Watching Vesuvius: A History of Science and Culture in Early Modern Italy 9780226923734

Citation preview

Watching Vesuvius

Watching Vesuvius a h i s to ry o f s c i e n c e a n d c u lt u r e i n e a r ly m o d e r n i ta ly

Sean Cocco

The University of Chicago Press  c h i c a g o & l o n d o n

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Bevington Fund. Sean Cocco is associate professor of  history at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2013 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2013. Printed in the United States of America 22  21  20  19  18  17  16  15  14  13    1  2  3  4  5 isbn-13: 978–0-226–92371–0 (cloth) isbn-13: 978–0-226–92373–4 (e-book) isbn-10: 0–226–92371–1 (cloth) isbn-10: 0–226–92373–8 (e-book) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cocco, Sean. Watching Vesuvius : a history of science and culture in early modern Italy / Sean Cocco. pages ; cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-226-92371-0 (cloth : alkaline paper) isbn-10: 0-226-92371-1 (cloth : alkaline paper) isbn-13: (invalid) 978-0-226-92373-4 (e-book) isbn-10: (invalid) 0-226-92373-8 (e-book) 1. Vesuvius (Italy)—History—17th century.  2. Vesuvius (Italy)—Eruption, 1631. 3. Vesuvius (Italy)—Research—Italy—History.  4. Volcanism—Social aspects— Italy—Naples.  5. Volcanism—Italy—Naples—Influence.  6. Naples (Italy)— Intellectual life—17th century.  7. Naples—Italy—History—1503–1734.  I. Title qe523.v5c63 2012 551.210945'73—dc23 2012020838 a This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

A Claire e Bianca

contents

Acknowledgments  ix Introduction: Vesuvius in the View South  1 1  ·  Approaches: Humanists, Naturalists, and Vesuvius in the Late Renaissance  25 2  ·  Marvelous Excesses: The Eruption of 1631  52 3  ·  Histories of Ignition: From Historia to Causa  79 4  ·  Contesting Vesuvius: Discordant Meanings in the Context of Revolt  113 5  ·  On the Face of This Earth: Vesuvius and Its Kind  138 6  ·  Watching and Philosophizing: From Controversy to Cosmopolitanism  170 7  ·  Formed by Explosion: Geology in the Neapolitan Picturesque  192 Conclusion: Returns to the Past  226 Notes  235 Bibliography  289 Index  307

Acknowledgments

I have been writing this book for a long time. I take great pleasure in expressing my gratitude to the many people and institutions that have helped me along the way. A Fulbright fellowship in 2000–2001 supported an unforgettable year in Naples. Adriana Nave took me up her volcano for the first time. On Vesuvius, the scientists of the Osservatorio Vesuviano extended a welcoming hand to the historian in their midst. I hope that Adriana especially will draw some pleasure from my work. Ettore de las Grennelais helped me to see his city through the eyes of a citizen, an engineer, and a historian. Costigan and Simpson Center fellowships from the University of Washington gave me the time to write and the chance to return in subsequent years. I have spent many hours in the reading room of the Biblioteca Brancacciana, where on warm days the windows are opened up to look out onto the bustling port and the silhouette of Vesuvius. To the entire staff of this wonderful place, where I know I will return often, my many thanks. Support from the Huntington Library in 2009 opened up the final pathways of my research. Dean Rena Fraden generously made sure that I had a year away from teaching to finish writing. Peter Diehl, Leonard Helfgott, the late Tom Horn, Georg Mariz, and Mart Stewart were my first professors. They set me on this path. While a student at the University of Washington I was fortunate to work with Ray Jonas, Mary O’Neil, Ben Schmidt, and Robert Stacey. Each knows, I hope, how they have influenced me for the better. Susan Smith’s boundless generosity has always humbled me. I feel honored to do the same work as Dean Bennet, Eric Bulson,

  Acknowledgments

Ali Igmen, and Nick Regiacorte. Many colleagues will hopefully see a reflection of their contributions in the better sides of the book. Special thanks go to Karl Appuhn, Tommaso Astarita, Paula Findlen, Helen Hills, Nick Napoli, John Marino, Tara Nummendal, Brian Ogilvie, Evelyn Lincoln, and Michael Robinson. Portions of chapter 4 appeared as “Contesting Vesuvius and Claiming Naples: Disaster in Print and Pen, 1631,” in Defining Community in Early Modern Europe, ed. Michael Halverson and Karen Spierling (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 307–26. I am grateful to Michael and Karen, and to Ashgate, for granting me the permission to use a portion of this previous work. I owe a significant debt to Victoria G. Coates and John Seydl for publishing my early essay on this subject (“Natural Marvels and Ancient Ruins: Volcanism and the Recovery of Antiquity in Early Modern Naples”) in Antiquity Recovered: The Legacy of Pompeii and Herculaneum (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2007). Books are sometimes finally finished. Scores of people at Trinity College made the completion of this one possible. My colleagues have been, to a person, unfailingly kind along the way. Kathleen Kete, Gary Reger, and Lou Masur at various points rolled up their sleeves and hacked their way through my Italianate prose. An exuberant thank you to Zayde Antrim, Jeff Bayliss, Jonathan Elukin, Dario Euraque, Luis Figueroa, Scott Gac, Cheryl Greenberg, Joan Hedrick, Sam Kassow, Eugene Leach, Michael Lestz, Seth Markle, Borden Painter, Susan Pennybacker, Nancy Rossi, Gigi St. Peter, and Scott Tang. Whenever our professional lives have intersected, Dina Anselmi, Dan Blackburn, Jean Cadogan, Xiangming Cheng, Dario Del Puppo, Kent Dunlap, Alden Gordon, Johannes Evelyn, Jeff Kaimowitz, Jean-Marc Kehres, Giuliana Palma, Aryella Kaysar, Barry Kosmin, Vijay Prashad, Todd Ryan, Mark Silk, and Kristin Triff have enriched my thinking. Trinity College’s librarians are superb colleagues, especially Rick Ring, Jeff Kaimowitz, Peter Knapp, and Sally Jenkins in the Watkinson Library, and Patricia Bunker, Jason Davis, Katy Hart, and Jeff Liszka in the Raether Library. Christie Henry at the University of Chicago Press first took a generous interest in my manuscript, giving it life. Karen Merikangas Darling then took up the project with more energy and solicitous attention than I ever expected. She was patient and encouraging. Karen was helped by Abby Collier, on whose expertise I often relied for the illustrations. Yvonne Zipter’s careful editing made this a better book, as did Julie Shawvan’s excellent indexing. The generosity of Peggy and David Bevington, through the Bevington Fund, helped make publication of this book possible, thereby enabling others to read it; for

Acknowledgments  xi

a first-time author there is no greater gift. I count myself very fortunate to have found a home for this book where I did. To the students I have had since my days as a teaching assistant: you have changed my mind many times over. Thank you for that joyful uncertainty. The distance between two shores has marked my life. In America and Italy, I have lived in a circle of family and friends. I have shared with my sisters Melissa and Dalila many of the transits from one side to the other. Our parents Luigi Cocco and Jane and Tim Nelson showed us how to stand at an angle to things. Their love across continents has been unflinching, unconditional, and unforgettable. My larger families in Italy and Washington State were enormously kind to this long undertaking. To Grandpa Brooke: yes, the book is finally done. Claire’s family, especially Marilyn and Greg, cheered me on more times than I can remember, filling this journey with laughter. Paolo Villa, Giovanni Spani, the “fellas,” and the tifosi—now you know what I was doing all these years. To my wife Claire goes my deepest gratitude, for this and for so many other things. My daughter Bianca turns a year old as I write this acknowledgment. I give her this message in a time capsule, for when she can understand: you and your mom are the binary stars of my universe, filling it with light. You both make my orbit right and true.

introduction

Vesuvius in the View South

I was on a high-speed train, Naples receding. Italians sometimes say that the South begins with the greenhouses south of Rome, but that opinion, like many things in Italy, is hotly debated. The landscape does change, however. Moving up Italy’s west coast—I was traveling inland north to Rome—the flat agricultural plain around Naples yields to jagged and arid peaks. Beyond them, the land stretches out again into rolling farmland. Somewhere in between, the landscape whizzing past, I would pass out of southern Italy. It was Friday afternoon and the sleek and efficient train was full. Most on board were commuters in regular transit. The woman in front of me told me that she was going to Rome to spend the weekend. Her trip would take ninety minutes. To make conversation, I commented on what I thought would be the pleasure of visiting Rome. Who could miss Naples after only forty-eight hours? But that question only arose from later reflection. I had assumed the pleasure of a short trip with an imminent return. Her reply surprised me: “I’m Neapolitan, I’m not really myself when I can’t see Vesuvius.” It was as if I had failed to acknowledge the obvious truth of an impending separation. Departing Naples, the tracks run to the northeast, then begin to swing left in a broad arc that bears northwest, up along the coast toward Rome. Vesuvius looms in the window on the right as the train begins to accelerate. You can keep its peak in the window frame for some time if you crane your neck as the train surges forward. When the woman in the neighboring seat had spoken wistfully of her home town, the distinct four thousand-foot bulk had been slipping out of view. She was sitting by the window facing backward, watching the

  Introduction

mountain recede. How many comings and goings have been so marked? For a mountain of modest size, Vesuvius possesses an enormous physicality. Its shape, latent force, and proximity to a great city magnify it. Years later, I learned of a reverse journey of sorts. In the fall of 1562, a fourteen­-year-old Giordano Bruno crossed the few leagues that separated Naples from his native Nola. Ingrid Rowland writes that Bruno would later recall that the trip changed how he saw Vesuvius, the “crookbacked One . . . the one with the sawtooth hunchback that splits the sky.” She explains that the verses of his De immenso, published in the 1590s, evoked vivid personal memories of the mountain. Vesuvius had once filled his view of the horizon with its gloomy bulk. However, when he rounded the dormant volcano on his first trip to Naples, he discovered another appearance. The side facing the city delighted him. Its slopes rose gently, covered in vines and orchards.1 That Naples is marked even today by the presence of Vesuvius seems a matter of easy first impressions. Different kinds of awareness grow with experience, sustained by sight. Closer to our time, Norman Lewis looked down on war-torn 1943 Naples from the high ground of the Vomero hill. The city’s scars and disfigurements blurred into a single tapestry, and he felt himself gazing on an ancient scene made whole in spite of all its contrasting elements.2 I find that effect to be in some way replicable. Through a certain vision, maybe with some effort, the cranes and bustling port at the volcano’s base can be knocked out of focus. The urban sprawl that rises so unwisely up the volcano becomes absorbed by an indomitable mass reminding us that Vesuvius is totally unencumbered by civilization. Nature is indifferent to us, but we are not indifferent to it. The Croatian scholar Predrag Matvejevic wrote of his own love of the Mediterranean that “many people have written in memoirs of picking up pebbles, weighing them in their hand, and using them to draw pictures in the sand.”3 For the woman on the train, as for Bruno many centuries earlier, the receding shape of Vesuvius on the horizon marked a crossing away from home. Can the power of place embody both timeless and historical qualities? More significant still, what heritage had the deep past transmitted to her? Landscapes are of nature and the mind, sustaining myths that explain, empower, and identify cultures and peoples. Simon Schama writes of “their surprising endurance through the centuries and their power to shape institutions we still live with.”4 There are natural landscapes that exert their force on human civilization in what appears to be a timeless and cyclical fashion, as some say the Adriatic’s ebb and flux have shaped Venice and its myth of the sea throughout a millen-

Vesuvius in the View South  

nial epic.5 High mountains rise and erode at a rhythm imperceptible to history. Yet, over the last few centuries, they have been transformed from bastions of horror to sites of vertical conquest.6 The significance of landscapes has always changed because their meaning is assigned by human beholders. Forests felled by bronze axe or chainsaw, for example, have evoked emotions ranging from confidence to consternation throughout history. There is a long narrative of the forest told in each advance and retreat. One might consider what lies between Dante’s fear of the dark wood in the thirteenth century and John Muir’s exaltation of the American wilderness in the nineteenth. More recently, fires that incinerate desert sculpted and irrigated into suburbia have raised questions of policy and politics, touching deep undercurrents in American culture.7 Calamities intrude and sweep civilization aside careless of the best-laid plans. Vesuvius embodies many of these dimensions at once. It is cultivated and wild, still and unrestrained, timeless, and beating out a ragged beat of disaster. Historians have deployed many different terms to denote the ideas that express and sustain human attitudes toward a vastly complex natural world. Reflecting varying assumptions about rationality, emotion, and feeling, these terms include notions such as paradigms, epistemes, mentalités and, more recently, sensibilities. These concepts have been of critical importance to cultural history and the history of science.8 In what follows, I will reflect especially on the bonds between natural places and ideas. Though it is a meditation on a larger theme, the core subject might be said to be the sensibilities of expert volcano watchers, especially those of a cadre of naturalists working in and around Naples. My intention is to complement the kinds of epistemological stories developed by historians of science through a special attention to environment and city. The bourgeoning scientific appreciation of the volcano in the 1600s was inextricably linked to dimensions of local perception and identity, and then—as a result of being nested in a larger cultural world—linked to the European gaze on Naples. Indigenous and foreign descriptions manifested similarity and difference, as well as relation. Neapolitan scholarly and naturalistic perceptions of  Vesuvius after the Renaissance set the better-known history of European views in contro luce, as I imagine the painterly effect of counterlighting might do. A threefold sequence of themes frames my introduction: first, cultural views of Naples, second, the volcano itself, and third, Renaissance natural history as a thread in early volcanology. These are only separations of convenience. In truth, the links between all these things tie a history of science and the environment to one of cultural realities. The seventeenth-century marked a period when Vesuvius—again to adopt Schama’s broader intuition about Western

  Introduction

attitudes toward nature—saw its “topography mapped, elaborated, and enriched as homeland.”9 If one holds to that premise, then tracking the Neapolitan response to historical eruptions requires attention to the ways in which autochthonous understandings of place interacted with the inputs of external curiosity. With that in mind, an opening scene from the late seventeenth century sets the background.

the view south The election of cardinals in Rome, midway through January 1664, provoked the usual stir and gossip. As an assemblage of courtiers and papal officials discussed the recent events outside the Lateran, they began to debate the origins of Cardinal Girolamo Buoncompagni, a Neapolitan who reputedly fancied himself from Bologna. Buoncompagni had been resident in that city since 1651, but his ties to the southern Italian city were difficult to ignore. Well entrenched in the baronage of Naples by the seventeenth century, his family was enrolled in its principal councils and possessed considerable property in the city. Heated words were exchanged when someone voiced that it was far preferable to be counted as a person who entered Rome from the Porta del Popolo to the north than it was to be among those who filed in through Porta San Giovanni on the southern circuit of the Aurelian walls. The assumption, so framed, was that “criminal and sad people” entered from the southern entrance. The eminent cardinal, by this logic, was right to downplay his Neapolitan origins, since all who came from that most abject of cities shared its miserable qualities. More calloused hands might have reached for daggers, but no serious scuffle ensued. Still, tempers had been seriously frayed. I have found a lone record of the incident.10 Spats and exchanges of insults like the one between courtiers in 1664 were not uncommon in early modern Rome, as the city concentrated Italians from many regions, along with as a motley assortment from other nations, especially Spain and France.11 Evidently, stereotypes about Neapolitans belonged to a currency of insults. Commonplaces like these were rooted in the profound regionalism that had shaped the Italian peninsula since the end of the Roman period. Narrow streets, broad egos, and the high stakes of curia politics were always apt to inflame an existing vocabulary. Furthermore, since the revival of Roman humanism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, humanists in the papal court had promoted the idea of a reinvigorated Rome as caput mundi—or, in less ambitious formulations after the brutal sack of 1527, at least caput Italiae.12 By the late seventeenth century, the imperial papacy of the Re­

Vesuvius in the View South  

naissance had been greatly diminished by the Italian Wars (1494–1559), by the Protestant Reformation, and by the confessional conflicts of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Still, Rome occupied the center of the peninsula, of Europe, and of the world in the universalizing vision of many.13 The sneers, grimaces, and insults of the heated battibecco between courtiers thus conveyed a geographical and special orientation that was familiar to everyone involved and, yet, contested in its essential qualities. The assumption that Italy’s lesser populations lay to the south ran counter to humanistic narratives. The stereotype’s geographical dimensions were imposed on two cardinal points that marked Rome’s most important entrances, north and south, and thus oriented assumptions that appear to have had some traction with seventeenth-century Italians. In defiance of the praise of classical authors, for whom the stretch south of Rome led to “happy Campania,” one alternative was to insult Naples. The gist of that insult had been this. Those who came through the Porta del Popolo presumably bore the civilized qualities of their regions. Tuscans, Lombards, Venetians, and the earliest trickle of Grand Tourists breezed in cool and reassured, like the tramontana wind. They were not like the crass Romans, and certainly not like the predominantly rural and southern influx through Porta San Giovanni. The southern gate pointed out to the agro Romano, so the spat had struck a recognizable theme. With its large market and concentration of peasants, Porta San Giovanni had strong rural associations. Not far away, the ancient Via Appia ran south to Naples and its reputedly wild and dangerous population. For the preceding century and a half, humanists’ nostalgic peregrinations had evoked the ancients’ Campania felix, conjuring up visions of Naples’s illustrious classical heritage. At the same time, however, a countervailing set of perceptions must have been acquiring strength. Both dimensions—the praise and denigration of the land south of Rome—privileged an understanding of nature and landscape, positing a link between the nature of the South and its people. The southern sirocco breeze, Roman doctors always warned, blew hot and unhealthy.14 The courtiers’ squabble was recorded by Camillo Tutini, a secular priest one source described in 1675 has having been “satirical toward the Spanish nation, for which reason he was forced to flee Naples and go to Rome, where he died three years ago, in misery.”15 Tutini’s recollection of the incident was fiercely patriotic. He wrote, “as the word spread among Neapolitans and dwellers of the kingdom of this man’s effrontery, they pressed me to reply to his petulance, so that I might not shirk my obligation to my patria, of which I am the lowliest son.”16 The Neapolitan

  Introduction

inveighed against the idea that all his fellow citizens were like the badly reputed lazzaroni, the urban poor who symbolized the unbridled force of change and upheaval in civic life. Naples had grown enormously in the 1600s as a result of rural emigration, so its inhabitants were often associated with lawlessness and violence of the countryside. More significant, it was the rebelliousness of the late 1640s that cemented the reputation of the Neapolitan populace and most likely provided the immediate source for the insult described by Tutini.17 It certainly seems that he interpreted the comments about Cardinal Buoncompagno’s origins as a thinly veiled sneer regarding the restiveness of Neapolitans, reputedly ever ready to profit from disorder. In reply, and quite strikingly, Tutini elaborated a vision of his homeland that endowed the natural features of the countryside with rhetorical force. The words inverted the stereotype he perceived so acutely in the volley of insults outside the Lateran. In opposition to a grim litany of disaster and rebellion, Tutini drew from humanism as well as from vernacular rural and agricultural images to convey the richness of his native city. Despite the fact that early modern culture grotesquely parodied the peasant, it promoted the aesthetic and moral dimensions of the natural world. These always trumped the disgust learned urban elites generally directed at rural inhabitants themselves.18 Tutini’s defense of home made the city’s landscape work rhetorically, doing so in ways established by Renaissance humanists in the two preceding centuries. The Florentine quattrocento chronicler Benedetto Dei, for example, had written in the fifteenth century that “beautiful Florence has a total of thirty square miles of land within twenty miles outside its walls . . . the estates and farms provide great wealth and large quantities of wheat, forage, wine, olive oil, wood, meat, cheese, saffron, fruit, and vegetables all year round.”19 The Neapolitan exile described the natural bounty of his country in a similar fashion. Beginning with the entire Kingdom of Naples—which stretched from the Apennines to Sicily—he moved to the more local scale of a ring of hills buttressed by fertile plains near the city, then down to the qualities of the fruits and greens grown in the volcanic soil. Vesuvius was girt on its elevating pitch by vineyards, orchards, hamlets and towns, first green and then shading to rust on its two peaks. Beneath it, the landscape hummed with life and activity.20 Tutini echoed the voices of the great urban market in Piazza Mercato when he inserted everyday vernacular names into his humanistic paean. Certainly, these words did not belong to a formal learned or naturalistic vocabulary. They evoked a peddler’s cry and not the terms of bookish and lettered men: “iannachelle, prugna di San Gio, prugna cacanelle, prugna rossa, prugna d’India,

Vesuvius in the View South  

prugna cascaveglia, pera Carmelina, pera papa, pera pazzelle, pera iacciole, pera inpanna villane, pera coscia di donna.” Tutini specified easily as many types of different fish, including bream, bass, rockfish, skates and rays, sharks, swordfish, eels, and tuna, and by the same names as local fishermen would have used.21 This natural glossary in the vernacular functioned not unlike the Latin of humanist paeans to cities in that each equated the well-being of the city with fertility and bounty. Hybridized like this, it seems, the vernacular language of locals could be elevated to patriotic speech. Abundance defied dearth and plenitude, triumphing over order like a vast cornucopia. Messy abundance did the rhetorical work of defending Naples by challenging the citizenry’s reputation as mala gente. While the offensive exchange that took place outside the Lateran reputedly included references to Neapolitans as a “seminary of criminal and sad people” (“un seminario di gente criminale e triste”), Tutini could counter with a long list of gifts provided by Mother Nature. He described that around the city there were “gardens abundant in all manner of fruit,” “plots of flavorful and savory greens,” and “mountains dressed in precious grasses for the pasture of sheep, chickens, and goats that make cheese.” The forests were full of game and “the seas that surround the kingdom are rich in the catch of all sorts of fish and shellfish.” Fresh water, too, flowed in abundance.22 By reconfiguring the regional stereotypes that the cardinal points of Rome’s two gates located, and by partly reframing the view south though a metonymic equation of nature and Naples, Tutini was talking back. The Neapolitan’s depiction of his city conformed to conventions already established by the 1500s, when the market for urban hagiographies, guides, and histories began to flourish, well in advance of the Grand Tour. “The Kingdom of Naples is the most beautiful part of Italy, and all of Europe, for that matter,” he wrote in echo, before launching into the thick of his description.23 This formulaic assertion repeated the kind of prefatory statements found in humanists’ descriptions of the city, a notable example being Enrico Bacco’s Il Regno di Napoli diviso in dodici provincie (1608), actually the work of a German with an Italianized name.24 Repeating the formula explicitly heightened a discursive strategy intended to contest outsiders’ views. Conventions were fork-tongued: praising the site of Naples could mean denigrating Neapolitans themselves. Tutini firmly challenged previous traditions of late sixteenth-century Neapolitan historiography, which had sought to emphasize the affinities between Naples and Spain, while also asserting the city’s distinctly ancient origins.25

