found themselves transported by the site and, on occasion, by the volcanic performance too, just as we were that August in Germany.
In classical antiquity, despite or perhaps because of their familiarity with the principal locations, observers knew volcanoes to be unpredictable and uncontrollable, the repercussions unimaginable. (In that respect, very little has changed.) On the available evidence, the ancients made fair guesses about the causes of volcanic activity. They were fortunate to have had a deeply moving eyewitness account. Thirty years after the event, Pliny the Younger’s letters to Tacitus recalled the cataclysm at Vesuvius in AD 79. In measured but vivid prose, he caught the last hours of his uncle, Pliny the Elder, as well as recalling his own experiences that day, the most cataclysmic event of his youth, indeed of his life. From the Renaissance onwards, Pliny’s enthralling description served to remind travellers just how terrifying Vesuvius could be, a salutory warning as they set off in droves up the mountain.
A member of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Naples who witnessed the 1737 eruption of Vesuvius, commented that down the ages it had provided ‘ample Matter for Reflection and Writing’ while its inextinguishable fires and continuous new eruptions give ‘modern Philosophers … a sufficient subject to employ their Thoughts.’ In the mid eighteenth century, Edmund Burke pointed out how extremes of scenery could prompt terror, a state of mind greatly to be desired in this context. Hardly had Burke developed his aesthetic theories when Vesuvius entered one of its longest active phases, during which sporadic eruptions continued for the best part of a century and a half. This book is about Vesuvius and that lengthy parade of men and women who found that the volcano mirrored their own moods and prompted conflicting, confusing feelings – among them fear, delight, curiosity or simply heightened emotion.
The dark symbolism of unpredictable violence and fearful transience lent itself effortlessly to political analogy. In troubled, introspective times, the volcano neatly suggested the overthrow of unwelcome regimes, the rise of revolutionary forces and popular movements or quite simply, the possibility of unforeseen change – for better or for worse. In Italy itself, Vesuvius was an image that helped formulate ideas of nationhood and, beyond that, to remind the world of the pivotal role that this small corner of the Mediterranean had played in its history.
Passive, Vesuvius was (and is) a set piece: a smooth, lavender-washed backdrop to chaotic Naples or the silent nemesis of the lost cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii. Active, even very slightly so, Vesuvius became a sensual, theatrical experience – playing pyrotechnic games against and with the moon or setting sun, reflections shimmering on the waters of the bay. The volcano had the capacity to violate anything in its path yet it provided innocent entertainment to audiences around the world – in amusement parks and dioramas, pleasure gardens and cinemas, in novels and even on the walls of art galleries and private houses. That cone, steep-sided because of the stickiness of viscous lava, looks very much like a firework, whose similarly cone-shaped packaging and evocative names tended to play up the volcanic link.
From the Renaissance onwards, the volcano (Vesuvius in particular) engaged the attention of alchemists and natural philosophers, Enlightenment thinkers, Romantic poets and artists, as well as those now known collectively as earth scientists. All of them chose what they wanted, or needed, to take from it. Vesuvius remains a profound and salutary reminder of what in life cannot be foreseen or brought to heel, as unpredictable as our own mortality.
1. The eruption of Vesuvius in 1794, at the height of the French Revolution, was a gift to political caricaturists like James Gillray. Here he plays on the rituals surrounding the patron saint of Naples, San Gennaro (Saint Januarius), who was trusted to protect the city from disaster. In this case, the head is Charles James Fox’s, borne by motley sans culottes (but with recognisable features) and the disaster has already occurred.
The most famous and most accessible volcano in the world, Vesuvius came to reflect and symbolise the Romantic conflict, a tabula rasa for the unsettled psyche, while handily supplying orgiastic or at least sexual metaphors. Those who set explicit scenes by the crater include the Marquis de Sade and Mme de Staël. Those whose personal dramas were played out there include the Shelleys and Claire Clairmont and, at its foot, another tragic trio, Sir William Hamilton and his second wife, Emma, with her lover Admiral Horatio Nelson, often caricatured against the suggestive image of an ejaculating volcano. Visitors came in ever-growing numbers, in hordes, to see Vesuvius for themselves.
