Retrospective: Mt. Vesuvius

In the south of Italy, near the edge of Naples there is a very famous mountain.  It isn't especially large, but it has a history.  And in case you haven't guessed by the title of this post, that mountain is none other than Mt. Vesuvius.
Vesuvius erupted, famously in 79 AD.  The Roman Empire was near its most powerful, and the Emperor Titus had just succeeded his father, Vespasian.  When he heard news of the eruption, the Emperor sent down a fleet of the Roman navy to assist evacuation of the port city of Pompeii.  The famed Roman natural philosopher Pliny the Younger witnessed the event, and Pliny the Elder met his fate trying to rescue people.  They are part of the reason that eruption was remembered so well even so many years after the fact.  But the port town of Herculaneum, referred to as Ercolono by the native population, was also hurt by the eruption.

There is an archaeological site with an excavated Roman town, that you can get a good sense of Roman life, and how the eruption of Vesuvius caused a trail of death and destruction.  People crowded near the docks to escape the pyroclastic flow, but it wasn't enough to save them.  We have no records from any survivors of Herculaneum.  The excavation sites at Pompeii and Herculaneum give us a large portion of our knowledge of life outside the city of Rome during this time, including how Roman towns were organized, and how Roman villas were decorated.

When the Greeks settled Neapolis (Naples), and later Romans founded more settlements around Vesuvius there was no indication that it was a volcano.  Geological evidence suggests that the last eruption before the one in 79 AD was 300 years prior.  The volcano entered into a period of great activity, then settled down until the 1660, where it erupted again quite violently, and since then there have been eruptions every few dozen years. The last one being in 1944, as the allies were retaking Italy in WWII.  So we might be due for another eruption soon, or that may have been the last one for another few hundred years yet.  The eruptions of volcanoes are notoriously hard to predict. Vesuvius is monitored extensively, and the Italian government had put in place economic incentives to move away from Vesuvius.  It is very much an active volcano.



This is an image of the caldera, or crater of the volcano.  Imagine those high cliffs continue around in a circle, I am taking this picture from the opposite cliff.  In certain areas of the volcano there are vents where moisture escapes and it smells of sulfur, imagine rotten eggs.  The hike itself was steep, but once you reached the rim it flattened out.

After the hike around Vesuvius our bus driver skillfully navigated the narrow and winding roads around Naples and took us to a farm to eat lunch.  We ate outdoors, and the owners of the establishment had a few cats, and several kittens, all so young they could barely walk.  What we ate was all local to the Naples area, or that farm itself, and all delicious.  The owner shared with us some olive oil, made from olives grown on his property.  And I bought a bottle of wine, grown from the owners grapes, fermented on site, and aged four years in oak barrels in a naturally formed cave on the side of Vesuvius.  Some of the best wine I've had, and it was only 8 euro. The volcanic soil makes the land very fertile, but it should be remembered that there is an ever present risk, living next to an active volcano.