  Introduction

More subtle to discern, perhaps, is that he voiced an indigenous response to the pejorative depiction of Neapolitans that the incident suggests was common­ hand. Documented were perceptions that only became augmented in following decades, as the great age of travel to Italy began in earnest. By the eighteenth century, northern Europeans often employed atavism, superstition, and restiveness as commonplaces, despite the cosmopolitan ideals of the Enlightenment­.26 Yet native humanists clearly voiced alternative views that complemented and countervailed myths constructed from the outside. The Grand Tour was barely in its origins in the 1660s, but what would come would be a time of relative peace, greater ease of travel, and the wider dissemination of scientific sensibilities among European audiences.27 Later, eighteenth-century Europeans commonly described Naples in terms of theatricality, superstition, even wildness and explosiveness. The city’s beautiful­ setting and historical significance were like a captivating backdrop. Over time, the landscapes and peoples of the Italian South were made to embody a kind of mimicry: they became alternately languid or irrepressibly explosive southerners. Contrasts animated the view. Indeed, Neapolitans were like Vesuvius. Both could pass from lazy to fierce. The vision was a fabrication that worked powerfully to qualify Naples. So if one were to imagine a stratigraphy of these ideas, the later perceptions would sit on a bedrock of older, and prevailingly native, knowledge of  Vesuvius. Much of that knowledge grew out of the lively humanistic and scientific culture­ of Naples, yet this recognition faded in time. In the 1700s, observers increasingly claimed to draw pleasure from watching Vesuvius erupt, making the deep anxieties of the tumultuous seventeenth century appear like the vestiges of a previous age. Even for Neapolitans eager to make a break with the past, privileging an unafraid, rational, objective, and scientific outlook on Vesuvius­ signaled a move away from the reputedly excessive contortions of baroque piety­. Such outlooks emphasized, in other words, the desire to participate in the cosmopolitan ideal of an emerging Enlightenment culture. Acknowledging something of this caesura at the turn of the eighteenth century, the early Enlightenment jurist and historian Pietro Giannone (1676–1748) wrote in his Dell’ istoria civile del Regno di Napoli that the 1600s had been a litany of disaster—a “chain of calamities” composed of eruption, rebellion, and plague. Giannone would himself leave Naples to escape persecution, but the sense he conveyed in his references was one of relief that the tragedies of the 1600s were over.28 These later reflections on the seventeenth century marked a desire to shift posture. Images like that of a ferocious mob invoking and cajoling San Gennaro, or of Vesuvius illuminating the Bay of Naples at night,

Vesuvius in the View South  

appeared both exotic and playfully frightening to eighteenth-century observers inclined to read superstition and ignorance into the ways Neapolitans had previously understood the volcano. There was a philosophical wink, to cite a native example recounted at the close of the book, in Ferdinando Galiani’s Spaventossissima descrizione dello spaventoso spavento che ci spaventò tutti coll’eruzione del Vesuvio la sera dell’8 agosto 1779, ma che grazie a Dio durò poco (Most extremely frightening description of the frightening fright that frightened us all with the eruption of Vesuvius on the night of August 8 of the current year [1779], but that thank God did not last long). Galiani reputedly composed this satirical pamphlet at his desk, surrounded by the frenzied shrieks of simpletons, with the intent of satirizing the wonder-struck and mouth-agape tone of earlier eruption accounts.29 As the indigenous tradition of describing Vesuvius became a greater and more cosmopolitan one, Neapolitan voices increasingly became the subaltern ones. And yet it was in Naples after the 1630s that volcano watching grew into a science. Tutini’s writings exemplify the complexities of telling the story of these cultural shifts. He was a Neapolitan citizen but also a Spanish subject who belonged to a vast imperial system stretching from Italy to the Andes. For Neapolitans, like subjects living elsewhere in the Habsburg domains, the mantle of outside control always rested uneasily on local institutions and notions of identity­. Landscape was part of the tapestry of difference that could foster strong notions of   local self   beneath the aegis of empire, and in this respect they surely shared in the impulses historians have discerned in the colonial Atlantic world. As one historian has noted, “Members of the local intelligentsia of every kingdom that constituted the Spanish Empire, from Naples, Sicily, and Aragon and Mexico were heavily invested in developing patriotic surveys of  local material and spiritual resources, including not only natural histories but also chorographies and hagiographies.”30 It is possible to untangle some of the meaning behind Tutini’s response to the insult levied at Neapolitans and, also, to suggest that an interpretative key might lie in the vitality of contrasts Naples appeared to represent. Tutini composed­ lists of flora and fauna, places, monuments, professions, and his­ torical details in defense of his maligned city.31 His inventory of  local particulars spoke to the close association with the natural world that was strongly felt in Italy, as well as elsewhere in Europe. Europeans in general were quick to equate Italy with natural beauty well before the modern period, holding that beauty up as a counterpoint to the peninsula’s political backwardness and chaos. “Italy is nature’s masterpiece” wrote one Swedish contemporary

10  Introduction

of  Tutini.32 Naples in particular, however, elicited a strong dichotomy between nature’s endowment and the state of its inhabitants and kingdom. Vesuvius would become, over the seventeenth century, the principal feature of the Neapolitan landscape, malleable to these representations. The vocabulary that linked nature to the traits of Naples had its origin considerably before Tutini’s formulation of it. Something of an original polemic was already present, for example, in the work by the Pesarese humanist Pandolfo Collenucio (1444–1504) titled Compendio dell’historie del Regno di Napoli, later heavily critiqued by emendators who saw it as the labor of a hostile foreigner perpetuating false commonplaces. Written ostensibly for Ercole d’Este (1471–1505), who had been educated in the Neapolitan court, it was an ambitious and ranging effort to recount the city’s past from antiquity through the Aragonese period. Collenucio revealed, however, considerable hostility toward Neapolitans and generally decried the city’s immense misfortunes. “I say, therefore, that the upheavals of state and the changing governments in no part of Italy today are seen as they are in the beautiful Kingdom of  Naples,” he wrote, voicing the sentiment as an apparent consensus among fifteenthcentury­ Italians.33 Collenucio argued that this severe judgment had already been passed by ancient historians—a considerable distortion, and something of an inversion of the traditional strands of antiquarian and humanist interest in the South. For the Pesarese humanist, there was a kind of quality proper to Campania itself, as if transmitted atavically to a succession of unruly generations. Citing the ancient geographer Strabo’s description of the volcanic Campi Flegrei region west of Naples—subject to eruptions and earthquakes—Collenucio noted that the geographer had stated “that country has a propensity to shift, and start wars.” On the basis of such classical sources, the Compendio established a relentlessly grim assessment: “Elsewhere, he [Livy] says, perfidy is proper and natural among those of Campania.”34 Rebellion was rooted in the soil. If not yet “Vesuvian” in the fashion intended after the seventeenth century, the association between the Neapolitan character and the landscape itself had these antecedents. Collenuccio was among the earliest humanists to attempt a comprehensive history of Naples, an effort that had made him acutely aware of how difficult it was to assemble the fragmentary past of a city that had experienced a succession of foreign conquests. Neapolitan history was in shambles. “It does not even surprise me,” he explained, “if there is scarcely any record in the chronicles, or in proper annals by the men of that Kingdom, considering all that has transpired as a result of the continuous upheavals, exiles and inquietude of

Vesuvius in the View South  11

men, who never had the leisure to write books.” Any such efforts, he added, eventually would have succumbed since, “if any histories had been written, it is easy to see that they would have been extinguished by eruptions and the pillaging of other nations.”35 Collenucio’s compendium had a life beyond its original drafting, and it was in the ensuing superimposition of commentary that more explicit polemic about the nature of Naples developed. Printed versions of Collenucio’s work, like the edition published in Venice in 1552 with the commentary of the mercurial humanist and professor of secrets Girolamo Ruscelli, impugned the original author’s pejorative assessment, even while admiring the breadth of the work. Native of the Papal States, Ruscelli had served in Naples during the Spanish viceroyalty of Pedro Toledo—but it seems that the intellectual circle dedicated to investigating nature he led in Salerno was tied to the political machinations of the powerful Neapolitan nobleman Alfonso d’Avalos. The political shape of the Italian peninsula had been transformed in the half century since Collenucio’s death, so Ruscelli could reflect on momentous political changes. Naples was, by the end of Toledo’s long tenure as a viceroy in 1552, firmly within the Spanish imperial system. Ruscelli’s closest ties, however, were to Neapolitan nobles like d’Avalos, whose political aspirations and religious leanings were highly suspect to the Spanish.36 In his Brieve discorso, which he appended to the history, Ruscelli wrote with subtle double entendre that “I wanted to explain that Collenucio had made it his particular quest in this work to call Neapolitans rebels, and an unfaithful and unstable nation. He is greatly mistaken and speaks either out of great resentment, or little care.”37 Collenucio had been careless in distinguishing important details, Ruscelli argued, not least in failing to note the distinction between the loyalty shown by the Neapolitan baronage and the fecklessness of the popolazzo sempre vile, “the ever vile mob.”38 Ruscelli also defined the other side of the dichotomy, appealing to the landscape that made Naples a natural “Paradise.”39 In a seminal essay written in the 1920s, Benedetto Croce remarked that “it is a proverb that now has no more currency, but for centuries did, thus: that Naples was a Paradise inhabited by devils.”40 Croce went on to trace the origins of this famous stereotype as far back as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when it was fashioned by Italians from the prosperous city states in northern and central Italy. Florentines and Pisans, as well as Venetians and Genoese all established a considerable presence in Naples in the 1300s. Although the natural setting was appreciated, the perceptions other Italians had of the Kingdom

12  Introduction

of Naples tended to be far less generous. For Croce, there had been a kernel of truth to the nascent stereotype in the fourteenth century, as the ruling Anjou dynasty was wracked by internecine conflicts and a restive Neapolitan baronage. “Nor was there reason in the following centuries to let it fall into disuse,” he wrote regarding the stereotype, “since the brigandage and violence of the urban plebs, the tumults and persistent loutishness, bad costume, poverty, absence of industry and industrious habits endowed it again and again with content.” Croce spoke as a southerner, however, solidly rejecting the determinism that had led both local and foreign authors to tie Neapolitans to some natural condition: “intended literally, the enunciation of a total and natural condition of stultified meanness was in itself absurd.”41 What I take from Collenuccio’s and Croce’s distant reflections is the historical persistence of a perception about the character of southern Italy. Naples was not singularly representative of the South, of course. The South—as an Italian national question, as well as a historical, political, and sociological construct—did not exist in Collenuccio’s time. This construct acquired its distinctly modern significance largely after Italian unification was completed piecemeal through 1871.42 Concepts of the South in early modern Italy were, in contrast, rather more fluid and unfixed. It especially would be a mistake to see any immediate reflection of the marginality of Naples on the political map. The Papal States, Florence, Venice, and Genoa were themselves diminished states, while a cluster of even smaller polities survived thanks mostly to their insignificance. Naples was by far and away the largest city on the peninsula by 1600, a vibrant center of baroque culture, and its large kingdom was crucial to the Spanish imperial system in Italy.43 It was the “jewel of the Spanish Crown” throughout much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, although the last decades of the 1600s also saw Naples track with the considerable retreat of Habsburg influence and power.44 I do not intend to recount a story of cultural declension and decline, however. Perhaps the most apt characterization of Neapolitan humanism ever since its Renaissance origins is that its exponents “refracted their Neapolitan experience and blended it with cosmopolitan interests of Quattrocento Italy in such a way as to make an enduring contribution to the culture of Renaissance humanism in general.”45 Throughout Italy humanists developed the heritage of Petrarch and other seminal authors such as Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni. Distinctive adaptations were particular to the movements that occurred in different cities. With respect to the traditional centers of the Renaissance—aristocratic Venice, mercantile Florence, and curial Rome—Neapolitan humanism developed late. Arguably, the constant upheavals of late

Vesuvius in the View South  13

fourteenth-century and early fifteenth-century Naples were the cause of this delay; only with the consolidation of Aragonese rule with the entry of Alfonso the Magnanimous into the city in 1443 did favorable conditions emerge for a sustained flowering of cultural talent around a powerful court. When this occurred, Naples became a significant cultural center of the Italian Renaissance.46 Quite convincingly, I think, erudite Neapolitan views of Vesuvius that emerged especially in the seventeenth century show the long reach of humanism, especially with respect to philology, historical writing, and the literary celebration of landscape. The courtier humanist Loise de Rosa had begun to assemble these tropes in his chronicle of his city written in the 1470s, and it became a standard of humanistic paeans.47 But the native claim that Naples was exceptional because of its setting was not simply a derivative repetition by the 1600s. Fundamentally, the scientific appreciation of the volcano that flowered in seventeenth-century Neapolitan culture cannot be divorced from humanism and its modes of cultural expression. Older forms of appreciation merged with and created others. The relationship between place and native cultural expression lies at the center of the book, but the inputs of external curiosity also figure large. This is for a distinct reason. Later travelers’ views of southern Italy understandably focused on the exoticism of Naples and its environs because both could be reached with relative ease from Rome and because these were the most immediate places of encounter with the South’s history, peoples, and settings. With Naples as a very close departure point, a succession of visitors began to experience Vesuvius. The crater itself—the destination of every desiring climber—was a close point of encounter with the exoticism of the South, but the urban vantage point from Naples acted as the gateway. So, one experience filtered the other. A historian who has studied the formation of stereotypes regarding southern Italy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries describes the view south as the “View from Vesuvius.”48 I intend to examine the view of  Vesuvius especially and, with that, follow how the volcano was made into a metonym of the Italian South. To the extent that my interpretation assembles an argument about a unique relationship between erudite modes of appreciating Vesuvius and its physical proximity to the city, I have become conscious of the ways in which highlighting particularities can also magnify seeing Naples as entirely Italian, and not determinedly southern and exotic. The salient commonality lies in how the physical environments of cities throughout the peninsula were figured by the rhetoric of particular civic cultures. For instance, Karl Appuhn describes “the Venetian view of nature as a fragile but fertile provider whose best works

14  Introduction

required attentive preservation by the state.”49 Like Naples, Venice was also a city for which the environment—its lagoon but, as Apphun shows, also its forest resources on the terraferma—meant a necessary material reality and a represented thing as well. Volcano watchers in Naples elected not to privilege the notion that the eruptions they witnessed could in any real and effective way be managed. They refined instead their practices of sight in the face of what seemed to them overwhelming force. Watching created particular forms of discernment. One intuition of significant scientific importance was a bourgeoning understanding of volcanic periodicity. The historical arts cultivated by humanism guided observers to situate their empirical observations as a chronicle of past, present, and future activity. From such diachronic thought the first sustained attempts to understand the concealed causes of eruptivity took shape. Despite the development of unique forms of native perception, it must be stressed that literate and learned Neapolitan observers expressed modes of appreciation that identify the city’s intellectuals as fully situated within a common Italian humanistic and scientific culture. One might even venture to say that the explosion of description that accompanied the first eruption of the seventeenth century gave Neapolitan humanism a new lease on life. Eruptions became occasions to describe, chronicle, historicize, and reflect on the urban body politic, as well as to investigate the concealed workings of a volcano.

geology and place All volcanoes are extraordinary landscapes. For all the danger they pose around the world, geologists understand them to regulate the carbon cycle that makes this planet a home for living things. They are like great engines driving the world’s vitality. In the late eighteenth century, the Scottish geologist James Hutton envisioned the mechanisms of an endless geological cycle—extrusion and erosion—as partly driven by the earth’s vast inner fires. The intuition was centuries old, even by Hutton’s day, although a clear awareness of tectonic movement only emerged in the 1960s. Today, understanding of volcanism stresses its interconnectedness to the inner economy of the earth. The volcano of textbook diagrams rests above a tectonic subduction zone, showing in section the collision of heavy oceanic plate and the lighter continental mass. Volcanoes sit above the diving oceanic mass, as the latter breaks apart in an explosive mixture of molten rock. This magma in turn works its way upward toward the cone.50

Vesuvius in the View South  15

Schemata of this sort reflect a modern appreciation of  how inextricably connected volcanoes are to the basic processes that shape the physical structure of the earth and the movement of the continents. These telluric forces are made visible to us by the spectacle of eruption, as in the words of a modern explorer on today’s newly rising Mount Krakatoa: “All this talk of subduction zones, of the collisions between two of the world’s immense tectonic plates, of the unfolding of the ring of fire—it all came down to this. Here, in this hot, crystalline, yellow-gray, wheezing, whistling, mud-boiling cauldron, was where the consequences of subduction were being played out.”51 Krakatoa is infamous for one of the largest eruptions recorded in human history, a cataclysm of immense proportions that vaporized an island archipelago and killed forty thousand people in August 1883. A new cone rose from the sea decades after old Krakatoa blew itself apart. The life cycle of many volcanoes is violent obliteration, followed by rebuilding and the return of life. Mount Vesuvius is among the most dangerous volcanoes in the world. Powerful and vastly explosive, it broods for centuries, only to suddenly demolish itself and its surroundings with unimaginable force. On various occasions in the past it has risen again, in fits and starts, through the accretion of new flows and clasts to form a new mountain. Vesuvius broke a long silence in relatively recent times by erupting frequently between 1631 and 1944. It then went quiet again.52 It is now one of the most closely monitored volcanoes on Earth, showing little sign of the power pent up miles deep. Such forces are easily forgotten, and over the last sixty odd years the sprawling suburbs of Naples have crept up its flanks. Meanwhile, lava flows half a century old have begun to break down, eventually to become the soil of new orchards and vineyards. Nearly a million people live within minutes of incandescent base surges of ash that travel at hundreds of miles an hour.53 It will erupt again eventually, with the violence seen in the past. The most violent eruption in human memory occurred in the first century AD, when a great cataclysm destroyed the Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum.54 The Italian authorities’ recent expansion of the Red Zone—where near complete destruction and high loss of life are expected—now stretches well into the modern suburbs of Naples. A great disaster also occurred in 1631, though this eruption is much less well-known. The first great eruption of modern times was an episode that made news across not only Italy but all of Europe, and the Mediterranean as well. By that time, there already existed a humanistic recognition of Vesuvius as a historical landscape; the volcano was like an archive of the past. This measure of appreciation was a creation of the Renaissance, when the aesthetic

16  Introduction

and historical interests of humanists led them toward all kinds of landscapes in Italy. These places bore the meaning of an idealized history.55 The eruption of 1631 generated curious, fearful, appreciative, and patriotic responses that evidence many features of Neapolitan literate culture in the period. Different and competing interpretations worked to give the volcano much of its symbolic charge as the castigator of impiety and political tyranny in Naples. On the crest of other equally rooted sensibilities, however, it also became an object of spectacle and scientific curiosity.56 If many early modern observers attached moral, religious, and even political meanings to the volcano’s eruptions, they often did so through a fundamental interest in the natural processes volcanism manifested to them. Volcanic phenomena—lava, eruptive clouds, pyroclastic flows, and lahar— found a place in the traditions of natural history that had flowered in the later phases of the Renaissance, as clusters of naturalists throughout Europe ventured into fields, forests, and slopes collecting all manner of natural things.57 Vesuvius was an important place to find the floral and mineral specimens early modern naturalists collected, for instance. Beyond that, eruptions generated questions pertinent to an even higher order of knowledge concerned with causes in nature: natural philosophy. Why did volcanoes erupt? Traditional Aristotelian natural philosophy gave a resilient if vague answer to this vexing question, even when the relative novelty of observed volcanic phenomena offered a wealth of new experiences. Most important, the view that volcanoes were sui generis terrestrial features came to rest on a new empirical foundation, especially as reports of similar phenomena frequently returned from other corners­ of the world. Volcanism was increasingly understood as manifesting the earth’s inner economy, in no small measure because European culture in general directed its attention to the globe.58 I have only attempted to recover learned modes of understanding discernible through print and manuscript sources. Admittedly, erudite attention to the volcano was only one dimension of native or local knowledge, but it was the most influential and conversant with broader European views. Because of this significance, I will advance a few particular claims. One is that modern volcanology began to develop in seventeenth-century Naples from roots within the city’s humanistic and historical culture, and in step with the eruptions of Vesuvius. A related claim is that the Vesuvian landscape was the object of metonymy by both Neapolitans and by outsiders, through a process of cultural representation that would in time make the volcano a signifier of Italy’s South. Because of these arguments, the evidence and interpretation assembled stress the cultural viewpoints of human historical actors. But I see this cultural history as