The volcano prompted self-examination and became a benchmark against which mood and the uncertainties of the soul were measurable: both Nietzsche and Freud linked Vesuvius to angst. The Surrealists were eager to exploit the possibilities of the metaphor, whether in film or on canvas. Volcanoes draw people and even, occasionally, immolate their disciples, the first being the early Greek philosopher, Empedocles. In June 1991 Katia and Maurice Krafft, French vulcanologists as eminent and experienced as any in the world, lost their lives at Mount Unzen in Japan as they were videoing it, felled by a pyroclastic flow, the deadly boiling gas bursting out without warning from a fresh vent.
Temperamental, atmospheric Vesuvius has been an obsession for many. Some stayed, watching it from close quarters for many years, attempting to unravel its mysteries. Others left, only to find the aftershock lingering long after they had returned to the placid landscapes of home.
The only active volcano on the European mainland, Vesuvius sits in a seductive setting, the keystone to every picturesque postcard view arching over the Bay of Naples. But since 1944, the most recent eruption, a demonic game of grandmother’s footsteps has been going on, in which the population creeps ever higher and nearer to the old lava fields, seeming to tempt Vesuvius not to turn without warning and devour everything in its path. Against the astonishing reality of that last eruption, as seen in the black-and-white news clips readily available on YouTube, there’s little to tempt visitors up now.
Much of the landscape is sour, derelict kiosks and cafés littering the lower region of the mountain with their telling detritus of failed or illegal tourist traps. Nothing, it seems, is ever removed; it all waits for another season’s vegetation to wrap it up. Arriving by bus or car, tourists buy their tickets, pick their way up the final metres to the summit along an unlovely clinker path – marked by a new timber handrail already mostly adrift – and reaching the top, follow a guide along the track that hugs the crater’s edge. Down below, nothing stirs but a minuscule wisp or two of vapour. Vesuvius can easily seem a huge anticlimax.
But a volcano, especially this one, is not innocuous. The dormant volcano is a fraudulent concept, dulling the responses of all except the teams of geologists and seismologists, watching and measuring (every hour of every day, they assure us), and who try to bring urgency to the discussion, as memories of 1944 fade away, to inspire feasible evacuation plans and an infrastructure with which to carry them out. Writing in the aftermath of a global convulsion caused by a small subterranean volcano in the thinly populated interior of Iceland (to which some 70,000 people made their way, out of curiosity), it is all too clear, to me chillingly so, that the heavily built-up slopes of Vesuvius await a natural catastrophe on a quite unimaginable scale. The only uncertainty is when.
2. Pompeii, with Vesuvius in the distance. A late nineteenth century commercial photograph taken by Giorgio Sommer’s studio. German-born Sommer set up his business in Naples as early as 1856. He became enormously successful and specialised in art, archaeology and topography for a wide and growing market, the people who came in droves to visit Pompeii and Vesuvius, its nemesis. Conveniently, the photographer had the place to himself on this occasion.
The following pages open a window onto a shared obsession that has endured for at least two millennia. Vesuvius has produced its own literature, imagery, scientific and universal insights but also, last but not least, it has engendered a huge amount of innocent delight and sheer astonishment – not just on Italian soil. I confess to becoming increasingly Vesuvius-struck during the writing of this book; I hope that my readers will follow suit.
Perhaps the Earth’s rumbling and fuming was less puzzling to the ancients than for us, so confident as we are of having the answers to everything and yet powerless to protect ourselves from violent natural phenomena such as active volcanoes or earthquakes. Our remote ancestors could shrug off their worries, since within polytheism volcanoes were the most obvious home of the many gods of fire and furnace. An eruption was, therefore, an expression of the gods’ pent-up fury and so, while a worrying portent, not unexplained.
