In Paperback: Vesuvius

VesuviusGillian DarleyHarvard University Press, 2015The most attractive entry in the “Wonders of the World” series from Harvard University Press is now presented in a handy little paperback: it's Vesuvius, Gillian Darley's short but surprisingly meaty study of the famous volcano on the Bay of Naples throughout its history.Vesuvius is of course virtually synonymous with one solitary eruption, the one that happened in AD 79 and buried the cities of Vesuvius and Herculaneum. That eruption was watched by a young man who would later become known to literary history as Pliny the Younger, and his uncle, Pliny the Elder, the Roman naval commander on the bay and also an avid naturalist, lost his life on the beach beneath the mountain's flank. But as Darley amply demonstrates in this book, the gorgeous, terrifying spectacle of Vesuvius erupting has been watched by countless people over the centuries, and quite a few of them left passionate accounts – and Darley seems to have tracked down and read all of those accounts.She tells the stories of these various witnesses with great color and concision, as in the case of empirical philosopher George Berkeley in 1717:

Like Pliny the Elder, his curiosity was so great that with three or four companions he sailed out across the bay to Torre del Greco, to see it from the south. They were astonished by the garish colours reflected in the clouds above the crater: greens and yellows as well as red, lingering on into the darkness when a dull rouging of the sky above the lava flow added to the sinister aspect.

Then there's the story of aged and utterly remarkable pathbreaking astronomer and mathematician Mary Somerville, who watched the eruption in April of 1872 and its weird aftermath:

The 1872 eruption, the first to be captured on camera, laid waste to the countryside. The deadly ash killed all the vines, fruit trees and crops that the rivers of molten material missed. The human casualties were high. Yet after the destruction, volcanoes always startle by their peculiarly transcendent beauty. One valedictory evening in late May, near sunset, as Mary Somerville was watching 'when all below was in shade, and only a few silvery threads of steam were visible, a column of the most beautiful crimson colour rose from the crater and floated in the air.' She did that November aged ninety-two.

Vesuvius presents that first photograph of this famous phenomenon; indeed, the little book is full of fascinating illustrations, period maps, paintings, and portraits of the many geologists and naturalists who were intrigued by Vesuvius. The result is very pleasingly multi-layered, giving quite the opposite impression from the innumerable Pompeii books (fiction and nonfiction) that inadvertently give the impression the whole shebang only happened the one time.