Vesuvius in the View South  17

related to particular differences in landscape. I hope that my interpretation sits somewhere on a continuum between privileging only cultural discursiveness and attributing essential historical traction to landscape. Human describers could have made any number of choices in portraying Vesuvius, but scientific and historical attention to eruptivity would not have taken meaningful shape without the phenomenon itself. There are many precedents for thinking about nature’s traction on human culture, but I am especially indebted to some. In the last century, the geographer and historian Clarence Glacken wrote a monumental survey of Western ideas of nature, Traces on the Rhodian Shore. Glacken’s travels throughout the world led him to reflect on how natural environments were dialectically engaged with human cultures. He examined the history of environmental theories that had sought to explain the effect of “airs, waters, places” on the physical and cultural characteristics of human civilization.59 Glacken’s intuition and deeper sensibility toward the ways nature and culture speak sprang from his ranging travels in the late 1930s. Everywhere, whether among the shepherds of the Caucasus or boatmen on the Yangtze, he found a common strand running through a kaleidoscopic range of experiences. Human beings developed affinity and understanding with the natural environments in which they resided, and that influence was translated into cultures. “One is continually asking questions about the circumstances which stimulate human creativity, about the effect of religious belief, about the custom and tradition men have soaked into their soils,” he wrote. He continued, “Although I have used abstract words like ‘man’ and ‘nature’ as a convenience, it is really human culture, natural history, and relief of the land that I mean. Phrases like ‘man and nature’ are useful as titles, as shorthand to express far more complex sets of ideas.”60 Glacken saw how customs and traditions bear the signature of place. Fernand Braudel’s two masterpieces, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949) and the posthumously published Memory and the Mediterranean (2001) reflect a similar perception. Braudel thought of Mediterranean civilization in its full breadth and long expanse of time as having been shaped by topography, climate, and millennia of human interaction with the environment. The sea and the mountains generated by the forces that drive the movement of the Eurasian, African, and Anatolian plates were the deep backdrop to Mediterranean history.61 Braudel wrote in the opening of Memory and the Mediterranean that the landscape “patiently recreates for us scenes of the past, breathing new life into them, locating them under a sky and landscape that we can see with our own eyes, a landscape and sky like those of long ago.”62 Braudel’s historical Mediterranean arguably no longer

18  Introduction

exists—the sea has forever changed, the shores have been despoiled, centuries of human history have transpired. One value of his construct, however, lies in how it registers long resonances but leaves space for the contingency of events as well. I have attempted nothing so sweeping as Glacken or Braudel’s thinking, but I do find their long views significant, at least as a way of gesturing to a larger scale. This is to say that I have sought to interpret Vesuvius as something more than a construct fashioned entirely by culture.63 I recognize that landscapes are the invention of human ideas. Neapolitans, for sure, deployed various and sometimes competing strategies in their depiction of the volcano—these were choices of human historical actors in the face of extraordinarily powerful natural events. Scientific observers privileged certain perceptions built around curiosity and historical erudition, for example, but that was not necessarily the perception of a large urban citizenry unequipped with the learned notions of elites. Neapolitan urban chroniclers often manifested explicitly contrasting intentions when it came to using landscape metonymies to figure the body politic. Ultimately, if cultural narratives did not exist divorced from the materiality of the volcano and what it did, it is human expression that the historian can recover and interpret. Seeing the historical contingency of Vesuvius’s 1631 eruption establishes a middle ground between granting the volcano direct historical agency on the one hand and disregarding its force on the other. The learned observers whose thoughts and utterances survived recorded what they saw through the election of individual and cultural proclivities. Because established currents in Neapolitan culture directed these observers toward historical and naturalistic interpretation, they developed a rather distinct tradition of natural history observation. In a sense, then, one place to locate the origins of modern volcanology is in the historical confluence of Neapolitan humanism and the eruptive cycle Vesuvius began in the 1600s.64 The visible emergence of a new tradition of volcano science was the creation of different strands actively brought together by human observers, and as such its history can also be a view of a larger set of environmental attitudes in the seventeenth century. Both the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution have been associated with “a decisive alienation from nature” in the Western mind.65 I am skeptical, fundamentally, whether starkly delineated arguments that identify humanistic anthropocentrism and scientific mechanistic visions of nature as clean paradigms can capture the full extent of even just learned perceptions of the environment in seventeenth-century Naples, let alone the sentiments of peasants and shepherds I have only vaguely discerned. Many nuances, such

Vesuvius in the View South  19

as the ways in which apparently remote philosophical and epistemological views also underscored environmental sensibilities, are elided when a single normative view is deployed. Such ignorance is especially the case when one postulates a definitive rupture between a world of organic sensibilities and one of empirical scrutiny and technical mastery. Neapolitan accounts of Vesuvius can be read in more complicated ways, I think, and perhaps it is exactly their marginality to traditional histories of geology and volcanology that makes them interesting to environmental history as well. Only superficially do the sources merit classification as reflecting ideas of nature before the putative secularization and disenchantment of nature.66 Much of my interpretation explains that scientific discursiveness about volcanism developed in Naples in relation to historical and religious ideas that were part of the Western heritage of thinking about nature. At least in my reading of this material, stark contrasts between a reverent view of nature and the coldly modern gaze of the Scientific Revolution are not a convincing interpretative key.

a nat u r a l h i sto ry t r a d i t i o n The aesthetic appreciation of Vesuvius, and fundamentally the historical and scientific inquiry that sustained that appreciation, can easily seem the creation of northern Europeans who traveled to Naples during the centuries of the Grand Tour, intent on experiencing an exotic Italian South. 67 Such accounts have left modern historians with the impression that travelers from England and France introduced volcanology to Vesuvius—a story of scientific culture transported.68 Neapolitan sources show, however, that a tradition of exploration tied to humanism and natural history had begun to shape the mountain’s cultural significance since the Renaissance. By the end of the seventeenth century, a cosmopolitan European audience trusted the ability of observers in Naples to report scientifically on new eruptions. Many excursionists subsequently journeyed south to have their own encounters, having learned previously of eruptive phenomena. The pattern of inquiry that took the raw empiricism of volcano watching and philosophized it—natural history serving as the foundation of natural philosophical explanation—affords a unique view into early modern science. Notably, it is possible to see how humanism played a vital role in the development of early volcanology. In order to explain the causes and effects of an eruption, observers had first to accurately, credibly, and persuasively narrate its occurrence. Empiricism, rhetorical persuasion, and natural philosophy could not be unbound. Framed this way, chronicles of eruptions demonstrate

20  Introduction

Neapolitan humanism’s vitality in the seventeenth century. They also confirm that historians of early modern Italy would do well to think about how Naples matched the peninsula’s broader cultural developments. A perspective emerges for seeing the early modern city. It is very much the case that Naples shared features of religious, civic, and cultural life with the major Italian cities of the period. Its distinctive elements, like its monarchical traditions, or its complex synthesis of foreign influences, were part of the many “Italies” that existed in the early modern period. Neapolitan civic life offers the most compelling case for integrating Naples into a fuller picture of the peninsula’s urbanity. John Marino writes that “the unique contexts of this commonality of practices, the particulars of local topography and historiography and the contingent interplay of castes and classes reveal configurations and characteristics of infinite variety in local stories worth telling and retelling.”69 Marino’s is an especially instructive point. One might register the particulars of a place, examine them in detail, but not necessarily make them determinants of an exclusive strangeness. A cultural history of Vesuvius that examines its aesthetic, historical, and especially scientific significance can track similar coordinates.­ Examining the development of the volcano as an object of science only partly illuminates a larger phenomenon, but it does so in interesting ways. In terms of the characterization of Naples as marginal and backward, the dichotomies that pulled differently on the representation of the city inclined strongly toward exoticism by the end of the early modern period. Though magnified, the extremes that underscored the perception of Neapolitan difference had had ample life by the eighteenth century. Renaissance histories and chorographies previously portrayed the city as gifted by nature, but also as unusually disturbed by rebellion and natural disasters. Vesuvius conveyed the ambivalence of Naples after 1631. No major Italian city expressed a vision of nature so subject to the enormous physical force of a single thing. Seventeenth-century­ historical and scientific observers saw the latency and activity of Vesuvius and, thus, shifted a Renaissance Arcadian vision to something else. Views were transmuted yet again by the European gaze in the age of the Grand Tour, when the seeming alternation of indolence and explosiveness of the local character appeared to mimic the volcano. Ultimately, science created the picturesque explosiveness of Naples because modes of natural inquiry also spoke to historical, travel, and ethnographic perception. Geology has a few stories to tell. I believe that the association of Vesuvius and Naples that developed after the Renaissance can at least show a slice of how cultural views of the South began to track in particular ways at the beginning of the modern period. By

Vesuvius in the View South  21

examining science in light of the better-known foreign perception of Naples, I hope to show that the creation of Vesuvius as a cosmopolitan object is a story not unrelated to that of the portrayal of southern Italy as exotic. There is, as noted above, a tail to what is partly an argument about the “Italianness” of Naples in the early modern period. There were also ways in which eruptions had a peculiar force on Naples, a kind of capacity that was sensed by foreigners and locals alike, and I am not inclined to dismiss its significance. Descriptions of the Vesuvian landscape show how nature served differing rhetorical purposes, but the metonymical uses of nature in this instance cannot be unbound from the live force of the volcano. Therefore, the way landscape was made to do the work of representing Naples is only part of the story. Vesuvius also stirred the conditions of its own representation. It did so by erupting, in the moments and in the ways it did, when it could in human and historical terms just as easily have done nothing. Volcanic eruptions, even small ones, are grand powerful things. Volcanoes are notorious for misleading people, enacting deception through silence. Unexpected paroxysms like the one of 1631 are tragic for that reason, and the cultural resonances can be enduring. It should be noted that historians have shown that geological sciences underwent considerable development in seventeenth-century Italy. This was a recognition that the enormously influential nineteenth-century geologist Charles Lyell was happy to bestow on his Italian predecessors.70 My principal intention is to untangle something of the meaning of such science beyond strictly epistemological concerns and expressly to link aspects of urban and local identity to them. I have not written a history of geological thinking per se. Those dimensions have received excellent treatment elsewhere.71 Mostly, I have sought to understand how scientific approaches to Vesuvius might be viewed through a local lens, one that highlights how Neapolitan culture constituted an emergent appreciation—through its anxieties, but especially through its sophisticated humanistic and scientific traditions. It is worth being blunt about one thing: the bulk of the sources I examine have not had much of a place in historians’ understanding of Italian science in the seventeenth century. History has not been kind to such works as Fran­ cesco Ceraso’s L’opre stupende e maravigliosi eccessi della natura prodotti nel Monte Vesuvio di Napoli (1632)—despite the dazzling title.72 The many things that conspired to exclude such works from subsequent consideration—such as the clerical origin of many of the early works on the volcano—did not mean that they were irrelevant to the history of science. In fact, they were the first sustained efforts to explain a natural phenomenon very few European naturalists ever had observed up close. On this matter, my argument reflects

22  Introduction

disagreement with some who have written on the history of volcanology. The world-renowned modern volcanologist Haraldur Sigurdsson has concluded, for example, that “it is remarkable that the cataclysmic eruption of Vesuvius in 1631 had little or no impact on the development of ideas regarding the origins of volcanoes or their inner workings. Contemporary natural philosophers made little mention of the event, nor did they discuss the unusual effects of the eruption on the surrounding area.”73 Such a conclusion, however, merits revisiting. In fact, the disregard for what constituted a significant body of published and unpublished accounts may have more to do with a lack of precision regarding the categories of early modern natural knowledge than anything else. For example, Galileo never replied to the letter querying him about the eruption of 1631, although he received news of it not long after its occurrence,  just as he was preparing the final iterations of the Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo.74 Admittedly, that reads as evidence that even a wild eruption of Vesuvius­ could not generate serious interest. The Copernican astronomical controversy of those years occupied a central place in Italian science, after all. The most pressing concerns in natural philosophy, the highest branch of science and traditionally the handmaiden to theology, were elsewhere, such as astronomy and physics. Despite their novelty, the observed effects of volcanism did not immediately rupture the canon of Aristotelian natural philosophy—less polemic, less profile, perhaps. Undoubtedly, the controversies that emerged as the earth was disengaged from ancient cosmology and became the object of increasing study posed serious questions, but these took time to emerge.75 There were nonetheless noteworthy attempts to explain and describe the eruption of 1631, as well as the eruptions that ensued in following decades. Very few accounts have drawn the sustained interest of historians. An important example is that by Pietro Castelli (1574–1662), Dell’incendio del Monte Vesuvio (1632). Early in his career, Castelli was a professor of medicine, anatomy, and botany in Rome. He eventually moved to Messina in Sicily to found a renowned botanical garden.76 In the first weeks of 1632, while still in Rome, he set aside voluminous drafts of an unpublished study of insects to spend a few sleepless weeks hurriedly drafting a treatise on the volcano. 77 Unable to see Vesuvius, he relied on a local Neapolitan observer and a specially devised questionnaire to gather observations—a resourceful technique for someone who had established a reputation for meticulous firsthand observation, but perfectly consonant with the strategies early modern naturalists employed to understand nature.78 His skills drew the appreciation of baroque Rome’s Maeceneas, Cassiano dal Pozzo, for whom he eventually published a comparative

Vesuvius in the View South  23

anatomical study of the Old World civets and New World coatis titled Hyaena odorifera (1638).79 Once in Sicily, Castelli continued to study volcanoes and became an authority on the matter. Castelli’s ranging studies often included natural history, a fully formed branch of natural knowledge by his day. The science had emerged as a distinct discipline during the sixteenth century, undergoing a gradual evolution that saw it fold in new practices, expand its concerns, and assume an unprecedented measure of epistemological precision and professional status.80 The techniques of observation, collection, taxonomic classification and description developed by Renaissance naturalists such as Carolus Clusius (1526–1609) and Andrea Cesalpino (1519–1603)—Castelli’s teacher—were a crucial inheritance of later practitioners of various sciences like botany, zoology, and geology, who inherited them as part of a continuously existing community of practitioners.81 Castelli’s example is broadly instructive of the fact that volcanoes eluded easy definition in the 1600s, despite the intense discovery of them in that century. They were objects of science somewhere on the border between natural philosophy, which explained the causes of natural phenomena, and natural history, which was the science concerned with description of natural things. Volcanic terrain must have generated, in this respect, both considerable confusion and possibility. Eruptivity could be theorized within the normal Aristotelian universe, just like weather and earthquakes, but the spectacle of it also spilled out the kind of time- and place-bound particulars Renaissance epistemologies were equipped to discern. What shape did the different clasts have? How far were they ejected? When? How did the lava flow? What was its composition? These questions were the domain of natural history. One example illustrates clearly the “in-between” nature of Vesuvius. Near the end of the seventeenth century, two Florentines, Francesco and Alessandro Marucelli, began to compile a vast multivolume bibliography with thousands of entries. Titled the Mare Magnum for its nearly oceanic expanse, the manuscript eventually grew to 111 volumes that spanned the vast range of topics studied by scholars. It included forty-three broad subject classes ranging from the Bible, theology, heresy, grammar and rhetoric, canon law, world history, and geography, to medicine, natural philosophy, and natural history. Vesuvius fell under the classification of Historia Naturalis, next to the entries de vespis and de vinaceis—it was sandwiched between wasp and grape.82 The earliest tradition of scientific description of Vesuvius occupied the category of natural history, like the studies of insects, plants, and animals Castelli conducted throughout his long career in Rome and southern Italy.

24  Introduction

The voluminous Mare Magnum evidences something of history’s vicissitudes and chance as well. One of the works listed in the “de Vesuvio” entry was Gaspare Paragallo’s Istoria naturale del monte Vesuvio divisata in due libri (1703), a work at once exemplary of a local school of natural history and at the same time evidence of the relative oblivion into which this tradition fell in a subsequent period. Alongside it, however, was another work whose destiny was considerably less obscure. It was Louis Moreri’s Grand dictionnaire historique, first published in one folio volume in 1674. Twenty editions later— 1759—it had became a collection of ten volumes, all written by a collaboration of new authors. Updated and amended by a small host of scholars, it crossed the divide into the nineteenth century. Strikingly, a bibliographic reference to the work in 1862 dubbed it as “still possessed of a considerable degree of utility, and deserves a place in all libraries of any consequence.”83 By that time, the revolutionary Simón Bolívar had climbed Vesuvius with the explorer Alexander von Humboldt, Ralph Waldo Emerson kept a print of the volcano in his house—having climbed it too—and Emily Dickinson would pen the words “Am I inclined to climb / A Crater I may contemplate / Vesuvius at Home.”84 The volcano embodied vastly cosmopolitan ideals, as the traction it had on these figures suggests. It was a multivalent icon: an icon of the fires of revolution in an imperial world, of the cosmic mystery of nature, and even of the scorching heat of an examined life. This rich significance grew from antecedent. The story of the volcano’s modern discovery began in earnest in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and that is where the next chapter begins—with the approach to the two faces of Vesuvius in Renaissance and baroque Naples.

chapter 1

Approaches: Humanists, Naturalists, and Vesuvius in the Late Renaissance

In the spring of 1638, Athanasius Kircher peered down into the crater of Mount Vesuvius. He had scrambled up through the night, past forest and dense scrub, fighting for purchase on the loose volcanic scree in the final stretch to the summit. The Jesuit polymath possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of the natural world that ranged from the smallest order of creation to a universe still unsettled by the decades of Galileo Galilei’s astronomical controversy. From the crater, shielding his face and staring into the maw of battling elements, he intuited that he stood at one of the vital nodes of the world-machine. The scalding life blood of the earth pulsed beneath him. Powerful tremors influenced his understanding of the subterranean world, convincing him that changes on the surface derived from the deep core. He also contemplated how they foreshadowed the end of all things in a catastrophe of fire.1 Four thousand feet below, along the angling slopes, and just a few miles away lay Naples and its surrounding hamlets. Its inhabitants had been the first to feel the volcano’s ferocious eruption less than a decade earlier. Kircher had seen destruction before. A refugee from the Thirty Years’ War, he had arrived in Rome in 1634 during an especially brutal phase of that conflict, bearing a few manuscripts, instruments, and letters of recommendation.2 Galileo’s condemnation was a recent affair, but the new arrival’s enormous knowledge and sense of the theatrical rapidly propelled him from obscurity into the limelight of baroque Rome. A few years later, he undertook a journey off the southwest coast of Italy to Malta as personal confessor to Cardinal Frederich Hessen-Darmstadt. It was an illustrious posting with unique rewards for a student of nature, as the return from Malta occasioned dramatic

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stops in various­ parts of the Mediterranean. On his return, Kircher observed Mount Etna’s lava flows, sailed through the swirling pools of Scylla and Charyb­ dis between Sicily and the mainland, and felt the hot breath of Aeolus off Stromboli. On March 27, he landed on the shore of Calabria after a devastating earthquake. His ascent of Vesuvius just a few miles from Naples, however, left him with an indelible impression of the forces at work within the earth.3 Kircher’s account of the climb prefaced his great tome on the subterranean world, the Mundus subterraneus, in which he visualized volcanoes as the venting spiracles of a burning-core earth. Nature was a theater and Vesuvius a stage. At least since the Renaissance, explorers on similar historical and scientific pilgrimages took to the volcano’s slopes, and they had also explored the Campi Flegrei caldera that flanked Naples to the west. Kircher ascended Vesuvius via a route humanists and naturalists had taken up the mountain for nearly a century and half—and these tracks bore the deeper-yet imprint of woodsmen and shepherds who had used the slopes for much longer than that. The volcano had erupted fiercely in December 1631, just seven years before the Jesuit reached the crater with a local guide, occasioning a burst of descriptive literature that combined historical, chorographic, religious, and scientific themes. While it is hardly possible to see all the precedents of a later appreciation, there is strong evidence of the ways in which one of the world’s most unusual natural and urban relationships began to acquire a distinct significance in the late Renaissance. The immediate precedents were fashioned in a period of deceptive stillness. For nearly five centuries before Kircher’s climb, the great hollow of the crater had been a silent woody place. Humanists who described their climbs were already making their way up in the early 1500s, searching for Arcadian pastoral and agricultural landscapes of the sort idealized by the Greek lyric poet Theocritus and, later, by the Roman poet Virgil.4 The mountain was forested in places, heavily cultivated on its more gentle slopes, and shading to barren near the summit. Parts were wooded much like Mount Amiata, the extinct Tuscan volcano the humanist pope Pius II lovingly described in his Commentaries. Pius had tramped about Amiata in the fifteenth century, looking for shade and elevation on hot summer days.5 The Campanian volcano exerted a similar gentle attraction, drawing a smattering of humanists, artists, and naturalists. Aware of the ancient eruption that had buried Pompeii and Herculaneum, early explorers also expressed a marked interest in the volcano’s natural features and collected from the botanical richness they found on the slopes. Apothe­caries climbed to collect plants by the early 1600s, for example, manifesting pat-

Approaches  27

terns emerging elsewhere in Europe.6 Humanism underscored a developing appreciation. First, of the thing itself: what was a volcano theoretically to Renaissance observers? What was Vesuvius as a historic place explored by humanists? Even before the great eruption of the seventeenth century, observers intuited the dialectic of laxity and force that makes a volcano significant to human culture. They understood that dormancy was succeeded by paroxysm.7 Eruptive phenomena eluded easy categorization, on the other hand. Two elements of understanding, one of which was the appreciation of the place, and the other was the appreciation of eruptivity as a natural phenomenon, were not neatly gathered together. For the time being, in the analysis, these two elements walk apart.

places and theories Powerful organic analogies governed what had become, by the sixteenth century, a hybridized body of knowledge about volcanoes and eruptions. The world above—wind, weather, and ultimately the ascending progression upward through the celestial spheres, the firmament, and God—was inextricably tied to the one below, where the ever-corrupting, changing, decaying, and exhaling sublunary realm played out the flux and flow of fire, air, water, and earth. After the great awakening of learning that had occurred in European universities in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Arabic glosses of Aristotle and other Greek sources became crucial to thinking about the earth. Ristoro D’Arezzo’s Composizione del mondo manifested this medieval syncretism in the 1280s, for example.8 Drawing on revived traditions of alchemy and astrology, as well as from Aristotelian natural philosophy, D’Arezzo emphasized the cosmic and astral flux that, “according to reason, we find acting and working with its power above the earth and below it” and observed that “accidents generated from the Heavens with their power inside the body of the earth, and one of these is earthquakes.” Subterranean winds sought passage through the crust and, where impeded, tore it and shook it, much like an excess of wind in the body.9 It was commonly believed that combustible substances like sulfur fermented inside the earth, where they could be sparked into conflagration by intense wind. This was something like what occurred in miniature within the vasi of alchemists.10 Broadly speaking, this kind of composite of alchemy and Aristotelian natural philosophy proved malleable to the enterprise of emending and expanding natural knowledge launched by Renaissance naturalists.