Since volcanoes were, from the viewpoint of the ancients, self-evidently caused by ever-burning fires at the heart of the earth, it followed that they would eventually burn out, their fuel spent. The only question was when that might happen. Recently, excavations have established that there was an exceptionally severe eruption of Vesuvius around 1600 BC at Avellino, just west of the current crater. The pyroclastic surge (also known as a nuée ardente – a burning cloud) must have reached Naples (as that of AD 79 did not). The footprints of people and animals fleeing their settlements as the jet of gas and volcanic matter, surging at a fantastic speed and at temperatures reaching 1,000 degrees centigrade, caught and killed them are poignant, if fragmentary, evidence of the deadly event. Logically, many other eruptions must have preceded it, of which no signs whatsoever remain. But now that we know something of the catastrophe at Avellino it overshadows all subsequent eruptions. It has, graphically, been described as the ‘nightmare blueprint’, forecasting that moment in the future when Vesuvius will reach, and overwhelm, the vast conurbation that is modern Naples.
Both the Greeks and Romans considered Vesuvius a sacred place from the evidence of its incredible fertility. The name is said to be a corruption of Vesouuios, son of Ves (Zeus), a figure close to the top of the hierarchy of deities. In Exodus, Moses received the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, ‘all in smoke because the LORD descended upon it in fire’. Fire and brimstone were menacing and apocalyptical stage props in Judaeo-Christianity, whether summoned up at Sodom and Gomorrah in retribution for the people’s heinous sins or within the Hell to which the Christian damned would be eternally confined.
In 1979 astonishing images taken from the Voyager spacecraft revealed the nature of Io, one of Jupiter’s several moons. The unprecedented scale and turbulence of this distant volcanic landscape came as a shock to the scientific community, far surpassing anything on earth – both in the intensity of its heat and the sheer quantity of activity there. Io was a revelation. When space scientists began to name the most important of its nearly six hundred newly discovered active volcanoes, they turned to a thesaurus of deities of fire from every culture and corner of the world, both benevolent and malevolent. They included Prometheus and Amirai, his Georgian counterpart; Zamana the Babylonian god of sun and war; and Pele, Hawaian goddess of the volcano. Ancient myth and memory mediated between these thrilling discoveries within the planetary system.
3. Aerial view of Vesuvius, showing the inert volcanic crater and, to the north, the half moon shaped sheer rim of Monte Somma, long extinct, rising behind. Vesuvius’ long inactivity, it having been dormant since 1944, has lulled the local population into a dangerous sense of security.
Two millennia before those volcanic revelations from space, Vesuvius erupted. It would become the most famous volcano in the world. Two rocky peaks nestle: Monte Somma, the outer incomplete one, is a rocky palisade rising to 1,133 metres; Monte Vesuvio, the inner funnel-shaped cone, is a characteristic stratovolcano formed of highly viscous lava. The inner currently tops the outer by 150 metres (although every major eruption has changed its form and vital statistics). Divided by a barren valley, to the west the Atrio del Cavallo and to the east the evocatively named Valle dell’Inferno (Valley of Hell) the paired craters loom over Naples (just nine kilometres to the east) but only one is active. Monte Somma has been utterly dormant for the last 16,000 or more years. Vesuvius has been in temporary repose since 1944.
The origins and explanations for volcanic matter – fire, brimstone, noxious gases and other red-hot materials trapped underground – run through myth and scripture into early natural philosophy and beyond. By happy accident, most of the volcanic activity in the Mediterranean was easily accessible to the great thinkers of the Greek and Roman world and it is through their eyes, from surviving literature, that we see it. The sages of classical antiquity approached Vesuvius, Etna, Stromboli and other live sites, including the extensive Campi Phlegraei (Flaming Fields), with due respect for their mythic associations but above all with questing minds, acute vision and a dawning preference for the rational. The latter area, to the west of Naples, was a flat landscape, a sequence of volcanic calderas or shallow basins, some of which held water. Unknown to the ancients, the system extended further, under the Bay of Naples. In its way, that area was, and is, as actively volcanic as the famous mountains.