28  Chapter 1

As in many other objects of natural inquiry, volcanoes could split authority and experience. While most naturalists relied on the gloss of ancient authorities to explain volcanism, they also showed the influence of empiricism and technical experience. The great tomes of Georg Agricola (1494–1555) on mining, metallurgy, and minerals, for example, evidenced an effort to generate a novel nomenclature commensurate with the vast complexity of the underground. Agricola achieved his ends through glosses of ancient sources, through correspondence, and through direct investigation, with the ultimate intention of endowing his science of the underground with elegance and precision.11 Readers of the preface to the De ortu et causis subterraneorum (1546) learned that Agricola imagined himself a lantern in the dark, illuminating the deep places of the world.12 Agricola’s dissatisfaction with where knowledge of subterranean things stood in his lifetime closely reflected a general attitude about the enterprise of emendation and elucidation Renaissance naturalists felt they had undertaken. Agricola was grateful for how Aristotle aided those who “today strive to reason scientifically,” but he felt less certainty and satisfaction about natural history, where messy abundance competed with established order. Evident was a broader dissatisfaction with the “more than millennial” gloss of ancient sources that was proving, up close, to have left great pockets of darkness.13 Agricola explained that: Because of those natured things that are brought forth within the Earth, I resolved­ to search widely, since it is not adverse to established reason that first the origin and cause of these same things be contemplated. But with what nature­ in the channels of the Earth—and indeed in withersoever interior fold and bosom—does she begat them, in places where by her force they erupt into the atmosphere as humors, air, vapor, and fire?14

Italy, it seemed to him, was especially volcanic.15 He mused about the terror sometimes endured by the inhabitants of such places, but he also confessed a naturalist’s true delight in knowing of the existence and location of such phenomena. The association between southern Italy and volcanism was already apparent. As he wrote the De ortu around 1544, Agricola cited the instance of two major eruptions in those recent years, news of which had reached him: Etna in 1540 and, two years before that, Monte Nuovo’s sudden rising amid the Campi Flegrei. He estimated that on both occasions the violent expulsion of subterranean winds had hurtled all manner of stuff—ash, pumice, stones, and

Approaches  29

boulders of a sulfurous or metallic nature—out of the ground. Agricola imagined the dangers of getting close to an erupting volcano, recalling Pietro Bembo’s fifteenth-century account of climbing Etna. Tantalized by that story, Agricola described Etna as “a lofty example” of volcanism.16 He had an even better sense of Vesuvius’s appearance, as he seems to have seen its summit.17 “He who climbs it must first, before he reaches the peak, make a path through three flat plains. Passing these and overcoming a precipitous rise he comes to the crater, which is wider and deeper than this recent one in Pozzuoli.”18 On a clear day, mused the German naturalist, the entire stretch of the surrounding territory lay before one’s eyes. The mountain itself only offered silence at that point: “Vesuvius burned often,” he noted, “but today no smoke comes out of this place.”19 Absent the observation of eruptions, however, Renaissance writers like Agricola found that their historical knowledge of volcanoes and their theoretical assumptions broke down after a certain point. However much he may have wished to amend the kind of vocabulary naturalists used to describe natural phenomena, the classification of volcanoes was one of historic places rather than eruptive phenomena.20 Fabrizio Padovani, an Italian doctor who practiced in Germany in the late fifteenth century, confronted a similar problem.21 Padovani’s Tractatus duo alter de ventis alter perbrevis de terraemotu (1601), printed in Bologna, was widely illustrated with wind roses, maps, and images of various technologies—things like bellows, tools, mills, foundries, and even a submarine. Unfortunately, though the depictions of the world’s winds were finely illustrated by engravings of a high quality, the treatise only went through a single printing, something that may have greatly lessened its impact. Because earthquakes were thought to occur as a result of subterranean winds, Padovani appended a treatment of the latter to the principal part of the work. Earthquakes, in turn, brought up the subject of volcanism. As was often the case with early modern natural knowledge, theory and practice came into conversation, so it is not surprising to find mechanical schemata replicating something of Padovani’s explanation of earthquakes and eruptions. For example, the book illustrated a fornax chymica (fig. 1.1)—“a chemical oven for casting metal with wind”—next to a system of surface bellows that could be used either to extract or inject air into pockets and spaces underground.22 Padovani imagined that such a contraption might serve the purposes of forging or melding of substances as well, since any system that concentrated and increased the flow of air would fuel fire and accelerate its combustion. He also included the possibility of generating something of a phreatic effect in which the coals of a furnace would gradually drop into a water catch below and, in

F I G U R E 1 . 1 . Illustration of a fornax chymica: “a chemical oven for casting metal with wind” from Fabrizio Padovani, Tractatus duo (Bologna, 1601). This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Approaches  31

so doing, generate powerful bursts of steam. The contraption was similar to how Padovani described earthquakes and eruptions elsewhere in the treatise.23 Technical schemata were strongly suggestive of these natural phenomena. Similarly to Agricola, Padovani saw volcanoes as geographical and historical toponyms. “This mountain snatched Pliny,” he wrote of Vesuvius. Using the examples of the Campi Flegrei, Vesuvius, Etna and the Aeolian Islands, Padovani argued that there were places where the hot press of subterranean winds and “matter” within the crust ignited fierce fires, to the point that “so much smoke and fire pours out that it combusts and destroys nearly everything around.” Padovani had an entire vocabulary for the features of such places: speluncis, antris, cloacis, et scrobibus (caves, caverns, sewers, and trenches). There were no observations to speak of, however. Regarding Vesuvius, for example, his description was quite vague: “A similar matter indeed comes out of that mountain in Italy known as Etna.”24 Padovani was more interested in earthquakes. He envisioned an early warning system and, also, categorized phenomena that were either concurrent with or subsequent to an earthquake, similarly to the typology of things seen before, during, and after an eruption that Vesuvius writers described three decades later. Earthquakes were more frequent than eruptions, and in this respect he was not lacking in a language of observation. 25 There was a marked sense in Padovani’s thinking that earthquakes and eruptions were generative of terrestrial landscapes. Might they shape the land, giving it rise and fall? Aristotle’s authority still appeared in many ways incontrovertible, but he had not seen or described everything. The dynamics of earthquakes and eruptions and the different things observed—ash, steam, pyroclasts—complicated the broadly tenable notions of traditional natural philosophy. Showing the sense of collaborative emendation naturalists envisioned, Padovani cited Agricola’s explanation of the vertical and lateral motion of quakes.26 The appeal to authority and the emphasis on empiricism were related features of inquiry and were the template for the traditions of description that developed for Vesuvius in the next century. Agricola and Padovani’s works suggest that Renaissance naturalists struggled to assemble the shards of evidence available into a coherent picture of eruption. For Padovani, as for Agricola, however, any theory came essentially from historical sources, so it is worth repeating that all forms of early geology­ expressed deep affinities with the study of history. Such evidence as these earlier sources could cite remained textual and based on the record of others, a smattering of ancient and medieval sources, but also included more contemporary accounts.27 In fact, the relationship between humanism and the

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developing­ appreciation of Vesuvius is evident around the same time, in another set of sources: chorographical texts describing the city and region. In the sixteenth century, artists and humanists were also developing an aesthetic, historical, and naturalistic appreciation for volcanism.

vo l ca n o e s u p c l o s e In the 1570s, the view of Naples and Vesuvius from the west might have appeared as the Dutch artist Joris Hoefnagel portrayed it, in what looked like a traveler’s first view of both from the crest of Cape Posillipo (fig. 1.2). The city’s stretch was partly visible in the distance as it extended along the horseshoe curve that reached beyond to Sorrento. Vesuvius’s rising pitch was roughly in the middle. Its two unmistakable peaks looked something like they do today. The northern one, slightly lower and left when seen from the city, was the caldera wall created in the gigantic eruption of 79 AD. It has withstood all the subsequent eruptions. Its ragged ridgeline is a monument to the enormous forces unleashed in the first century. The southern peak is the troubling one; it has something of the shape it had in the long dormancy preceding 1631.28 When Vesuvius erupts again, the crater will be destroyed—just as it was half a century after Hoefnagel saw it in the late 1500s. The engraver’s depiction of the Bay of Naples appeared in Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg’s atlas of urban and natural cityscapes, the Civitates orbis terrarum (1572–1618), although it was also printed as a separate sheet—image and descriptive text on the recto and verso respectively.29 The Dutch artist squared the viewer’s gaze on the volcano, with Naples only barely protruding from the tuck of the bay. Was he possibly acknowledging where his own eye had come to rest looking out from the promontory that rises west of the city? The perspective certainly simulated a traveler’s first full prospect of what lay ahead before approaching Naples—the tunnel visible to the left, for example, dated from the Roman republican period and was frequently mentioned in sources since the Middle Ages.30 The dark and dreary passage was still in use in the sixteenth century, crossing beneath the uneven terrain that separated this stretch of the coast from the city. Despite the seaside setting, Hoefnagel chose in this representation to privilege the appearance of the land. The foreign artist’s depiction resonated with a vision of the city already established in literature, the dulcem Parthenopen—“sweet Naples”—celebrated in poems of love, longing, friendship, and nature in the Bay of Naples by the Neapolitan humanist Giovanni Pontano (1429–1503).31 Pontano was one in a

Approaches  33

F I G U R E 1 . 2 . A view of Naples and Vesuvius from the west in the 1570s, as envisioned by artist Joris Hoefnage­l (Flemish, 1542–1601), Elegantissimum ad mare Tyrrhenum ex monte Pausilipo Neapolis montisque Vesuvii prospectus. Courtesy of Bibliotèque national de France.

circle of many talented humanists and scholars—including  Jacopo Sannazaro (1458–1530) and Panormita (Antonio Beccadelli, 1394–1471)—in the Aragonese court of Renaissance Naples.32 The Aragonese had been especially aware of the need to promote their capital as a center of the new culture that had begun to flourish in fifteenth-century Italy. Alfonso I had wrested the city from the last of the Angiovins in 1442, and while he was successful in establishing the permanence of a foreign monarchy, his successors remained acutely aware of their fragile legitimacy.33 The Spanish conquest of Naples in 1503 and the ensuing establishment of two centuries of Habsburg rule was no exception in this respect. Political concerns were inscribed into the landscape, shaping indigenous traditions of description that emphasized the natural fertility of Neapolitan soil, the amenable climate, and the city’s impregnable position. Ultimately, Neapolitan humanists sought to recover the aesthetic sense of ancient culture and bring classical landscapes back to life. “Is not the air now

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unusually serene, / Green and grass and the orchards shining?” wrote Pontano in a poem dedicated to the last of the Aragonese kings, Federigo, on his visit to ruined Roman baths in the local countryside on the eve of the late fifteenthcentury onslaught that brought waves of French and Spanish invasions into the Italian peninsula. A century later, Hoefnagel’s Arcadian setting evokes a similar sense of idyllic tranquility that the volcano had only disrupted in remote historical memory—a stylized squiggle of smoke is barely suggestive of its eruptions. In the foreground, a shepherd propped against a tree plays his bagpipes dreamily in what looks like a spring scene of newly tilled soil and fresh growth on the trees. The young shoots spurting from old broken trunks symbolize redemption beyond death and sin.34 It was a pastoral scene entirely fitting with the image of Campania and Naples­ described by humanists—a sort of fortress in Arcadia. The viceroyship of Pedro Toledo (1532–53) had left an especially indelible mark on the city, molding it to Spanish control. Churches, new roads, and imposing fortifications were part of the usual iconography of engraved portraits. To figure a city meant situating the urban topography front and center, identifying its centers of religious and secular power, showing the routes of connectivity that bound the whole, and marking the centers of communal commerce. A vigorous separation between city and countryside was implied by the emphasis on cityscapes in most urban portraits.35 The geographical, topographical, and historical information conveyed in chorographical works made them highly layered conveyers of meaning. The volumes of the Civitates included many bird’s-eye views with monuments, churches, palaces, streets, walls, and natural setting. These depictions schematized and symbolized cities, capturing their significance for armchair travelers.36 This particular portrait by Hoefnagel, however, registered the affinitive pairing of city and volcano more than anything else. The engraver drew from literary convention, but in so doing he might have struck on an original iconography. Georg Braun’s accompanying description reveals the humanistic descriptive trope that sustained this configuration: Naples, royal maritime city, capital of all Campania, and of its kingdom, shaped as a triangle of unequal side, the portion of which is bathed by the sea curving in the way of a half moon. Her proximity to the sea, the amplitude of the port, the salubrious air, the fertile soil, and abundant springs, the amenable orchards, and in brief all things that human life requires, yielding to none in abundance.37

Approaches  35

The city played an important military and strategic role for Spain on the peninsula­, a fact not missed in the way Hoefnagel turned the descriptions of humanists into a picture. The folds of the terrain appear like natural outer walls, supporting the imposing outline of urban fortresses. Braun noted how the highest situated of these, the Castel Sant’Elmo on the Vomero hill, afforded direct lines of fire into the city itself. The least ancient, the Castel Nuovo on the sea, loomed like a mighty sentinel against any assault from that direction. A city within, unseen in Hoefnagel’s painting, was also revealed in the written description. There were dungeons, prisons, reliquaries, and a network of tunnels and passages in Castel Sant’Elmo large enough for the movement of cavalry and cannon. Naples, the description related, was massively provisioned and capable of withstanding a prolonged siege. The overall impression was of a redoubtable city, firmly in Spanish hands and favored by its setting. Naples was “a singular place enjoying the benefits of nature.”38 Nature girded the fortress, so perhaps the mountain stood sentinel too? “Mount Vesuvius looms over this place, famous in the commemorations of many authors,” Braun also wrote. The volcano only hinted at the violent differences in state that would enrich and enliven its significance subsequently. Beyond the cultivated lower slopes lay “impenetrable and horrid” stretches of dense forest and rough terrain leading to the desolate crater. “In the midst there is a deep chasm, in which it is conjectured one might penetrate very far within the bowels of the earth; it is from here that fire and flames rush forth.”39 Braun derived his evidence of a fiery history—distant, he reassured readers—from authorities like Procopius. Hoefnagel positioned a few isolated farmhouses a considerable way up the mountain’s flanks. They were vertical outposts of cultivation and husbandry in this Arcadian setting. Vesuvius did not have any determined or essential traction on its Renaissance observers, but their views corresponded to what they saw. There are few landscapes that can effect such a transformation as a volcano; for human culture that can be at once a deceit and a painful dividend. Appearances changed after the 1630s, and the volcano was not depicted or its meaning deployed in a similar way. Hoefnagel saw the volcano as resembling the Alpine environments many European travelers experienced with new eyes after the Renaissance. Traditionally bulwarks of horror and perdition, mountains had begun to look different. In 1555, the naturalist Conrad Gesner climbed Mount Pilatus near Lucerne, delighting in the thin air and scoffing at the prospect of demons and monsters. Guidebooks, maps, and botanical inventories began to proliferate. Exploration and mapping were accompanied by the naming of peaks.40

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Hoefnagel’s­ Vesuvius was sensitive to native views, just as it reflected sensibilities discernible across European culture.41 Ambrogio Leone’s account of a phreatic eruption in 1500 caused by rising magma coming into contact with aquifers gives a sense of the native discernment that informed artists like Hoefnagel. As he related in a treatise titled De agro Nolano, Leone had watched with other dismayed locals as the generally silent mountain cracked, boomed, and vented for a few days. The eruption was a minor disruption, however, that scarcely seems to have altered the practices of locals. Villagers from nearby climbed the volcano during summer months, hoping that the gas vents and the elevation would help cure ailments. The Aragonese court had supposedly also taken to climbing for better health in previous decades.42 After a first edition in 1500, Leone’s description reappeared again in 1514; both editions were reputedly printed in Venice.43 The book, a small success, was graced by a birds-eye etching of the Bay of Naples by the Venetian artist Girolamo Mocetto (fig. 1.3). Like the Dutch engraver’s work decades later, that view had a life of its own as well. Seventeenth-century copies of Mocetto’s original, for example, were bound up with earliest reports of the 1631 eruption, possibly to highlight the volcano’s transformation. The long life of the image shows that Renaissance views of Vesuvius could be incorporated and modified in later periods.44 More to the point, the portrayal of the city and volcano was fabricated by a cosmopolitan sort of humanism. That native and foreign scholars and artists were making the image of Naples highlights the city’s integration in Renaissance culture, rather than its peculiarity or isolation. Mocetto’s vantage point lifted the viewer to a vertiginous height over the region.45 Terrestrial features, more than the sea, defined the city’s setting. The half-moon arc of the bay showed an alternation of bulwark-like mountains, plains, and rivers. Later seventeenth-century versions of the original, such as the one figured here, included a few subtle adjustments. Naples was shown correspondingly larger in order to reflect the growth of Naples. But the basic­ features remained constant in pairing topographical natural features with historical ones: the river Sebeto flowed to the sea not far from Herculaneum and Pompeii, shown on the map well before their unearthing in the 1730s and 1740s. Such views were already cosmopolitan by the Renaissance. In 1501, for example, the Spanish courtier and chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo had not yet traveled to New Spain when he visited the volcano in the company of Naples’s royal court, sailing to Palermo in sight of Mount Etna shortly there­ after. By 1525, eleven years after arriving in the New World, he was busy draft-

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F I G U R E 1 . 3 . Etching of the Bay of Naples by Girolamo Mocetto (Italian, ca. 1448–1531), ca. 1632. Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, SQ XXX B 72(5. Used by permission of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, Italy.

ing a natural history of the Indies for Charles V, a work that was partly based on his explorations. In 1529, he climbed the active volcano Masaya in Nicaragua, evoking for the readers of the Historia general y moral de las Indias (1535) the gestures of Pliny the Elder, whose imperial service and extreme bravery in the pursuit of natural curiosity would have pleased and flattered Spanish audience­s.46 Oviedo’s career straddled Italy and the Indies, the product of an empire that spanned from the Old World to the New. At least in that respect, he was not unlike Hernán Cortés, who weighed his options to join Gonsalbo de Cordoba­’s invasion of Naples in 1503, opting instead for the Caribbean and central Mexico, where he, too, saw volcanoes.47 Because Oviedo was familiar with the court culture of Naples and its particular appreciation of volcanic landscapes, he had an Old World reference for the New World encounters that appeared in his renowned history of the Indies. Empowered by the imperial credo of plus ultra, “further yet,” the Spaniard carried out ancient gestures on

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a new horizon. Pliny the Elder’s Historia naturalis became the template for a history of the New World. Oviedo’s vision was Janus-like in its evocation of antiquity and its projection of Iberian imperial destiny. The famous stoicism of Pliny during the classical eruption of Vesuvius had especially powerful connotations, linking the study of nature to duty.48 For a Spaniard, the linkages between Naples and Central America were political and ideological. The southern portion of the Italian peninsula was a relatively recent part of the Habsburg’s domains when the Historia general was published—so recent, in fact, that Naples had still been ruled by an independent Aragonese monarchy at the time of Oviedo’s visit in 1501. Furthermore, Oviedo’s only familiar reference to volcanism came from Campania. The historical, natural, and even ethnographical material the Spaniard gathered reinforced some crucial affinities between souther Italy and Central America, though the New World seemed to magnify everything. Naples had entered into the sphere of Habsburg power in 1503, as a result of conquest. Contested at least until the failure of French ambitions to retake the kingdom in 1528, southern Italy was transformed in important ways. New opportunities—patronage, service in Spanish armies—but also new imbalances—the disproportionate growth of Naples—shaped this part of Italy. Partly as a result, the remoteness, wildness, and restive population of the kingdom contributed to its reputation for being a “paradise inhabited by devils” and “the Indies down here.” That latter representation echoed both the breadth of the Spanish Empire and the Jesuit’s goal of civilizing the toe and heel of the Italian boot. This mission was strongly associated with the order’s global reach and, often, tied to the Habsburgs’ own vast ambitions.49 Powerful political, religious, and cultural forces were shaping not only the region but also its depiction. With observations of Campania and Central America, Oviedo could tantalize his Spanish readers with language that was at once familiar to humanists and incipiently exotic. In fact, Oviedo’s vivid recollection of Italian volcanoes helped convey the richness of his experiences in a new continent. He noted, for example, how the Campi Flegrei caldera west of Naples and the volcanism he encountered in Nicaragua both strongly shaped the culture and lives of local inhabitants. His reflections identified difference, however, as in this contrast with Pozzuoli, near Naples: These are all the things I saw in that town of Leon, and the tremors of the city of Pozzuoli (because of which I almost once saw it destroyed) are without a doubt not comparable to those that occur in Leon; I am of the opinion that if it had

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been built of stone houses, as are those of our city or of Spain, many would be demolished in these earthquakes at great loss of life.50

Pozzuoli sat in the Campi Flegrei, where Oviedo had had occasion to visit with the Aragonese court. Geothermal vents, ruins, and forests rich in game had drawn Naples’s rulers, courtiers, and scholars for centuries, but its frequent tremors often caused destruction. Remembering the death of Pliny spoke to the perils of a new continent as well. Oviedo reflected, for example, on the heroic death of the “learned philosopher, called [Micer] Codro, who with desire to know the secrets of these parts, passed through and died.” On visiting his burial site on an island off Panama years later, he was shown a tree marked with a cross. “At the foot of this tree was the said Codro; such that he died carrying out his office, as Pliny did his, investigating and going forth to see nature’s secrets in the world.” Moved, Oviedo felt compelled to add a footnote: “Pliny died climbing towards Mount Vesuvius, which is now called Mount Somma in the Kingdom of Naples; then fire and smoke escaped from its peak, and now that is entirely excellent vineyards.”51 The active volcano Masaya, in contrast, reminded Oviedo of Vesuvius and Etna, though these had not shown him live volcanism. Again, the New World seemed to magnify scale. “It seems to me that neither of the above mentioned [volcanoes] is as admirable or as notable as Masaya” he ventured in his description.52 His climb there began on July 25 of that year, after he departed the town of Managua and worked his way toward the peak. Thick jungle prowled by jaguars blocked the first stretch of his approach. Higher up, the broken terrain became increasingly difficult to negotiate. Oviedo then dismounted and continued in the single company of his indigenous guide, a cacique named Nacatime. His Spanish companions lagged and fell back. Oviedo bore his resoluteness as a particular badge of courage: “Although many say they have seen Masaya, it’s from afar; few, however, have dared go up there.”53 Nacatime eventually led him to the crater, where he observed “a fire liquid like water” roiling and occasionally bursting upward with great force. “I don’t believe that there is a Christian man who, nearing this inferno seeing it would not fear and repent his sins,” he wrote of circling the rim. In the meantime, the cacique helped the Spaniard identify local flora and fauna. Oviedo watched a flock of long-tailed parrots called xaxabes skirt the crater’s rim, learning that locals believed they came to worship the crater. He was especially interested in the medicinal uses of nanci, a berry that aided in digestion. Prying his indigenous guide for names and local lore, the naturalist filled in, corrected, and amended the body of European knowledge he carried with him.54

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m a rv e l s at h o m e Around the same time that Oviedo was in Central America, the Campi Flegrei became a site of similar explorations. The remains of Greek and Roman towns—Pozzuoli, Cuma, and Baia—populated this large caldera to the west of Naples. Ruins and thick patches of forest were scattered about tuff cones and solfataras. Not surprisingly, the entire place held considerable allure. By midcentury a small host of explorers was delighting in the thrills and discoveries of the place. Drawn by both the ruins and volcanism, humanists sought and imagined the distinctiveness of the Neapolitan environs.55 In 1538 a new cinder cone rose one hundred and fifty meters into the air, displacing cultivated plots, overgrown ruins, a small village, and two lakes.56 The brand new volcano was dubbed Monte Nuovo. It was a foreshadowing of Vesuvius, as Giulio Cesare Braccini recalled a century later: “In that time, all memory of the fires of Mount Somma [Vesuvius] had been nearly extinguished . . . such a great amount of stones and ash was ejected that a little mountain was born in that place . . . it was for our day an extremely novel thing, and terrifying, as all memory of Mount Somma, and of Ischia that also burned on past occasions, had been lost.”57 Surviving accounts included the published letter to the Spanish viceroy, Pedro Toledo, by the court humanist Simone Porzio (1497–1554). “You certainly observed the eruption,” Porzio wrote, “and inspected the entire area of Pozzuoli.” Numerous sources do record Toledo’s attention for the population of Pozzuoli, as well as his interest in preserving Roman ruins from further damage.58 Writing the concerned viceroy bolstered Porzio’s standing in the viceroyal court, as sciences and letters in Naples were closely tied to courtly patronage.59 The eruption became an occasion to restate the allegiance between the Neapolitan nobility and the viceroy, which was ultimately the very idea and civic mechanism that supported Naples’s increasing integration into the Spanish imperial system. Pedro Toledo was instrumental in consolidating these political ties between the 1530s and 1550s. He installed an efficient administration, spurred urban growth, and powerfully advanced the image of Spanish permanence. Staking a claim to the Neapolitan landscape, he even built a splendid villa in the Campi Flegrei, as close as he could to what had been identified as the ruins of Cicero’s villa.60 In spite of these gestures, he could nonetheless not afford to be overly confident, aware that a fear of portents could sway the mood of the large capital.61 Possibly as a reflection of this particular concern, Porzio was openly hostile toward astrologers, noting that “some ask me anxiously what phenomena

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are prognosticated by these events. In truth, I hold with the Peripatetics that there is no certain thing in this presage. Even though Cicero attributes much to portents, he also detracts much from them.”62 Likewise, Porzio’s strategy expressed a deep suspicion of vulgar knowledge, and what a lack of understanding might incite among the unlearned. In a parting shot at the end of the letter, he asserted “therefore, my Maecenas, I felt compelled to write this so that fortune tellers, readers of dreams, and vulgar astrologers not seek to explain those things that otherwise occur by virtue of nature.”63 In the years after the publication of the De conflagratione, concern and fascination with volcanic marvels brought visitors to the Campi Flegrei; the flourishing of print descriptions was a reflection and a stimulus to that interest. In 1549, Benedetto Di Falco (1480–1550) published the first edition of his Descrittione dei luoghi antichi di Napoli e del suo amenissimo distretto, inaugurating what would become a genre of guidebooks to the classical and natural sites of the area. Chorographies were being published throughout Italy and Europe, a fact that Di Falco recognized in the first pages of his Descrittione. He noted that similar accounts had been written on Marseille, Venice, Milan, and Rome. The closest literary model was Flavio Biondo’s Italia Illustrata (1507). If Biondo was the standard, Naples had fallen behind the market. Neapolitan printers had weathered a number of crises in the early 1500s, including a complete shutdown of presses between 1526 and 1527. While other Italian cities raced ahead recovering—and fabricating—their ancient past, Naples and its environs were in Di Falco’s estimation “day by day plunging into the waves of obscure oblivion.”64 Whatever gap there was, it was soon recovered. Guides to the region proliferated by the 1570s, strongly reinforcing the linkages between humanism and natural history.65 Works spanned much of the local environment. Scipione Mazzella’s Opusculum de Balneis Puteolanum Baiarum et Pithecusarum (1593), for example, was an account of the thermal springs around Pozzuoli and on Ischia.66 The work that came closest to paralleling Oviedo’s experiences in Central America was the guide to the region by Ferrante Loffredo (1501–85). Like the Spanish explorer of New World volcanoes, Loffredo spent a lifetime in Habsburg service. The Marquis of Trevico—a marquisate in the interior of Campania—served Charles V in wars on the peninsula, in Germany, and in Hungary and, also, took part on the Christian expeditionary raid on Tunis in 1536. He organized the Kingdom of  Naples’s coastal fortresses against growing Ottoman piracy and coordinated the defense of  its land borders when French forces threatened to invade by passing through the Papal States. Moving from the periphery to the metropole and then back, Loffredo landed at the royal

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court of Madrid and, finally, fought in the Spanish fleet at Lepanto. When he returned to Naples, he sat on the city’s chief fiscal council, the Sommaria, passed to the governorship of the Terra di Otranto, and eventually became viceroy of Sicily.67 Le antichità di Pozzuolo et luoghi convicini (1572) was still being read a century later.68 The book could be purchased in Naples as late as 1675—over a hundred years after its first publication—when it was appended to Giovanni Summonte’s seminal history of Naples, Historia del Regno di Napoli (1675), another classic in reprint. Loffredo had undoubtedly cut a striking figure as he explored the caldera in the sixteenth century. The portrait he gave evoked a soldier’s daring and a scholar’s punctiliousness: By day I would go riding through the countryside, seeking out all things worthy of consideration and marvel, natural as well as artificial, that are present between the promontories of Posillipo and Miseno, then Cuma along the shore, and up along the hills and the surrounding mounts. Then at night, I would confer with the writings of ancient authors that tell of these places. In a similar fashion I would gather the best recollections of local inhabitants, left to them by their fathers and ancestors. Bunching all these together, even if I found many conformities between what I observed riding and the lore of books, I continued to find some discrepancies and differences, and in numerous matters I was put in great difficulty by the silence of authors, lost lore, the ruins of buildings in complete disrepair, and finally the absence of all things that normally guide conjecture in such matters. I was nevertheless determined to conquer with as much diligence necessary all those inconveniences, revisiting many times these places, examining the inhabitants minutely, and diligently reviewing and considering books, so that no labor remained. Unless I am fooling myself, I worked in such a fashion as to shed all the true light that could be in such darkness.69

Loffredo transported the text into the field, but then brought the field back into the study. As was Oviedo’s case, local informants were of vital assistance, guiding him to the entrance of the Solfatara crater, for example, and warning him where to tread carefully. From such sources the marquis gathered information on location, usage, and local lore, cross-referencing with ancient authorities. Humanists’ outings always required a return to the library or study. Inside was the place of elaboration: it was where examination, comparison, collection, and display could occur.

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Loffredo’s investigations led him to suspect that the area near Naples suffered earthquakes more than any other part in Italy. The source of the problem, he reasoned, was the subterranean heat that fed all the fumaroles of the Campi Flegrei: Since [Pozzuoli] is underneath made up entirely of flammable material, and since its fires are already lit, I am convinced that it will always be in this unhappiness, and that there will always be earthquakes, which will not be lessened by the exhalations. In ancient times it must have been the same, and one can observe many places similar to this [Monte Nuovo], which could not have been made in a different manner than through exhalations, among these the Solfatara, the Astroni, and Campiglione. These exhalations have ruined many magnificent­ buildings, which one can now see destroyed throughout town.70

Similar speculations were echoed in other sources, such as Scipione Mazzella­’s Sito è antichità della città di Pozzuolo (1606).71 The genre became well established: at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Giulio Cesare Capaccio wrote a guide to the area that rivaled Loffredo’s in importance, and the tones reached a new pitch. “Nature wished to show herself generous to all places in the world in the distribution of her treasures,” Capaccio—a municipal secretary—announced in the opening lines of his guide. It was titled La Vera Antichità di Pozzuolo (1607). Capaccio advanced the boldest claims yet: if Columbus, Vespucci, Magellan, and Cortés had revealed these wonders to the wider world “in a new way,” Neapolitans were about to have their place in the sun.72 “When [nature] came to Pozzuoli, gathering herself together, she determined to make herself known so great, so courteous, even so prodigious, that generously she opened her bosom to all goods, and girded [Pozzuoli] not only with a playful and delightful site, with tranquil and bountiful sea, with benign and happy skies, all laughing and festive­.”73 Readers accustomed to reading of the New World, could now gasp at Monte Nuovo and newly discovered ruins of the Greek and Roman world. Neapolitan humanists were in truth no more hyperbolic than their colleagues in other Italian cities. Everyone manufactured importance and distinction. For Roman humanists, the master landscape was in the sparsely inhabited city itself. The disabitato was where the secretaries and scholars of the returning­ papal court in the early fifteenth century generated a Roman revival of antiquity. That area was mostly outside the focal points of the Re­ naissance papal city: the old basilica of Saint Peter, castle Sant’Angelo, and the

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fortress-like palazzos of the Orsini and the Colonna. The Roman forum, the Palatine, the basilica of Constantine, and the great thermal complex built by Caracalla, in contrast, had essentially gone to nature. They were overgrown, nearly organic shapes whose rotting mortar had long composted the soil. These places already attracted the trickle of nobles, churchmen, artists, and humanists that began to return to the city with Martin V, in the 1420s. The gardens set in the ruins of ancient Rome—the vigne—were suburban plots, places of leisure and retreat from the city, ideal for ruminating on antiquity. Roman humanists gathered here in the pleasant shade to read Latin poetry and reenact the customs and rites of Augustan Rome.74 Campi Flegrei ruins lay well outside the city walls of Naples, in an unparalleled setting. These were distinctions not lost on Neapolitan humanists, especially when they felt competitive with Rome. Capaccio described how Pedro Toledo chose to build his suburban villa near the presumed location of Cicero’s—what ruler could ask for a more amenable and prestigious place? That project showed the velvet side of the viceroy’s armored guantalete, and whether it was flattery or encouragement for later viceroys, Capaccio emphasized how the center of Neapolitan political life had mastered the surrounding countryside. Investing in the renovation of Campi Flegrei sites was part of an elaborate strategy meant to suggest that his rule came in the best Roman tradition. So, like some Roman consul or emperor, Toledo widened and improved the tunnel that connected Naples to Pozzuoli, allocated funds for the reconstruction of sites damaged in 1538, and invested in a number of other projects that included a personal villa.75 Capaccio praised the viceroy’s effort, noting that “worthy of him is the garden that he made near Pozzuoli, where the statues are of incredible beauty, the citrus fruits surpassing of all others in flavor and beauty, and the water so salubrious that some Viceroys of the Kingdom customarily have had it brought to Naples in barrels, drinking it as most conducive to human life.”76 Visions of nature and antiquity in the Campi Flegrei underscored one of the myths of late Neapolitan humanism, here voiced by Capaccio: If in some regards the edifices of Pozzuoli contend with those of Rome, in the matter of fires, waters, and marvelous things of nature there is no doubt that they are surpassing. What have I said on the Solfatara that does not rouse wonder in the reader? Or what of he who sees it? . . . Seeing now vapors exhale and become the cause that level ground rises in mountains of ash, as was the case in the one that covered Tripergole and lake Lucrino in Pozzuolo, is this not something that surpasses all marvel?”77

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While such claims addressed Neapolitan elites and their Spanish lords, they were highly sensitive to foreign views of Naples. An awareness of being the object of a foreign gaze was signaled by the literary device of the forastiero, a traveling outsider, whose imagined, and therefore deliberately controlled, questions about antiquities and local history occasioned exhaustive replies. Capaccio’s immense guide to Naples, written decades after La vera antichità, was aptly titled Il forastiero (1634), the “foreigner.”78 The impulse seems a significant one: to have loaded, almost to have intercepted, outside perception and have charged it with specific cultural intentions. Humanists’ depictions of Vesuvius confirmed the pastoral and agricultural qualities Hoefnagel had seen thanks to them. Forests, orchards, vineyards, and pasture yielded their bounty to the industry of men. Any deeper fear of the true wild—always a Western trope—sat at in the hollow of the inert crater, just exciting enough to recall ancient eruptions and, as was the case for Oviedo, to evoke parallels with the smoking mountains rising from the jungles of the New World. Master metaphors—the body, or the garden—spoke to the intricate web of correspondences that bound the natural world and the social order together: “Social arrangements were projected on to nature, and this socialized or domesticated nature was in turn invoked to legitimate society by ‘naturalizing’ it.”79 In the early decades of the seventeenth century, the appreciation of landscape developed in the Renaissance increasingly had to endure the strains and fractures that existed among Neapolitan citizens. The vocabulary of humanism proved resilient.

foreshadowing In the spring of 1620, the incoming Spanish viceroy received an imploring letter in Italian as he held court on Procida, awaiting entry into Naples. The letter was likely written by Antonio Caracciolo, a representative of one of the five noble districts of the city, although the surviving copy is anonymous. 80 On May 25, 1620, Caracciolo was chosen to lead a delegation to greet the new viceroy, Cardinal Gaspar de Borgia, who was temporarily on the island just off the coast. The letter was presumably drafted in advance of this audience. The advent of a new viceroy in Naples was always a moment of some concern. New political players emerged and different alliances were forged to govern the city, but the transfer of power in 1620 was unusually fraught with dangers because of the recall of the serving viceroy.81 Pedro Girón-Tellez, Duke of Osuna, had been recalled to Madrid on charges of high treason that would eventually result in his imprisonment and disgrace.

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According to the accusations, Osuna had plotted with Venice, the Duke of Savoy and France to establish an independent principality in the south of Italy, this only a few years after he had maneuvered to harry the Venetians in the Adriatic. Osuna was an opportunist of the sort who had meteoric careers but whose downfalls could be correspondingly steep. As a variation of the chimera chased by numerous figures in southern Italy after the beginning of the Italian Wars in the late fifteenth century, the disgraced viceroy’s ambitions would have been highly unlikely ever to succeed. What the charges reflected, surely, was how isolated the Spaniard had grown in Naples. The Neapolitan baronage feared that the viceroy had forged an alliance with the urban citizenry, and their consent was vital to holding the city. For example, Osuna had established an uneasy relationship with an outspoken popular leader, Giulio Genoino.82 Genoino was a prominent citizen leader in the popular revolt that engulfed Naples in 1647. There is, therefore, some suggestion that Osuna had at the very least planned a series of reforms aimed at further curbing the power of Naples’s powerful nobility.83 Adding to these tensions in the spring of 1620 was the apparent unwillingness of Osuna to surrender his authority to the new viceroy, who waited impatiently within sight of the city. Osuna was politically isolated and forced to give way, but for a moment the specter of rebellion had loomed large. The letter of the citizenry in 1620 spoke to the volatility of the situation. Its author proclaimed “a universal desire, and in particular of all the People, to see you in this city: and the most unhappy state and the grave and dangerous infirmities in which it finds itself along with the entire Kingdom.”84 The exhortation that Borgia leave Procida and finally make good his formal entry into Naples exclaimed about an impending crisis: Such is the desire Your Excellency of all those People of whatever state, rank, and condition to see your face, that I can easily liken it to that of pilgrims, sailors, agitated by tempestuous winds upon their seeing a secure port: and of the invalid travailed by ardent fever, on prognosis of death, upon seeing the doctor; of the Jewish people upon their leaving the cruel and tyrannical servitude of the evil Pharaoh: and of Holy Moses on seeing the face of God, from whom he hoped to be shielded from all evil, and be certain of every good.85

This appeal set the high ideal of civic harmony before the incoming viceroy arrived, but it also underscored the right of Neapolitans to resist a tyrannical viceroy. Ruling Naples required enough subtlety for all sides to recognize the high cost of a failed bargain. Spanish power was ultimately overwhelming, but a restive city could be a formidable opponent.

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Rather than experiencing an impending crisis with Spain, however, Naples felt the deep rumbles of conflict between nobility and popolo. The political tumults that sometimes gripped the city were manipulated by the Spanish. The pattern kept Naples firmly in the imperial system by “playing off native power against itself.”86 In other words, the letter identified the traditional antagonisms that the Spanish viceroys learned ably to exploit in their two centuries of rule. Indeed, it was the illusion of self-governance—the illusion of a city that was in truth held by superior force and whose densely packed circumscribed spaces favored control—that was a salient element of Neapolitan political culture.87 The various urban constituencies played their respective roles in the drama of urban politics, but ultimately they had to reckon with the capacity of Spain to impose the status quo. Neapolitan humanists had been refining their conversation with power during the decades of Aragonese rule in the fifteenth century, and it was very much in that context that the rhetorical depictions of the Neapolitan landscape had been constructed. The Aragonese kings as well as their successors had shown themselves highly appreciative of the kinds of settings Naples provided in its environs. Such previous rhetorical uses of nature explain why Caracciolo, assuming he was the letter’s author, analogized the city to a battered and stormsavaged garden. Nature and the body politic were analogous in affliction: Your Excellency ought to imagine a garden of green and tender plants, enriched by flowers, and fruits, so agitated by angry winds, shaken by tempest and great amounts of hail and lightning, that the trees remain without flower, stem or branch: with broken limbs and tumbled trunks it becomes such that its former self can hardly be discerned: so finds itself the City, and the Kingdom of Naples, transformed, and changed from its original self.88

Caracciolo referenced the senescence of nature in this depiction, hybridizing the classical Ovidian regression from a golden age with the Lapsarian narrative of the Fall. The senescence of nature was tied to man’s condition in both Christian and classical traditions.89 The myth of recovery was also tied to such ideas, and the recovery narrative assigned different meaning to wilderness and productive terrain, to the desert and the sown.90 The Edenic narrative in particular was one of the loss of innocence for man and woman, but it also spoke of a transformation of nature. In his anger, God forever altered man’s relationship with the natural world. Banishment from Eden had been a clear sentence; from then on humankind labored, amid the weeds and briars, on the soil from which it was created.