The most vivid clues to what lay underfoot came from the sulphurous wisps and scabrous crusts of the Solfatara (from the Latin, sulpha terra), the caldera which was the best known feature of the entire Campi Phlegraei. When he visited it in 1645, John Evelyn (recalling it later, but drawing heavily on several earlier accounts) used its nickname, the ‘Court of Vulcan’, and wrote of a place memorable for the heat (‘almost unsufferable’) and the ‘variously colour’d Cinders’ underfoot. It was ‘no little adventure to approach them, however daily frequented both by Sick & Well, who receiving the fumes have been recover’d of diseases esteem’d incurable … a world of sulpure made’. In Christian times, this place was seen as a preview of Purgatory, its infernal qualities mediated by its curative powers.
The characteristics of a caldera (in effect a flattened volcano) such as the Lago d’Averno – a famously sinister, lifeless lake – are now known to indicate subsidence in the underlying magma reservoir – the yin to the yang of the volcano. When, very recently, astronomers gained more detailed images of Io, Jupiter’s boiling moon turned out to bear a surprisingly strong resemblance to the Solfatara, with its scrofulous, sulphuric acid green-yellow surface.
Long before these discoveries Aristotle had posited that demonstrable and observable phenomena pointed to clear outcomes, and his empiricism led to a gradual devaluation of the status held by miscellaneous deities and the dismantling (or at least redirection) of primitive beliefs. The ancients sensed, and on occasion saw, that there was unseen turbulence below, a massive subterranean strife going on under the surface of the Earth. It helped to know that Etna was the home of the Cyclops who, blinded by Vulcan’s fire, was blundering about in caves beneath the volcano. But returning to the demonstrable evidence, Virgil’s description of Etna erupting in the Aeneid was as much an eyewitness account as any that came later. In the 1690s John Dryden conveyed it pithily – the ‘pitchy clouds’ rolling overhead and the ‘flakes of mounting flames, that lick the sky’ all manifest evidence of the ‘fiery springs that boil below’. Etna had been far more rewarding to the volcano watchers of antiquity than the seemingly moribund Vesuvius.
Vesuvius is often referred to in the literature of classical antiquity. In one particularly seductive passage in his fourth epigram, the Spaniard Martial describes Bacchus and the Satyrs dancing in the vineyards and on the ridges above Vesuvius, in an area of glorious fecundity known as Campania felix (blessed Campania). So beautiful was this landscape, resulting from the rich minerals contained in volcanic deposits, that it offered, according to one translation, ‘a retreat for which the gods of pleasure and gaiety forsook their most favoured abodes’ – only for it all to be decimated at a stroke. ‘All lies drowned in fire and melancholy ash; even the High Gods could have wished this had not been permitted them.’ From now on Vesuvius is always pictured in dramatic, shocking contrast: before and after, fertile and infertile, paradisiacal and hellish – good strong polarities for a modern audience, too.
Martial drew the modern English poet Tony Harrison back to Vesuvius. It became the recurring subject of his poem ‘The Grilling’ (2002), in which he weaves together the ancient voices, along with seventeenth-century translations, and Goethe and Tischbein his chosen Romantic companions, with whom he imagines enjoying fine wine and good conversation on the slopes of Vesuvius. One of Martial’s translators was the Parliamentarian poet Thomas May, whose reputation had taken a dramatic downturn at the Restoration (though he was eventually reinterred in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey). The vicissitudes of his life endear him to Harrison, who finds resonance in May’s choice of Martial. Thomas May’s translation of Martial’s epigram runs ‘Where satyrs once in mirthful dances mov’d … Is now burnt downe, rak’d up in ashes sad. The gods are grill’d that such great power they had.’ Fifty years later Joseph Addison tried again, with a far lighter touch; ‘The frisking Satyrs on the summits danced:/ … Now piles of ashes, spreading all around/In undistinguish’d heaps, deform the ground: / The gods themselves the ruin’d seats bemoan / And blame the mischiefs that themselves have done.’