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Nature­ required the laboring hand of man to express its full measure of worth; left alone and untouched it was a place of horror.91 Renaissance and early modern views of the environment were much more complex and varied than a simple exegesis of Caracciolo’s turns of phrase can singly evidence, but one might draw at least one insight about the particular inflections of Neapolitan humanism. Even though nature was not just imagined as a long degrading declension in the Western tradition, the notion of senescence and decay, of lessening, exerted a very strong traction on its depiction of the natural world. Of course, especially in the Renaissance, many claimed that nature could be improved. The imitation of artists, for example, underscored the transformative quality of human artifice. Improvement was embedded in the very notion of cultivation inherited from Greek and Latin sources. The urban schemes of some cities strongly reflected these ideas in the Renaissance, implying at least the attempt to merge theory and praxis. In the mid-fifteenth century the Venetian Marco Cornaro developed a view of forest and hydrological systems on which his republic depended that conveyed a distinct understanding of the human role in nature management—as in both damaging and ameliorating environmental conditions. The Venetian lagoon was among the most intensely managed natural settings in Europe, one in which the classical and Renaissance notion of imitating nature was defined by a strong civic and state attention to the ways in which technical expertise and ingenuity could be leveraged to improve and control nature.92 Humanism in Naples, particularly in its ongoing baroque iteration, was not especially sanguine about controlling the natural world. The image of an older and battered nature permeates written sources, at least. That characterization of erudite views of nature in the city seems especially appropriate to the volcanic turn of events that took place in the seventeenth century. Humanists and naturalists after 1631 did not articulate any sustained theory of management, let alone a plan for concerted technical interventions capable of really mitigating what eruptions could do. Particulars of environmental circumstance as well as cultural circumstance must have been determining. Venetians at least tried with their tides and inland forests, but their struggles were with different natural forces and their intentions were distinct for political and cultural reasons. Written accounts of the Vesuvius in the seventeenth century privileged the theme of loss, a kind of recurring battering and retreat suffered by Naples. For one thing, chroniclers and observers warned that no human remedy could be commensurate with the volcano’s recurring harm. From Rome, where he had heard news of the December disaster from a Neapolitan priest, Pietro Castelli explained that most harms to the human

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condition—mali—originated in “natural and manifest qualities.” In his particular causal schema, volcanic eruptions were not occult, astral, or demonic but, rather, entirely natural occurrences ultimately willed by God. Where the patient could be cured, Castelli explained, any good doctor might apply remedies. But reports of the devastated mountain made this Roman doctor think that only prayer, fasting, confession, alms, and the sacraments stood as any real barrier from further harm.93 Such views were consistent. Nowhere should this be read to suggest that locals—in this sense not even urban Neapolitans, but those who really lived on or near the mountain—were incapable of envisioning any way to work around the conditions volcanism presented. I simply have not been able to recover real evidence of this peasant thinking. The message the urban citizenry sent to the viceroy can be seen as exemplary of the larger humanistic sensibilities that cultured the Neapolitan response to the volcano once it became active—exemplary because it conveyed two related ideas that would guide a newer set of baroque perception of  Vesuvius. The view of nature’s senescence, its declension into something lesser and harsher, was one idea. The other was an aesthetic sense of loss—the ugliness of the charred mountain. In short order, scientific curiosity would couple to these sensibilities, and a new kind of delight in the spectacle of eruptivity took shape in their mingling. Vesuvius had represented the amoenitas of Campania felix at least since the Renaissance, but after 1631 it was also angry and arrabbiato. That altered perception, voiced increasingly in the Italian vernacular, marked the most important shift in humanistic views toward the mountain. In that change, the meaning of Naples was also subjected to change. “Europe is the garden of the world, Italy the garden of Europe, the Kingdom of Naples the garden of Italy, and beautiful Parthenope the garden of our kingdom,” wrote one observer decades later in 1711. He lavished praise, but acknowledged the deep tremors Naples concealed. “For her rare beauty, fructiferous bounty she is the envy of all nations, and also because of the various actions of Rulers, this Siren [Parthenope] is rarely serene, and mostly perturbed, or she would surely be the Fifth Essence, granted only to the Earthly Paradise,” he wrote.94 Naples’s piety, “made her dear to Heaven, so she was hateful to Hell, from which she was many times threatened with destruction by the vomiting of Vesuvius, and by plague, war, hunger, and the terrible shaking of earthquakes, and other things.”95 This different face, contrary to Campania’s traditionally idyllic condition, grew magnified after the great eruption that gripped Naples with fear in December of 1631. A foreshadowing of that fear gives one more clue as to how earlier sensibilities linked with a new phase of discovery.

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Giordano Bruno sensed danger in the way Vesuvius “reached and split the sky,” many decades before it really did. Writing in Paris in the 1580s, he remembered the woods that covered the sides of Monte Cicala situated across the plain from the volcano as having nurtured his young soul. Bruno was recalling his childhood memories from the 1550s, when he had wandered among chestnuts, oaks, olives, oleander, and rosemary. These woods had been the edges of his native Nola. By contrast, Vesuvius had looked foul to him in the near distance, like some great malformed creature.96 Imagining Bruno’s vantage point, one can accurately surmise that he was looking at the back of the steep Somma caldera created in the eruption of 79 AD. For Neapolitans, Somma was the steep and scree-strewn backside along the north and eastern slopes, which they could not see from the city. Where might knowledge of past eruptivity have resided? The phreatic eruption of 1500 was the only sign of life that Vesuvius gave in Bruno’s lifetime. The residents of Nola had been among the witnesses to that eruption. Leone’s elegant little Latin description gave local memories humanistic­ form. Bruno may have known of this work, since his soldier father had literary and philosophical interests.97 More importantly, however, he was likely to have heard the lore of peasants and shepherds that peopled his rural hamlet. If the child Bruno knew that Vesuvius harbored fire within, it is possible that memory existed in various places. As a wandering doctor of theology in Paris many decades after, he could express in Latin meter what may have well been the tales of rural folk whose living memory would have reached far back enough to recount the time, decades earlier, when an ominous cloud had temporarily sat above the strange mountain with two humps. They were thin memories that scarcely trailed to the great city on the other side. Humanistic eloquence was not the only expression of memory or knowledge of nature, though the vernacular understanding of the unlettered is difficult to retrieve. The examples of Oviedo and Loffredo querying locals shows that learned empiricism could readily exploit more vulgar forms of experience, if rarely with acknowledgment. The kind of expertise authoritative volcano watchers asserted on the basis of their historical erudition and eyewitnessing was clearly consonant with contemporary ideas about what constituted expert knowledge. It is only obliquely possible to discern the ways in which the information of oral sources was deployed.98 Naturalists made claims of autopticity because they were aided in their explorations by people who were versed in experience rather than letters; they subsequently translated the native accounts into proper learned form.

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The differences and overlap between humanist and natural philosophical views and more lived kinds of experience is one key for reading the narrative of the following chapter. Shepherds were surely the first to know that Vesuvius would blow, but they left no chronicle of what they saw. Numerous learned Neapolitans did. In seventeenth-century terms, they were expert witnesses who could describe the scene in historical and naturalistic ways.

chapter 2

Marvelous Excesses: The Eruption of 1631

The “stupendous workings and marvelous excesses” of Vesuvius came to life on a winter morning, when the first powerful eruption in five hundred years transformed the idyllic landscape lauded by Renaissance humanists into a dramatic spectacle of fire, smoke, and molten rock.1 Giovanni Battista Manso (1560–1645), the Marquis of Villa, awoke to the sound of terrific booms echoing in the still-dark hours of December 16, 1631. Only a few miles away, he watched a massive eruption blow out the volcano’s western flank and surge into the upper reaches of the atmosphere. From his vantage point, the marquis discerned a familiar shape in the maelstrom of battling elements above him. A column of ash was already amassing tens of thousands of feet in the air and dissipating to the east, bearing a strong resemblance to the spread-out top of a pine tree.2 The Roman writer Pliny the Younger had observed something similar in the first century, as he had watched his uncle Pliny the Elder sail across the Bay of Naples into the maw of the eruption. The nephew recounted the cataclysm and the death of the renowned naturalist in two letters to the historian Tacitus, one of which described a maculated cloud alternately rising and collapsing.3 The similarities between the classical account and Manso’s own view of Vesuvius on the morning of the eruption were striking and immediate, so strong that he spliced the younger Pliny’s narrative into his own breathless description. According to the Roman author, the eruptive cloud had resembled “nothing so much as a giant pine tree.”4 Manso wrote in imitation: On the morning of Tuesday, that which had appeared to be a fiery smoke seemed in new light to be a cloud rising from the earth straight up into the

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seventh­ region of the air, and here expanded in such a way that, as the part raised straight up resembled the large trunk of an extremely tall pine, so the other part . . . seemed a giant pine greater than an enormous mountain.5

Manso resolved on this attachment in the flush of circumstance, drawing from his recollection of ancient authors. Such recollection framed a deliberate set of gestures Neapolitans made during the eruption—watching, recording, reading, and praying. Manso, in fact, alternated between describing the effects of the eruption and joining tens of thousands processing in the streets as the disaster raged over a few dramatic days. Manso’s bricolage of Pliny the Younger’s description requires some decoding. One key is this: the cobbling of experience and ancient narrative emulated the way artists and humanists quoted antiquity in their own creations. Throughout the Renaissance, attachment to classical models structured form, narrative, and expression, yielding novelty and innovation—as when Michelangelo’s heroic Sistine nudes mimicked the powerful rotation of the Laocoön torso.6 Giovanni Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century description of the Black Death in Florence was perhaps an even more relevant example of the use of classical textual antecedents in the composition of a disaster narrative.7 Perhaps Manso immediately conceived of such imitation on seeing the eruptive column. His subsequent recollection was unavoidably in echo of the ancient Roman tragedy. Manso’s description bore the considerable heft of his reputation in Naples and in Italy. He was one of the most influential men in the city, a powerful patron, and a scholar in his own right. As a young man, he had cultivated a friendship with Torquato Tasso, who had been much the elder. In 1619, the Neapolitan printer Giovanni Roncagliolo published Manso’s glowing tribute to the author of Gerusalemme liberata.8 As the founder of charitable institutions such as the Pio Monte della Misericordia, as well as the scholarly Accademia degli Oziosi, Manso had a penchant for patronage and an eye for talent.9 He had commissioned work from Caravaggio when the artist made a brief stay in Naples at the beginning of the seventeenth century and, later, hosted John Milton, who visited the city in 1638.10 The Neapolitan nobleman was by 1631 a very powerful and connected man. That prestige enabled him to skirt the edges of orthodoxy. Earlier in his life, he had known the heretical Dominican friar Tommaso Campanella, for example, as the latter languished in a dungeon but continued to write prolifically. Status and reputation undoubtedly permitted considerable latitude Manso’s part, but it is also evident that he carefully cultivated his reputation.11

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Manso had expressed an active interest in the new science for decades, even as the challenge to traditional Aristotelian natural philosophy collided with problematic questions of religious orthodoxy and authority. Not surprisingly, he wrote repeatedly to Galileo Galilei, whose advances in astronomy the Neapolitan had followed ever since the Tuscan mathematics professor experienced his first brush with fame. Manso even had been among the very first to respond positively to the observations of the lunar surface, Jupiter’s moons, and the Milky Way when they appeared in Galileo’s Sidereus nuncius in March of 1610. The Neapolitan nobleman wrote directly to Galileo on March 18 of that year, eager to know more about the new cannochiale that had radically extended the range of the human eye. At the same time, he wrote his friend Paolo Beni, expressing his delight at the new astronomical discoveries and requesting that any news be delivered to him in Naples.12 Twenty years later, however, Manso had a distinctly different opportunity, one that his previous solicitous and generous feelers to Galileo suggest suited him well. It is reasonable to assume that the Neapolitan believed that his volcanic observations would circulate in intellectual circles beyond his city. Like the chatter of seventeenth-century science, circulating accounts like Manso’s were vital to the more substantive investigation of the phenomenon. Witnessing eruptions became a fundamental feature of describing the volcano and understanding its eruptions scientifically.13 Manso, like a latter-day Pliny, related one of the extraordinary natural events of his generation. What sum can be drawn from eyewitness accounts of Vesuvius like this one? The “marvelous excesses” of Vesuvius produced multiple meanings clustered around a common theme. Eyewitness descriptions were vivid with expressions of terror, dismay, and wonder, but they also conveyed descriptive particulars about the natural phenomenon. In the weeks and months that ensued, a piecemeal reconstruction of the eruption grew out of the body of accounts recorded by eyewitnesses. This elaboration included chronicles that recounted a dramatic sequence of days, as well as treatises focused directly on the natural effects of the eruption and the appearance of Vesuvius. Admittedly, Neapolitan writers observed a less-than-rigid distinction between the narrative of events and its natural causes. The tensions between chronicling an event and explaining a natural phenomenon should not, however, be read as confusion or bafflement, as later writers would suggest—a baroque artifice and plastic mingling of piety and expression ushered out by modern sensibilities. The intertwined strands of meaning were, instead, warp and weft of  a greater narrative through which Neapolitans elaborated responses to the volcano’s transformation. What was the composition of the ash, what was

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the nature of the fierce lightning storms illuminating the incandescen­t eruptive cloud, and what forces had demolished a huge portion of the mountain? Manso was an unusually qualified observer by seventeenth-century stan­ dards of erudition and social status. Caravaggio’s patron, Tasso’s biographer, Milton’s host, and Galileo’s correspondent—these things showed a subtle and complex intellect that went beyond idle prestige. Certainly, he was the kind of person who could entertain the “various constellations of belief within a combinatory matrix” common to the baroque intellectual climate.14 Already in his seventies at the time of the eruption, Manso lived long enough to witness a surge of philosophical novelty. The last decades of his lifetime saw significant strands of innovation race through Naples. The mathematics and physics of Tommaso Cornelio—influential in introducing Descartes to Naples­—heightened­ the debate between the “ancients” and “moderns” in these decades, creating an important pocket of ferment and innovation in the city.15 Manso may have been especially skilled at shifting between the multiple mansions of the mind—or at least what might have been his scientific and civic obligations—but his propensity to do so was not singular. Scientific observers of  Vesuvius would move between the canon of  Aristotelian natural philosophy and the new epistemologies of the Scientific Revolution for the duration of the seventeenth century.16 They also relished telling the story of eruptions. “It’s been possible to know in such fresh ways,” wrote Francesco Ceraso, author of one of the more spectacular accounts of the eruption, reflecting the excitement generated by the mountain’s unexpected awakening. The year 1632 appears to have been an extraordinarily good year for Neapolitan printers. For many—Ottavio Beltramo, Egidio Longo, Giovanni Domenico and Secondino­ Roncagliolo, Francesco Savio, and Lazzaro Scorriggio—the year after the eruption was at least third-best in terms of editions printed. For Longo, Scorriggio­, and the two Roncagliolo, 1632 was their most active year. Writings on the volcano constituted much of the fodder of their production in the months that followed the eruption. While the majority of works were in Italian and not in Latin, this was probably the case because the first eruption accounts followed a ubiquitous vernacular genre of relationi on other types of disasters, battles, miracles, and similar noteworthy events. Abandoning the scholarly formality of Latin may have also reflected the vernacular strategy employed by the most notable contemporary example of Italian science—Galileo.17 Set against an even greater backdrop, Vesuvius writings reflected the seventeenth-century proliferation of “spiritual, philosophical, and scientific writings aimed at an elite reading public wider than learned readers of Latin and technically proficient philosophers and mathematicians.”18

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These hurried printings spun accounts filled with ekphrasis in the Italian, Neapolitan, and Spanish vernaculars, evoking the eruption’s powerful visual and audible features. “And the cloud,” wrote Ceraso, “which had grown marvelously frightful to all, appeared full with fire, thick bolts and lightning without, and to those who listened it was as if it harbored within the booming drums of a great army, the racing of carriages, and the thunder of artillery.” 19 Baroque authors relished description. They delighted in complexity. Vesuvius accounts slipped across the apparent boundaries of the natural, historical, or religious with relative ease, while maintaining an acute understanding of the purview of each field of thought. Take, for example, how a discalced Augustinian friar, Francesco Agnello, wrestled with these possibilities in a crackling little treatise entitled Trattato scientifico delle cause che concorsero al terremoto e fuoco del Monte Vesuvio vicino Napoli (1632): A variety of food is not the only way to ingratiate the stomach; so is preparing the same food in different fashion. . . . Having been asked by many dear people that I write a bit about the ruin they reasonably feared, and not being able to deny them in full, I have labored to vary my prose, so that if the discourse of one science is not suitable to the taste of one, he might nourish himself on another, both entering into the history of the thing.20

Description was generative of knowledge, but there was so much to describe to tell the history of the thing! As Agnello’s gastronomic analogy acknowledged, adequate explanation required “multiple partaking”—the necessity of inhabiting several subjects at one time, even when they might generate countervailing understanding.21 Agnello was tracing the contours of a greater surge of expression, and at least the chorus of learned voices that included can be readily heard. Culture structures understanding: through their culture, Neapolitans produced a sophisticated interpretation of a natural event that had radically altered the landscape around the city, killed thousands, and seemingly brought a great ancient tragedy to life again.

m e m o ry a n d e x p e r i e n c e o f t h e c r at e r Seeing Vesuvius rip itself apart evoked powerful memories. How did previous explorers recall the volcano’s appearance before the eruption? In his Descrittione di tutta Italia (1568), the sixteenth-century humanist Leandro Alberti had written that Vesuvius was “fruitful on all sides” and that the mountain’s

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natural fertility made “the Earth perform miracles.”22 Such a view was consonant with the Arcadian image of Vesuvius in the Renaissance and was the reflection of distinct cultural sensibilities. The aesthetic appreciation of nature that humanists cultivated led them into the fields, woods, and hills surrounding cities. Italians for centuries had experienced the natural world beyond the urbs as a place of labor and cultivation, hunting, travel, or religious experience. Although humanists could be keen observers of such activities in the countryside—cultivation, husbandry, hunting, for example—they went into nature with particular aesthetic and historical ideas. This is why, even before the eruption, climbers had explored the crater. In the most mysterious part of the dormant volcano, early explorers crossed paths with shepherds and woodsmen whose regular peregrinations took them there.23 On the seaward side, the pitch of Vesuvius rises gently, but the slope steepens with altitude. In the first part of the seventeenth century, as now, a valley named the Atrio separated the shattered caldera wall of the massive firstcentury Plinian eruption and the cone built around the crater. Broad and welcoming before the final rise, “it was all covered with grass for pasture, and it was as well a garden of simples.” This is how Giulio Cesare Braccini—a Lucchese abbot and prothonotary apostolic in the service of the papal chancery—fondly recalled the landscape he had traversed during a trek in 1612. He had hiked through pasturage, forest, and tracts of broken terrain before reaching the summit. Huts dotted the lower slopes; footpaths marked the coming and going of animals and people.24 Recalling that first ascent, Braccini wrote that he had not considered remotely the possibility of an eruption. That day, the thrill of climbing in the company of friends and the prospect of a sweeping view of Naples­ made summiting a carefree affair. This fond recollection was nonetheless marked with a twinge of regret twenty years later; he had elected not to lower himself into the inert interior of the large crater. Dissuaded by the obvious danger of falling and the fading daylight, he had simply peered in from above. There was thick growth below. He identified oak, ash, and hornbeam, as well as what appeared to be animal trails winding toward the bottom.25 Braccini’s desire to climb Vesuvius had come from a particular account. It came from Stefano Pighio, a court humanist who had climbed the volcano during the pontificate of Sixtus V in the late sixteenth century—during what Braccini described as a peregrinaggio among the sites of Campania. The clergyman noted that he had come across Pighio’s account while reading a general guide of Italy, Franz Schott’s Itinerarium nobiliorum Italiae regionum, urbium, oppidorum­, locorum (1601). In that work, Schott related the earlier Italian­ humanist’s observations of the dormant crater. Braccini might have

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been especially struck by this image before his trek: “In the middle of the summit there lies a vast round opening just like a deep amphitheater, called a crater because of its shape, through the bottom of which it is believed one penetrates into the most secret interiors of the Earth.”26 Braccini read that his predecessor had “lowered himself into the abyss.” Lacking the stomach to do this, he still got a good look. There was gas and steam—what we now know is carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide, along with water vapor—emanating from the passage of the earth’s “humors.” Pighio had tried to touch the vents, only to have them scald his hand.27 “All marvel ceases,” Braccini wrote, “if we believe, as we discuss below, that in all the deepest recesses of the earth there are fires that are never extinguished, and they always launch upward some vestige, some smoke, some vapor, or flicker.”28 Still, little in his memory of the crater squared with the great eruption. What in that brooding sylvan setting had ever portended such hellish fires? There were, however, other observers of the crater decades earlier who had intuited more readily the immanence of new eruptions. One of them was an acquaintance of Braccini’s, the doctor and expert in medicinal plants, Giovanni­ Domenico Magliocco. Back in 1619, Magliocco had climbed Vesuvius in search of simples and had ended up exploring much of the crater. On his ascent, Magliocco had paused to gather plant specimens in the deeply cut valley set between the mountain’s two summits. From here, with the massive crater wall of the ancient eruption that destroyed Pompeii to his back, Magliocco had then made the steep scramble to the top. Summiting, he then claimed to have followed a winding trail into the crater, ever deeper. The descent forced him to cling on all fours to the rock wall. The climber found a strange landscape at the bottom: immense carriage-sized boulders enveloped in puffs of vapor and steam. An empiric at the antechambers of hell, he had collected samples of water­, rocks, plants, and other natural objects. These he delivered to Naples for study. Although Vesuvius would not erupt for another decade, Magliocco had suspected that the crater’s thick vegetation signaled a long dormancy.29 He lived to see his intuition that Vesuvius could erupt confirmed. A few hours before dawn of December 16, 1631, explosions ripped gigantic cracks in the base of the great cone of Vesuvius, at about seven hundred meters in altitude on the western side. As seen from Naples in the dark hours before daybreak, portions of the mountain glowed a terrifying red, then disappeared into darkness again as they were veiled by the billowing clouds of ash. With daylight, a keen observer would have noticed that the eruption had begun as a tear near the same wide expanse of pasturage through which Braccini had wandered and Magliocco had gathered his medicinal plants. There had been

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a few clues in the intervening years—as in 1624, when a party that reached the summit reported fresh ash. Francesco Ceraso recalled that “it appears that the Mountain gave more than one sign, which it was our sin to ignore, as some locals report that, having gone up the Mountain to see the memorable site of ancient fires, they came across ash that appeared to have been recently extruded.”30 Even such fresh memories, however, had held scarce purchase before the storm.

t h e e a r ly p h a s e o f t h e e r u p t i o n In the weeks and days before the eruption, Vesuvius appeared to warn the local population of its impending fury. As early as December 10, reports reached the city that people in the countryside had heard “moans” and “sighs” emanating from the mountain. “It seemed that Pluto had transferred his reign,” wrote one observer.31 Many of the inhabitants of the numerous small towns at the base of the volcano complained of sleeplessness as the noise, and tremors lasted for weeks. Perhaps to signal the vulgar superstition of rural people, Braccini reported that a terrifying rumor had begun to circulate among local peasants: devils were mustering in the woody dark. “Others more pious,” he wrote in what was an adjustment of tone but not so much a change of message, “recalled the stories of Peter Damian, who had written that in that place there was a gate to Hell, and that here were brought the souls of the most inveterate sinners.” Peasants, however, were always keen observers of the world around them. They were the first to report, for example, that the water in wells was dropping and growing murky. A woodsman who had ventured high in search of timber saw that parts of the mountain had begun to bulge grotesquely. To the trained eye, this is one of the last terrifying­ signs of imminent eruption, as the rock contorts to its limits. Shepherds, huntsmen, and woodsmen seem to have noted such changes on Vesuvius in the preceding weeks, but they did not know that Pliny the Younger had written about the frequent earthquakes and similar signs that preceded the eruption of 79 AD. The sources record no such premonition in Naples. Anyone likely to have it would have had to know the Latin of Pliny the Younger’s letter. Citydwelling humanists, however, lacked the everyday knowledge of nature and terrain possessed by a peasant.32 The historical record can only reveal fragments of the lived experience of nature possessed by Europeans who lived much of their lives in field and forest. Peasants possessed intimately local maps in their minds. They knew distinct trees, field boundaries, animal trails, and

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the seasonal­ changes on the land. Humanists tracked the footsteps of the past; textual fragments were carried into nature and attached to the living landscape. The ascent to the crater was marked in many places by the sinew of footpaths—the come and go of animals and people. Erudite explorers often employed locals as guides, so they sometimes acquired their own experiences. Nonetheless, there was a gap between informal and formal knowledge: peasants noted the mountain’s bulging appearance days before the eruption, before anyone else. This was because they knew its appearance in close detail. Humanists just could not see certain things. One city-dwelling witness of the eruption, Vincenzo Bove, recorded that the glowing volcano appeared to be “that nefarious sun that was to bring a day darker yet than the blackest night.” After the first round of cracks and booms in the early morning, others followed at nine, noon, and an hour later, at one.33 Even at midday, Naples appeared to be plunged into darkness; the air felt thick and difficult to breathe. By one thirty in the afternoon, an eruptive column could be seen rising from gashes in the side of the volcano on the seaward side. Braccini estimated that it reached at least thirty thousand paces into the air and that it resembled a great pine tree; Manso’s observation was similar.34 If the latter wished to record like a Roman observer, it is evident that others felt the same.35 The first phase of the eruption provoked great panic and bewilderment across the countryside as well as in the city. Still, some people showed a degree of pluck and curiosity that astounds even from the distance of nearly four centuries. One man raced to the base of the volcano in the early hours of the eruption, only to desperately regret his decision to be so close; he fled in a mad dash for the safety of the seashore. Others were even more foolhardy. Five men began an ascent at early dawn from the most protected side of the mountain, up the outer slope and ridge of the first-century caldera wall. Standing atop the semicircular ridge that partly encircles the cone of Vesuvius, they were nearly struck by a lava bomb. Others were just unlucky. At least one cowherd was camped in the Atrio the night of the eruption. The mountain exploded beneath his feet. Abandoning his animals in terror, he outraced two great gashes that had opened in the earth before him.36 Despair mounted also in Naples. Because the eruption was still growing, and the mountain miles off, large numbers of people gathered on the balconies and on the rooftops of the tallest buildings. Like Manso, Braccini perched himself at a window alternating, he noted, between watching the expanding cloud and studying the frenzied response of the city’s inhabitants. He later proudly

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counted himself among the few who had maintained stoic composure amid the mounting fear. “The more simple,” he wrote, “ran screaming along the streets.” Driven partly by the horror at the thing and by distaste for the panic in the streets, Braccini wrote that he temporarily retreated into his library, closed the shutters and pulled Pliny’s letters to Tacitus, epistles sixteen and twenty, from the shelf. Surrounded by natural and human delirium, the scholar sought the enclosed, rational space of his study. “Here,” he claimed to have recalled to those huddling in fear around him, “are described one thousand five hundred and fifty years ago what, after all, we are seeing today.” Braccini evidently established order and reason among the chaos—or at least that was the scene he wished to recreate for his readers. He recalled weaving between text and experience. Anxious to compare the height of past and present eruptive clouds, he took measurements from the roof of his residence. From these he calculated the height of thirty thousand paces—not surprisingly a measurement very similar to Pliny’s. Hours later, he recruited the assistance of two “geometricians”; together they employed a quadrant and other instruments to measure the size of the crater and the mountain’s drop in elevation.37 Like Ferrante Loffredo, the sixteenth-century curioso who had explored the Campi Flegrei by day and then retreated to his library at night—and also like Manso—Braccini compared his observations to those of Pliny. The latter, however, had not hidden his terror as he watched the eruption from Cape Miseno. The Roman author had described a horrific volcanic crepuscule, scenes of panic, and visions of the world’s end.38 Braccini wrote that he tried to quiet his own fears in the face of the impending cataclysm.39 He eventually left his residence and joined thousands of Neapolitans in the streets, one fearful citizen among many. As the day progressed to the late afternoon of December 16, fear suffocated the city. With the onset of night, it became evident that the eruption was growing. During the months that preceded the eruption, subsurface magma—less dense than the surrounding rock—had risen buoyantly closer and closer toward the surface. It had permeated through the insides of the volcano, exploiting and filling fracture systems that included the vertical conduit that led up to the mouth of the cone. When the pressure of the magma surpassed the load of the rock above, it exploded outward. Inside the crater walls, magma came into contact with aquifers, pulverizing in huge phreatic bursts. Billows of ash began to cover the city. Propelled into the upper reaches of  the atmosphere, the same ash reached Constantinople in a few days.40 The archbishop of Naples, Francesco Buoncompagno, was near the base of

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Vesuvius on the eve of the eruption. At dawn, he commandeered an abandoned­ fishing skiff and rowed across the bay. Braccini recorded a suitably dramatic scene on Buoncompagno’s arrival in Naples. Cries and invocations from the common people reached the exhausted and terrified archbishop as he raced for the cathedral, strengthening his resolve and reminding him of his pastoral obligations toward the threatened city. The confusion was surely too great to result in any clear narrative of events, but the crucial detail is that the actions— real or inferred—of Buoncompagno as well as the Spanish viceroy became a crucial part of the narrative, elevating the religious and secular heads of the city to a prominent role in sparing it from disaster. Neapolitans turned their appeals to San Gennaro in particular, as he had saved Naples from the volcano on past occasions.41 The archbishop was hardly the only one to seek the safety of the city walls. In the first hours of the eruption, inhabitants from the countryside had begun to stream in through the Porta Nola, the entry point from the eastern littoral road that led from Vesuvius. The incoming droves put the Spanish viceroy, Manuel de Guzmán Zuñiga y Fonseca, Count of Monterrey, in the difficult position of protecting the rural population and sparing the city from worsening disorder. He and the members of the governing Collaterale council could only have been too aware of the risk an influx of desperate masses presented to a city that already numbered three hundred thousand. While the Count of Monterrey grappled with controlling the streets, clergymen, nobles, and commoners began to assemble outside the Duomo. The first attempt at organizing a communal response to the disaster was something of a debacle. In the late afternoon, after most of the preparations for an initial religious and civic procession had been made, the archbishop fell ill and withdrew to his residence. Temporarily abandoned by Buoncompagno, the viceroy and the highest ranking nobility—Manso included—assumed leadership of the procession. Manso recalled a moment gripped with a sense of tragedy and hope, as Neapolitans prepared to process, “in tight ranks and late into the night.”42 As they did, they reached into a well of communal memory.

urban memory The lengthy passage of time renders the thing novel, and unusual, though knowledge of the aforesaid mountain’s fires is transmitted through tradition even among the most ignorant peoples. It caused every time great ruin, but the city of Naples was always spared through the miracle of San Gennaro protector­.43

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Some awareness of the volcano’s fierce power resided in urban collective memory, as Vincenzo Bove suggested. Bove was a successful bookseller whose account was printed by the city’s printers Giovanni and Secondino Roncagliolo, Lazzaro Scoriggio, and Egidio Longo. Saints’ lives had been the staple of his bookshop. The Novissima relatione dell’incendio successo nel Monte di Somma a 16 Dicembre 1631 joined scores of handbills and pamphlets on the eruption for sale by the first few weeks of 1632. Typical of many of the authors, Bove wrote in the vernacular and produced a relatively cheap and accessible format—usually something along the size of an octavo and in the order of a few dozen pages. If the assertion that the most “ignorant people” preserved knowledge of the volcano served to distinguish the sophisticated knowledge of the humanist or the naturalist from popular superstition, it was also an oblique acknowledgment that beyond the erudite landscape narratives of Renaissance humanism, there persisted other sources of memory about Vesuvius. These early reports hybridized the conventions of learned and popular culture. In fact, those boundaries—never more than a historian’s convention in any case— appear to have been malleable and porous, rather more like points of contact and blurring. The cult and memory of San Gennaro was one of the points of convergence for a community under duress—between Manso and Braccini and the swarms in the street and between the archbishop, the viceroy, and the restless people of Naples. San Gennaro’s association with Vesuvius nearly reached back to the ori­ gins of the cult in late antiquity, when the saint was reputed to have spared Naples during the powerful eruptions in the fifth and seventh centuries. The mi­ raculous liquefaction of his blood—which occurred when two phials of the saint’s blood were set before his severed skull—was traditionally celebrated twice a year. The ceremonies had an apotropaic function that also allowed seventeenth-century Neapolitans to evaluate the state of the city. While it is a mistake to assume that the three principal disasters that threatened the city— eruptions, popular rebellions, or plagues—were always conflated, the perception of threat from each could be very similar.44 Ever since the Middle Ages, the miracle whereby San Gennaro’s congealed blood liquefied inside of its two glass phials was closely scrutinized for how quickly it occurred, generat­ ing tremendous anticipation in moments of great communal anxiety. As was the case throughout Catholic Europe, Neapolitans would even resort to violently invoking the miracle, threatening the saint.45 Ecclesiastical and secular authorities, for their part, feared the consequences of failing to deliver.46 The vitality of the local cult was well-evident before the 1631 eruption. San Gennaro featured prominently, for example, in works like Cesare d’Engenio

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Caracciolo’s Napoli Sacra (1624). D’Engenio’s hagiography of the saint and the sacred places associated with him revealed a cult that was enduring and widely embraced. According to d’Engenio, San Gennaro’s martyrdom occurred amid the boiling mud and fumaroles of the Solfatara. Christians gathered his severed head and placed his blood into two glass phials. For much of late antiquity, the relics were safeguarded outside the city walls, in the catacombs dug into the side of the Capodimonte hill.47 The saint’s most important miracles before 1631 were connected to the eruptions of late antiquity, in AD 472, 512, and 685. According to d’Engenio, the eruption that first consolidated the saint’s fame occurred in 472. Citing the evidence of two late antique sources, Procopius and Marcellinus Comes, he confirmed that the local population had fervently prayed for San Gennaro’s help, though they had called on numerous other saints and holy relics as well. The 472 eruption was similar to the one of 1631, with devastating flows of volcanic clasts, mud, and debris. Fleeing the devastation, the Christians of late antique Naples repaired to the catacombs of San Gennaro clustered beneath the saint’s tomb, on the slope of the Capodimonte hill, site of early Christian burials and sites of worship. This was the likely origin of the association between volcano and saint, who was credited with protecting not only Naples but also Constantinople. Greece received much of the ash expelled from Vesuvius, possibly as these lands experienced unrelated earthquakes that occurred almost contemporaneously.48 Although the annual miracles of liquefaction confirmed the saint’s ongoing vigilance, the connection with Vesuvius had faded during the volcano’s dormant centuries. In 1631, this long-standing link to the saint was reconfirmed. The clergy played a vital role in establishing the relationship between saint and volcano, going to great length to tie the last miracle with those of the late Roman period, closer to the saint’s martyrdom. Ecclesiastical writers identified 472 as the year of San Gennaro’s first miraculous intercession on Naples’s behalf, situating the eruption of 1631 as a parallel example. Channeling of popular expressions of piety into the formal cult of San Gennaro was a step toward preventing any potentially troubling interpretations of Vesuvius from gaining currency.49 Firmly establishing the saint’s previous intercessions helped transform the most recent eruption into an example of not only God’s returning anger with the city but also one of the saint’s repeated miracles in its assistance and, most important, of the enduring orthodoxy of Naples. The Jesuit Giulio Cesare Recupito’s De Vesuviano incendio nuntius, published in April of 1632, for example, reinforced the linkage with the late antique eruption related by Procipius. Recupito emphasized the archbishop’s brave return to the city and his efforts to organize its spiritual defense around the relics of San Gennaro.

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For this Jesuit author, the present cardinal’s actions replicated those of the early Christian leaders who had gathered the faithful in the saint’s catacombs for protection. The devotion and repentance shown by all Neapolitans, for its part, evoked similar parallels with the early Christian community.50 If past chronicles provided some reassurance, the future was less certain.51 Braccini, for example, identified a specific connection between this contrition, the miracle of the liquefied blood and the saint’s intercession, and the hope that Naples would be spared from the flames of Vesuvius. The miracle of liquefaction was the hinge: In the second instance [of liquefaction] we recognize by this way that God, to placate his ire, and because He does not want the ruin, but the conservation of his beloved people—He does not wish for the death of the sinner, but that he live and be converted to him—works to promise us emendation, and instill in us a spirit of contrition, and devotion, now for love, now for happiness, [so] without any other incentive [the blood] liquefies.52

The progression from fear, to contrition and memory, to the miracle, and ultimately to anxious hope situated the eruption in a meaningful frame. God had spoken to Naples through Vesuvius. “And maybe,” Braccini wrote, “it was for this reason that everyone felt they were in mortal danger, and at the same time there formed a hope that we would be liberated by the Saint, and from this hope faith and devotion grew in everyone.”53

miraculous intercession As dusk began to fall on December 16, a procession bearing the saint’s sacred relics began its laborious progress toward the church of  the Madonna del Carmine. The archbishop, apparently exhausted by his perilous escape, languished in his residence and did not put in an appearance. Many members of the nobility were also missing, some because they had been trapped in the surrounding countryside. There were reports of them having traveled desperately in their carriages under the volcano’s frightful glow. The eruption continued unabated, its intensity increasing greatly in the early evening. The advancing procession encountered a stream of refugees from the outlying towns. As the throngs collided, the procession trudged on gloomily late into the night. One estimate put the number of people entering the city at forty thousand.54 Darkness fell on a day that had scarcely seen the sun, while Vesuvius shook, burned and roared unabated. The horrors described by the incoming rural

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refugees rippled throughout the city. “It seemed to be Judgment Day,” recalled one observer. He continued: You needed to have a heart of stone to witness such a spectacle. You could see a mother with her child embraced in flight, a son tied to his father so as to be almost united, a brother in his brother’s arms, a husband chained to his wife, heads severed from the bust, arms separated, members dispersed, and a universal massacre.55

Numerous witnesses contrasted the unspeakable destruction in the countryside with the relative safety of Naples. “Death,” wrote one, “roamed the countryside pompous and glorious,” but could not, “with her sickle reach the city.”56 “You would have thought,” concluded Vincenzo Bove, “that, with those tongues of fire, with that murmur, and booming, the Mountain had announced a glorious triumph of devotion and piety.”57 The dusk was haunting. Striking the Bay of Naples from a low angle, the last fading rays of light coming from the west pierced the ash-filled air, illuminating the huge eruptive cloud in a strange glow. It was an effect that struck observers as particularly ominous as they attended the onset of night. “Everyone took into account that this would be the final, and eternal night, without any hope of ever seeing the dawn anew,” wrote Braccini.58 Refugees from the devastated hinterland of Naples crowded into the city’s churches, opened to house refugees at the archbishop’s request. Again, recollections of the night captured the communal acts of contrition: priests heard confession, while in the streets flagellants lashed themselves bloody, women tore at their hair, friends and family embraced, and sworn enemies made peace. Franciscans, Dominicans, and the members of other religious orders held vigil in the darkness, displaying relics and sacred images.59 By the dawn of December 17, Vesuvius had entered a second, even more violent, phase of its eruption. The initial burst had ripped out the side of Vesuvius, below the heavily wooded crater explored by Braccini and Magliocco decades previously. Hours into the eruption, the flanks of the volcano seemed to become liquid. Braccini was in time to see it: “A huge quantity of water mixed with ash, clay, liquefied bitumen, sulfur and alum, having formed, in the blink of an eye—this is beyond human imagining—into five large torrents, with such fury . . . poured down in waves.” This was the lahar, a great liquefied mass of eruptive clasts, ash, mud, and debris that engulfed everything before it. At the base of the volcano, the town of Torre del Greco was struck in full. Brac-

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cini eventually estimated that six thousand people died, while others probably exaggerated with a figure of ten thousand.60 Meanwhile, the great eruptive cloud yawned over the volcano, part of it thinning as a massive plume trailing to the northeast. Large quantities of volcanic ejecta in the atmosphere generated violent rainstorms as water vapor nucleated around fine ash particles in the air. Rain deluged down the volcano’s slopes, liquefying the ash, clasts, and debris into devastating lahar flows that ripped down the shattered flanks of the mountain. In the meantime, the violent release of magma had weakened the edifice of the crater, and it collapsed as well. The sum of these huge forces was the destruction of the existing cone of  Vesuvius, causing the volcano’s elevation to drop some 500 feet. Sources before 1631 had described the mountain as biceps: two peaks formed by the rim of the caldera from 79 AD and by the cone of Vesuvius that had formed over fifteen centuries. By midmorning, much of the latter was gone, washed and crumbled into the sea, having taken everything before it.61 Another communal procession bearing the relics of San Gennaro began under a fierce deluge on December 17. This time, the archbishop was present. Buoncompagno led “all the religious, carrying the Head and Blood of the glorious San Gennaro, followed by the count of Monterrey, by all the Royal Ministers, and the Lords of Naples, with the infinite People of one, and the other, sex, imploring divine aid.”62 It was slow and grim going at first as the hard rains had turned the ash-strewn streets into a quagmire. Winds that had spared Naples more damage by pushing the eruptive plume east now whipped up flurries of ash that stung the face and made it difficult to breathe. It was at this dramatic point that the miraculous deliverance reputedly occurred. “Wednesday morning you could no longer see the mountain on account of the great murk caused by the smoke,” wrote one observer, recalling how shafts of light began gradually to part the volcanic crepuscule to reveal “the happy Sun, which consoled all the inhabitants of Naples; the people began to shout jubilantly, and giving themselves to the Saint, glorying in their Saint, they processed out Porta Capuana before the Mountain.”63 The lifting darkness manifested a miraculous sight: San Gennaro in his full bishop’s regalia, poised over the city. One hand staved off  the clouds of  fire and ash, the other gestured to the city in an act of benediction.64 That night would break clear, and by “midnight the air grew still, revealing the stars in the sky.”65 Manso had a prominent position in the procession that snaked its way out toward Vesuvius. The crowd first carried the relics of the saint past the Porta Capuana and, then, paused just outside the city walls.66 The gate was one of

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the ceremonial foci of the city; Charles V had made his triumphal entry into Naples through it. Manso was in the crowd, as it pressed and surged out past the gate. While the clergy struggled to steady the baldachin, the archbishop apparently turned to him for assistance: I was the closest to the Cardinal, since he had asked me to find a place where we could best do this, which I did on a high platform, perhaps an arquebus shot from the gate, where the Cardinal, once he had arrived, had the Holy blood drawn from the baldachin and raised before the sight of the fire and cloud, but nothing happened. Then the Cardinal took the glorious blood from the tabernacle in which it was transported, and holding it in his hands raised it toward the fire, making the sign of the most holy Cross. Then that huge unrestrained and very high cloud lowered itself, almost bowing its head to the Holy relic, and right away began to recede.67

Manso explained how the crowd of nobility, clergy, and commoners congressed before the gate in a state of bewilderment. He related that he hurriedly arranged for the display of the relics, confirming at once his physical proximity to the saint’s remains and to the ritual gestures that invoked the miracle overhead. Nobility and clergy thus orchestrated together the display of civic unity before the disaster.68 Much like Manso, Braccini also described how the fierce cloud appeared to bow and recede, taking an easterly course away from the city. He also reckoned that the earthquakes ceased and the torrents of lahar slowed. For both observers, however, a now-smoldering Vesuvius would remind the city of its ongoing contrition.69 In the ensuing decades, the dramatic climax of December 17 became an iconography that preserved these first eyewitness accounts. Between 1656 and 1660, for example, the Neapolitan artist Domenico Gargiulo (1609–75) painted the eruption for his patron, Antonio Piscelli. The scene’s primary focus was exactly the event Manso and Braccini described (fig. 2.1).70 Gargiulo chronicled the 1647 revolt of Naples, as well as the 1656 plague, although art historians have challenged the notion that the three disaster scenes were thought of as a related narrative set. Nevertheless, the scene Gargiulo depicted before the Porta Capuana was one of the most notable examples of how the 1631 eruption found a place in visual memory. Since the canvas was commissioned and completed decades after the event, Gargiulo must have relied on accounts like Braccini and Manso’s. The rich visual imagery these observers had employed—the roiling cloud that appeared at

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F I G U R E 2 . 1 . Domenico Gargiulo (Naples, ca. 1609–1675), Eruzione del Vesuvio del 1631. Private collection.