But even the ancients hadn’t prepared Addison adequately for Vesuvius when he visited Naples in 1701–02. He confessed that until he saw it for himself, he had no idea of its impact. After all, the Roman poet Silius Italicus, whom he quoted, considered Vesuvius no more than a ‘second Etna’. But for any politically engaged writer, powerful Vesuvius serves to illuminate dark places. Harrison, like others before him such as Shelley and Leopardi, uses the desolate volcano as ‘a metaphor for all the fiery devastation of our times.’
Vesuvius’ most resounding fame in antiquity rested upon the early history of Spartacus and his slave army. With fewer than a hundred armed fellow gladiator escapees, Spartacus took refuge in the dormant crater in 73 BC. The slaves had just broken out of their quarters in Capua, and with foresight Spartacus directed them to head for Vesuvius. The outer rim of Monte Somma resembled a gigantic ruined keep with lookout towers and had just one entry point and thus, their pursuers guessed, a single exit. Spartacus’s men could look down, unseen, upon the three thousand Roman infantrymen below, while busily manufacturing their means of escape: a quantity of improvised ropes and ladders made out of knotted vines and willow stems. With these, they clambered up the sheer walls of the crater and then shinned down the outer cliffs to take the massed soldiers, who were nonchalantly undefended, completely off guard. Spartacus’s little force, their numbers now augmented by local shepherds and herdsmen ‘all sturdy men and fast on their feet’, routed Gaius Claudius Glaber’s entire ragtag citizen army. Surprise had rendered them incapable of effective action.
The tale, as retold a couple of centuries later by Plutarch and Appian (it was the latter who identified Vesuvius as the precise site), gave the volcano a certain heroic reputation. The feared, ill-disciplined army that Spartacus soon amassed had begun, we believe, as an orderly and efficient military kernel which only survived thanks to their leader’s prescient choice of hiding place. Peter Stothard, writing about Spartacus, judges the Roman engineer and bureaucrat Frontinus’s account to be the most accurate since, ironically enough, he used the details for practical purposes to describe a site and a situation of particular awkwardness in the section of his military manual Stratagems that provides ideas and clever strategies for ‘escape from difficult places’. More than a century after the event, he admired the clear thinking with which the handful of besieged men (Spartacus and seventy-four others, he believed) broke out of their high mountainous nest, leaving their horde of erstwhile captors askance. Later Frontinus became governor of Britain and took on the Welsh.
A detailed description of the characteristics of Vesuvius was to be provided by Vitruvius, the author of the first surviving architectural treatise and a far more renowned military engineer than Frontinus. Although the volcano was still dormant at the time he was writing (c.20 BC) the many trails of lava in the area gave him pause for thought. He admired the qualities of volcanic bi-products, without understanding their chemistry. Vitruvius describes a ‘kind of powder’ which when combined with lime and rubble becomes so solid and impregnable ‘that neither the waves nor the force of water can dissolve them’. He is puzzled by its origins, though he knew of ancient tales about fires bursting out under Mount Vesuvius sending ‘flames across the fields’. However, it was the high silica content in Vitruvius’s wonderful ‘sand’ that gave the special mortar known as pozzolano, or pulvis Puteolanus (Puteoli was the Roman name for Pozzuoli), its impressive strength and waterproof properties. This bonding material could be used under water (for Ostia’s docks) and for increasingly ambitious vaulted and curvilinear buildings. A revolutionary structure such as the dome of the Pantheon, with its massive unsupported span, entirely depended upon pozzolano, the key ingredient in ‘Roman cement’ and as important as any single element in the efficient and enduring construction of the monumental structures of the Roman Empire.
After the rediscovery of Vitruvius’s work in the early fifteenth century and its subsequent adaptation into innumerable other manuals and treatises, engineers and architects gratefully embraced hydraulic cement, considering its properties near miraculous. Vitruvius came close to identifying the volcanic origin of stone in this area of Campania; and for architects such as John Soane, who came to Naples with his treatise in hand, Vesuvius was little more than a giant quarry for unusual materials. In fact, pumice (lapis spongia, sponge-like stone) and tufa (also known as tuff or tephra), compounded volcanic dust, were not particularly suitable for masonry. Paradoxically, from the Renaissance onwards, tufa (or, more often limestone which simulated it) would be considered ideal for grottos, fountains and other lightweight decorative garden structures, even for the Vesuvius that was built in Germany in the late eighteenth century. Other tougher igneous rocks formed out of magma reservoirs elsewhere, such as basalt and obsidian, were not identified as volcanic material for almost two millennia after Vitruvius.
Vitruvius also devoted considerable space in his treatise to the choice of suitable sites for particular types of building, including private residences. Many variants of the delicious villa maritima – with its airy vocabulary of garden terraces, arcades, colonnades, loggias and porticoes – were to evolve along the coast around Naples. It was an architecture developed to maximise the benefits of the natural beauty of the landscape, offering a choice of sea and mountain views, in contrast to the inward facing suburban villa hermetically sealed around an open colonnade, the peristyle. Some of these Roman waterside villas had jetties and reached down to the shore but most were terraced, stepping up several levels above sea level to better enjoy the prospect. Amoenitas (charm, delightfulness) was highly valued and life here emulated a civilised culture, the life of ease and fulfilment that the Romans believed had been a feature of earlier, Hellenic, times.
The sites of two large villas excavated at Stabiae (south-east of Castellammare) suggest that, exactly like their eighteenth-century successors outside Naples, they had been conceived to borrow views of the Bay in front, and Vesuvius to their rear. Wall paintings of similar villas show their relationship to the sea and, on occasion, to the hills behind. A difficult site, steep or confined, was an incentive – a way to engage with nature. Like those who began to build villas in great numbers following a Bourbon king settling in Naples in the 1730s, earlier generations of equally fortunate men, of Epicurean tendency, built here in order to drink in their delicious surroundings, just one strand within a completely sensuous existence that almost always teetered on the edge of vulgarity and extreme ostentation.
Others were looking ever harder at Vesuvius, the mountain, itself. Strabo, the Greek who, in the first century BC wrote a geographical account of the world as he knew it, has left the earliest surviving description of the volcano, pondering its very particular external characteristics. He noticed the dramatic contrast between that well-populated and intensively farmed land wrapping around the (by then long quiescent) mountain and its pale, flat, barren summit. There he observed ‘pore-like cavities’ in the blackened rocks and surmised that they had been ‘eaten out by fire’, suggesting that the entire mountaintop had once been alight, only to be quenched when the, to him, entirely mysterious fuel was spent. He considered volcanoes to be the earth’s ‘safety valves’, the fire caused by subterranean hot winds or draughts fanning the rocks below, like sublime bellows, until they ignited, to seek an explosive exit via inadequate narrow passages to the surface of the earth.
This had been Aristotle’s notion long before, and before him, that of Empedocles of Agrigentum in Sicily, the mid-fifth century BC Greek thinker, the first man to identify the four elements and an apparently prodigious figure, considered (on his own admission) to be a living god. His observations of a volcano, here Etna, gave rise to the potent and enduring idea of the earth as a kind of seething sponge, perforated by canals through which water and fire continually passed. The Sicilian volcano was reliably active and provided ready material for those who were struggling with theories of the earth. In contrast Vesuvius, as it then was, offered nothing more than a poetic, peaceful landscape surmounted by rocky outcrops.
This theory of volcanic activity was accepted whole-heartedly by Roman natural philosophers. Lucretius, in the sixth book of his De Rerum Natura, noted that the earth was ‘amply fitted out/With windy caves’. Like all his contemporaries, he considered volcanoes to be hollow; ‘The wind and air is everywhere around/In these grottoes: the air becomes stirred up/ And turns to wind.’ That air, by now warm, ‘strikes up hot fire that rapidly/ Rises up high and hurls itself on out’ by ejecting flaming material followed by billowing smoke and hurtling stones.
Seneca happened to be pondering the causes of earthquakes just as Campania was hit by a particularly violent seismic shock, which severely damaged both Pompeii and Herculaneum in AD 62 or 63. He could not know it, but he was grappling with the repercussions of a fatal conflict between shifting tectonic plates – an explanation which did not emerge until the mid twentieth century. That terrifying occurrence prompted him to pause and consider the psychological effects of natural disasters in the fourth volume of his Naturales Quaestiones (Natural Questions).
Even to a twenty-first century world audience, at risk of being numbed by a multi-media crescendo of terrifying natural cataclysms, Seneca’s words are profoundly moving. How can anyone offer reassurance once all the certainties are lost, he wonders. ‘Yet can anything seem adequately safe to anyone if the world itself is shaken, and its most solid parts collapse?’ Worse still, ‘What hiding-place do we look to, what help, if the earth itself is causing the ruin, if what protects us, upholds us, on which cities are built, which some speak of as a kind of foundation of the universe, separates and reels?’
By extraordinary good fortune in AD 79 the man in charge of the Roman fleet at the naval base at Misenum (modern Miseno), just across the bay from Neapolis (modern Naples), happened to be Pliny the Elder. Thus, Aristotle’s heir, an astounding polymath, was on hand as Vesuvius erupted in a fashion never before recorded.
Pliny treasured every morsel of knowledge but was also committed to sharing his findings widely. He hardly slept, surviving on regular catnaps, and never moved without writing materials to hand and two secretaries, one reading to him, the other taking continual dictation (in winter with his hands encased in gloves). Somehow Pliny combined his diurnal official duties and attendance on the Emperor Vespasian with the nocturnal compilation of his multi-volume Natural History, the very first encyclopaedia. ‘Nature, which is to say Life, is my subject’, he wrote. Among the topics he covered was volcanism, though Vesuvius was not among the ‘vents’ he identified as being active. Discussing minerals, he identified certain types of sulphur which contained a ‘powerful abundance of fire’.
In Rome, the annual festival of Volcanalia (or Vulcanalia) was held on 23 August and involved ritual sacrifice and celebratory games to ‘allay wildfires, earthquakes and volcanoes’ after the long weeks of searing summer heat. Volcanus or Vulcanus was the Roman god of destructive fire, whose shrine stood in the Forum Romanum. In AD 79 the festivities took place as usual, their objective to placate the forces of fire but, this time, with awful seeming prescience.
Pliny had already been intrigued, alert to such signs, by continuous recent earth tremors together with drying springs and broken water supplies. These hints of significant geological disturbance must have excited his curiosity hugely. His sister and seventeen-year-old nephew, the boy we know as Pliny the Younger, had been staying with him at Misenum. Recalling the first tremors, Pliny was to write that the tremors in themselves had not caused anyone great worry, ‘because they are frequent in Campania’. But as he wrote to Tacitus thirty years later, one afternoon his mother suddenly alerted her brother ‘to a cloud of unusual size and appearance’. On this day, probably 24 August, Pliny the Elder had taken a cold bath and had lunch before returning to work but he now urgently ‘called for his shoes and climbed up to a place which would give him the best view’. For an avid natural philosopher who had never before witnessed a volcanic eruption, this was a thrilling, cathartic moment – the experience of a lifetime.
What they now saw, very far away, recalled his nephew,