once to grow and recede on itself, the shrieking women, the cracks and booms and sulfur smells, and the anxious passage past the Porta Capuana—appeared on the canvas. The procession and the throng of people filled the center of the urban space. Vesuvius menaced in the background. In the foreground, a long line of people marched in the volcanic crepuscule, lighting their way with torches. The procession formed a rough circle, where the leading elements had completed the motion and were rejoined with those that followed. Exactly at this point, Gargiulo painted the viceroy and the archbishop Buoncompagno, as they marched behind the baldachin bearing the saint’s relics. San Gennaro flew above, as if launched straight at the threatening ash cloud. One of the painting’s most salient features was the contrast between the composure of urban elites and the unruly masses. Within and without the circle formed by the procession, the lazzaroni pressed in a frenzy of emotion. This was much as Braccini described them as acting in the streets on December 16, in marked contrast to how he had remained stoically observant in his palazzo. Gargiulo was faithful to the narratives also in rendering San Gennaro flying above the

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processional crowd. The figure was small, making the saint part of a vast panoramic view, rather than the center of a devotional image.71 That panorama portrayed what Manso had witnessed: a massive and hulking smoke leering at Naples, the miraculous kinetic energy of the saint on an imminent collision course with it, and the citizens in between.

nat u r a l v e r nac u l a r a n d l e a r n e d h i sto r i a The impetus of the three racing lahar flows of December 17, 1631, was so great that they burst into the sea, projecting scalding limbs of volcanic debris hundreds of meters out. The Mediterranean had roiled and steamed before these new projections.72 Elsewhere the sea receded, yawning open a glimpse of the seafloor. “There was so much stuff dragged by the flood and fire to the sea that it retreated for more than a mile from where it was previously, and for a mile further yet the waters were hot and smoking,” wrote Ceraso. These malformed peninsulas were a terrible sight. Floating around and strewn among the fish and sea creatures were the charred bodies of people and livestock, all tangled in a mass of debris from the countryside (fig 2.2).73 In their aftermath, the flows that had streamed down the flanks of Vesuvius occasioned dark humor. During the weeks that followed the eruption, Giambattista Bergazzano—poet and possibly barber to Camillo Caraccio, Prince of Avellino—composed a poem of doggerel lines in Neapolitan, in which a battered and scorched Bacchus bemoaned the destruction caused by his uncle Vulcan, who had ignited the volcano. “I wrote this ridiculous dialogue jokingly during the Carnival days,” Bergazzano explained in the preface to his little work, published by Vincenzo Bove as Bacco arragiato co’ Vorcano descurzo ‘ntra de lloro (1632). Lest his readers suspect that he was capable only of doggerel verse, he remarked that he had just written and performed a play on Vesuvius, that time in “the grave Etruscan style.”74 It is unclear whether the Neapolitan aspired to a greater audience, but his turns of phrase in dialect do suggest how local victims readily sought to explain, commemorate, and even mock the eruption. Some way into the poem, Bergazzano’s maltreated Bacchus complained to Vulcan in the local idiom: “Half the world’s a pyre / ’Cause you lit such a fire / You boiled the tuna / No pot on the wire / Fried minnows and squids nary a fryer / And grilled up a dish / Of mullets and bass and little fish.”75 There was laughter in these lines, but also the reutterance of things seen during the most dramatic phases of the paroxysm. As the sea had retreated and boiled under the volcano’s onslaught, it had flashed glimpses of its creatures amid the stream of other familiar natural things:

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F I G U R E 2 . 2 . Nicolas Perrey (Spanish, d. ca. 1650), Stato del Monte Vesuvio doppo l’ultimo incendio. By permission of Special Collections, Honnold/Mudd Library of the Claremont Colleges­.

the remnants of forests, orchards, and animals that had made up a heavily used and lived-on landscape. Bergazzano’s poem described that horrid convergence of land and sea as a smoking and sputtering morass. “Nice burst you’ve done / The peach and cherry / All in smoke have gone,” Bacchus bemoaned, as he accused Vulcan of incinerating orchards and battering walnut and chestnut trees not to reap their nutty harvest, as it was out of season, but rather to mutilate them: “Can’t you see, it’s winter, and the trees are bare?”76 The eruption had ravaged trees barely budding with the latent promise of an early Mediterranean spring, obliterating their future yield. The botanical and faunal richness of Bergazzano’s verses included birds in their local names—woodcocks, larks, doves, and wild ducks—as well as ancient apple cultivar species endemic to the area. Ultimately, the dialogue hinged on Bacchus’s obvious lament: the massive damage to the volcano’s ancient lagrima and grieco vines, whose cultivation had extended well up Vesuvius before the eruption. The poet employed a local idiom derived from the field and especially the market, a place where the residents of early modern cities regularly encountered nature piled and peddled

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as sustenance. The painful humor of Bacchus’s words surely demanded the audience’s own familiar recognition of the slopes outside the city walls. Bergazzano’s printed verses were probably recited in the streets, where reports of a different sort were circulating within a week of the eruption. It was common for printers all over the peninsula to rush pamphlets of a few pages off their presses at any news of a natural calamity. Written by eyewitnesses, their correspondents, or even the printers themselves, these relationi transmitted the lurid particulars of a catastrophe to an information-hungry audience.77 In 1618, for example, news of an earthquake in northern Italy reached readers to the south as the Vera relatione del grandissimo terremoto e compassionevole infortunio, a ten-page account published in Viterbo.78 Calamity reports often traveled even greater distances. The Roman printer Lodovico Grignani published an account of a Chilean earthquake and mudslide in 1648, a transatlantic version of  the accounts that created plenty of  grist for the mill in disaster-ridden Italy.79 Booklets, handbills, and loose sheets with news were popular printed matter throughout early modern Europe, constituting a merchandise of opinion at once feared and employed by authorities. Disaster relationi were one form of this baroque mass media that swayed opinion outward from its makers to the purchasers of printed material and those who heard its content.80 Eruption chronicles were committed to natural reasoning as well as to memory.81 Printing turned the personal memorias of witnesses into an object of mass consumption. The hybrid nature of the relationi is significant for this reason: they merged humanistic erudition with market demands and public curiosity, as well as with the response of authorities. They transmitted news with immediacy, relaying the observed natural effects, the response of clergy and citizens, and the dimensions of the catastrophe. Relationi published in Naples in the days that followed the 1631 eruption described a dreadful spectacle as refugees from outlying areas sought safety inside the city. The collective memory of thousands of witnesses, the eruption became the focus of how the viceroyal government and the clergy commemorated and explained the calamity, reinforcing visions of a community unified in the face of disaster.82 Market, science, and erudition were closely merged. Giovanni Orlandi’s Dell’incendio del Monte di Somma was for sale from Scoriggio’s press in scarcely a week and was also soon available in Rome, reprinted in another shop.83 Orlandi’s tone was echoed in the many similar versions of the news, suggesting that the eruption provoked especially intense curiosity and perplexity.84 A fundamental concern lay in distinguishing between a disaster attributable to natural causes alone or one, in rare and prodigious instances, occasioned by God’s angry intervention in nature’s habitual order.85

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Sometimes, disasters readily invited a prodigious reading, as was the case with earthquakes in the south of Italy in 1627 and 1638. Portents and prodigies had proliferated in Italy since the Italian Wars of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. News of such signs and occurrences in nature would have had an even broader circulation over a century later, with images and texts moving ideas from and into oral culture.86 The description of an earthquake in Calabria in 1638 announced wearily that “our poor Italy has become, it seems to me, this century’s most famous theater for prodigies,” subsequently asserting that the earthquake’s “prelude might have been the fires that occurred on Vesuvius not long ago.”87 Disasters were not read exclusively in this key, however. Many printed tracts rejected prodigious readings. On Christmas Eve 1599, for example, the waters of the Tiber rose to unprecedented heights in Rome, killing some one thousand citizens. Published after the first wave of reports, Marsilio Cagnati’s De Tiberis inundatione medica disputatio addressed the nature of the flood, presenting evidence that it could indeed be attributed to melting snow and that it was not a sign presaging plague or political upheaval. “I think,” he wrote, “that what happens to the Nile happens to all rivers, truly the Tiber grows and floods with the rains, as reason persuades us, and moreover the occurrences themselves demonstrate: indeed, we who now live have seen and observed the growth of the Tiber now lesser, now greater.”88 Such an assessment did not exclude the possibility that floods would be signs of further scourges, but it stressed caution accompanied by reason, authority, and experience in assigning prodigious meaning.89 As a reassurance that high waters were not a portent indicating impending political upheavals, Cagnati cited the concurrence of papal diplomatic successes and previous disastrous floods of the Tiber, such as the one that had occurred under Paul IV.90 Ultimately, relationi printed in Naples, but also in Rome, Florence, and Venice transformed calamity into news, chronicle, and explanation. Despite their urgent and sensational tones, early reports facilitated an expanding and unfolding response to disaster. They circulated, for example, important details such as the location, chronology, effects, and death toll. By disseminating the views of eyewitnesses, the early reports of the eruption confirmed the fact that its observed effects generally accorded with ancient accounts of Vesuvius, as well as with the theories of more modern authorities such as Georg Agricola. In short, relationi relayed an early surge of information that subsequently sustained the explanations developed in a heftier second wave of printed works. These later iterations—bearing the more formal designation of trattato or discorso—appeared within the order of months but frequently cited the first wave

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of printed works as sources of information. While the writers of the later tracts chronicled the disaster and San Gennaro’s miracle, they were very attentive to the natural causes of volcanism. Gianbernardino Giuliani’s Trattato del Monte Vesuvio e dei suoi incendi was exemplary of the pattern: it related the episode as a triumph for the Count of Monterrey and the clergy of Naples, and then dismissed a prodigious reading of the eruption as a lack of attention to natural causes. The Trattato likely replaced earlier broadsheets in Egidio Longo’s shop in the summer of 1632, since Giuliani’s dedication to the new viceroy’s son, Gaspar de Gusman Count of Olivares, was dated June 2 of that year. Echoing the sentimental attachment to Vesuvius of Renaissance humanists, Giuliani opened with a fond recollection of the once-rounded and verdant form of Vesuvius rising just beyond Naples, a city at rest and justly governed by the viceroy. Here the political tones were unmistakably meant to convey loyalty to Spain. Giuliani then undertook a sixty-page gloss of ancient sources. Humanistic and hagiographic strands intermingled throughout these opening passages of the Trattato, since the eruptions of the Christian period—most notably the very powerful one of 472—were vital to the cult of San Gennaro in Naples. The remaining threequarters of Giuliani’s tract, however, addressed the recent calamity. “It is by now time, leaving so many other authorities, and lingering no longer on the mountain’s past eruptions, that I try best from the lowliness of my intellect to enter into the nature of Vesuvius and the manner of its eruption, which we have all observed all these days with our own eyes.”91 The ensuing chapters related the civic drama—highlighting, for example, the steadfastness of  Leonora Maria de Guzmán, who helped set an example at court by not fleeing—as well as crucial details about the eruption that were vital in assembling an understanding of what was in action in the volcano. Giuliani, for example, “read” the eruptive cloud for what its appearance might have revealed about the composition of substances ignited in the crater. On these visual observations he conjectured that a mixture of sulfur, bitumen, and alum were likely present.92 Even if incorrect, these observations highlighted a vital feature of Giuliani’s tract: the eruption had discernible natural causes. The surviving sources from the immediate aftermath of the eruption do not yield a complete picture of the debate Neapolitans likely had about whether the eruption was prodigious or not. Certainly, the chronicles of Braccini and others, Giuliani’s included, stressed erudite distance from the contortions of fear that gripped the common population between December 16 and 17. The ideal traits of a natural observer were strongly in evidence: a humanist’s knowledge of ancient authorities and attentive recording of the phenomenon were

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requisite. If the Vesuvius tracts unanimously recorded a miraculous intercession on the part of San Gennaro, they also leaned heavily toward explaining the ignition of the eruption as having occurred within the habitual order of nature. Giuliani was probably accurate in asserting that there was a contrast of opinions on this matter. Leaving no doubt as to his own reading, the communal secretary wrote: It was and continues to be the opinion that [these effects of the eruption] are prodigies and portents, because they are rarely-observed effects, and are outside common experience and generate fear . . . but I am of a contrary opinion and say that all these effects and their like are natural, not prodigious, nor portentous, because as Saint Augustine says in book XXX of the City of God in c.8 portento, according to the opinion of Varro, [that] is an effect contrary to nature.93

Here Giuliani restated the distinctions between supernatural, preternatural, and natural phenomena articulated by Scholastic philosophers. “Some effects that occur in a lower elemental nature, that of the Elements, in short, that are beneath the moon, like excessive rains, strong winds, and great earthquakes—which sometimes level a city—these are attributed to inferior nature, even if they do not occur without the will of God.” The Trattato was dedicated to the viceroy’s family; Guiliani’s hierarchy underscored political concerns linked to how one read the sequence of natural causality. That sequence was earthquake—generated by subterranean winds, in line with the Aristotelian paradigm—then ignition, and then all the ensuing observed effects. None of these things exceed the habitual course of nature, nor did they portend further trouble. “Even after such effects it is common to see many calamitous and miserable events, as happened in Sicily, which saw a great civil war [guerra sociale] after that big earthquake, [but] this happened by accident, and not because the earthquake necessarily dragged it on.”94 Thus Giuliani’s reading: San Gennaro’s appearance during the procession of December 17 had miraculously attenuated a natural calamity generated inside the volcano. He did not turn to the supernatural to explain why and how the eruption had occurred. It must be stressed that this explanation could not have expressed a consensus among Neapolitans, but it did highlight a strongly evident discursive and epistemological thrust in the Vesuvius literature. Knowing the volcano was not a matter of identifying its bursts as prodigious but, rather, one of assembling a picture of causality from the history of the observed phenomenon—the passage from natural history and natural philosophy.

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Baroque Naples hungered for miracles. Relics and the miracles associated with them dominated southern religious life, although this was true throughout Catholic Europe. Saints’ cults were the focus of intense civic pride and even fierce competition among religious orders.95 The proximity of the saintly, the proliferation of ex-voto objects, and the strong tones of Neapolitan piety should not be read as exclusive of other ways of understanding nature. One of these, Giuliani’s writing suggests, was the intuition that within the recently awakened form of Vesuvius, nature’s marvelous workings had been secretly active for centuries. The volcano concealed gusts of subterranean winds, the slow accretion and growth of minerals, and the unseen spark of ignition.

coda On Thursday December 18, the Count of Monterrey ordered two scouting parties to approach the volcano. Two men, Scipione Capano and Francesco da Miro, picked their way along the shore and then turned inland. They likely first crossed the Maddalena Bridge over the Sebeto River, then veered sharply eastward in the direction of Madonna dell’Arco, approaching the western slopes of the volcano before the eruption had quieted. Thousands of refugees had been streaming across the Maddalena Bridge for two days. The men moved up-flow toward the disaster site. Reports of thousands of human and animal carcasses littering the countryside gravely concerned Monterrey, who now had to fear the outbreak of disease. Capano and da Miro reported tough going over the broken terrain. They turned back shocked and defeated. In the meantime, Francescantonio di Ligorio and Gianfrancesco di Bianca launched a skiff in attempt to reach Torre Annunziata on the far shore. The sludgy and steamy mess of the lahar foiled their landing. All four scouts reported the terrible suffering of trapped people. There were semivivi—the “half-living”—gesturing for help, clinging to debris, and suffering burns and wounds. Twenty boats were subsequently launched in rescue.96 Some efforts to assist victims were obviously spontaneous and improvised. A military officer, Pietrantonio Ferrante, took in a group of some eighty survivors and fed them for days. In other instances, the viceroy’s orders effectively worked to lessen the catastrophe. City bakers received orders to fire their ovens day and night in an attempt to feed and calm the influx of survivors. Francesco Antonio de Angelis, the chief representative of the popular city ward, stockpiled provisions in the Borgo Santa Maria di Loreto not far outside the eastward facing Porta Nolana.97 The suburban hamlet was clustered not far past the city walls and would have been a logical—and wisely exter-

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nal—staging point for administering aid.98 Soldiers and captains were sent to scout the flames, as if sallying against the Muslim privateers that sometimes raided the islands in the Bay of Naples. The provisioning reflected a marked unease about the potential for social unrest and violence; accounts, in fact, strongly conveyed the image of a city under siege. A few months later, Juan de Quiñones’s El Monte Vesuvio aora la Montana de Soma was printed in Madrid with dedicatory poems by various Spanish authors. “Burning in violent fiery sedition / this snowy hypocrite Obelisk” began one, illuminating the contrast between the volcano’s seditious upheavals and the solid foundations of Philip IV’s universal monarchy. Like local authors, the Spanish alcalde portrayed Naples’s ties to the Habsburgs as unshaken.99 The city had wavered under nature’s assault, but it had held. Quiñones emphasized that he had had to sift through different relaciones in order to discern which ones deserved faith and which deserved to be jettisoned because of their inaccuracy. Accurate knowledge of nature was hard to come by, as was evidenced by the example of “many Spaniards who, ignorant of natural causes,” persisted in the belief that lava was metallic and possibly contained gold. The Spaniard’s quixotic depiction of unlettered soldiers and captains lowering various contraptions into the incandescent flows was certainly in tune with the bold and martial actions some were reputedly stirred to perform during the eruption, but it also conveyed ignorance.100 Good observers of the eruption, the author suggested, were eyewitnesses schooled in natural knowledge. The claim conformed to a pattern of evidence in the 1631 sources: an insistence that the eruption was attributable to natural causes. Thinking about the volcano in these natural terms would not have been an unusual reflex for learned Neapolitan observers. They were conditioned overtly by the Scholastic exegesis of Aristotelian natural philosophy and, less openly, by Renaissance alternatives—Platonism, Lucretian and Epicurean atomism, for instance—as well as by the tradition of exploring exemplified by natural historians and chorographers. Regarding the first strand, it was normative to deploy the maxim Aquinas asserted in his lengthy discussion of earthquakes: Prima causa est voluntas Dei. Aquinas’s understanding of earthquakes, that “the first cause is the will of God,” simply established the acknowledgment that mediantibus causis secundis hoc agit—in other words, that “it occurs through secondary causes.” Those causes did not require God’s immediate will. Aquinas had proposed a simple analogy that would have still held up perfectly in the third decade of the seventeenth century: the limbs of an ill person trembled because of the body’s illness, likewise the earth for its own imbalanced humors.101 Clearly, however, other influences had developed

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in the Renaissance, most visibly in source materials such as Agricola’s De ortu, which had inserted another important set of theories about subterranean heat, in particular, the emphasis on sulfur and bitumen rather than on the vague Aristotelian notion of pneuma heated by the sun.102 Rather than starkly contrasting—some of Agricola’s rhetoric aside—one might categorize the addition of these ideas as a convergence. The bourgeoning practices of climbing and exploring were equally significant. Explorers of the dormant volcano sought its historical and aesthetic qualities, but they also demonstrated the intuition that it might erupt again. Braccini’s recollection of seeing the crater as a younger man, and his description of Stefano Pighio’s earlier climb in which this naturalist had wandered deep into the crater, sustained his understanding of the volcano once it erupted. Magliocco, as well, had figured that Vesuvius was simply biding its time, building the pyre that would some day burst into flame. Beyond that residual memory of volcanism, however, there was another crucial insight that explains how chroniclers and describers of the eruption would have approached understanding volcanism in terms of natural knowledge. Inquiry into nature was itself an exercise in piety. If prodigious and natural causes were gradations of scale that marked God’s ultimate will, such discernment was the yield of  accurate observation and reasoning. The response to Vesuvius in 1631 bore the vivid inflections of baroque piety, no doubt. Accounts of Neapolitans’ behavior strongly suggest that terror and dismay evoked the image of a castigium Dei; many may have believed that the fires of hell had been unleashed on the city. Manso, Braccini, and many others—the learned observers whose records circulated and survived—manifestly did not. What had been supernatural, in contrast, had been San Gennaro’s celestial hand. To confuse the miraculous recoil of the eruptive cloud with the cause of the eruption would have been a failure of reason.

chapter 3

Histories of Ignition: From Historia to Causa

Ash began to fall snowlike over Lecce in the late evening of December 16, 1631, at the end of a day that had dawned, with no premonition, “clear and cold.” The city’s inhabitants watched an ominous blackness advance on the night, as if a shadow were occluding the dark. Some saw an “unusual and laden cloud.” The doctor and astrologer Giovanni Spinola recalled that he held out his hand to the falling flakes and let them settle into his palm. More dense and granular than common ash, the stuff stuck in his hand and reeked of sulfur. Squeezed as one might squeeze a snowball, it held the impression of his fingers, and then, angled to his torch for reflection, twinkled like the night sky. For days afterward, the city streets sparkled under this mysterious covering.1 As Spinola watched an ashy blanket fall over his city that winter evening, he set to describing its unusual appearance. The plume rising from Vesuvius had begun to dissipate rapidly, scattering to the wind. In the days that followed, the inhabitants of Lecce cleared their streets of ash, mounded piles of the stuff where they could, brushed it from their roofs, and tried to resume their daily affairs. After a few weeks of writing, Spinola gave his account to the city’s first and only printer, Pietro Micheli.2 The Discorso sopra l’origine de’ fuochi gettati dal Monte Vesuvio appeared in early 1632, just as works were also appearing in Naples and Rome. “I wrote it in the vernacular tongue against my Genius, as Your Excellency and many others know, so that on this public occasion all might openly and at once enjoy its usefulness and delight,” Spinola explained to the work’s dedicatee, the Florentine gentleman Vincenzo Sirigatti.3 Italian was a sensible choice. The Tuscan vernacular had acquired an especially eminent place in science, thanks in large measure to Galileo’s brilliant pen.

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“Since the reason for my writing is the history of the phenomenon, I do not tarry to begin the first report,” Spinola began, explaining also that he wrote “from the city of Lecce in the Kingdom of Naples where I was present.” News of the eruption had traveled less rapidly than the ash itself, explaining why the night of December 16 generated terrible anxiety in Lecce. Processing crowds snaked through the streets for a few strange days, winding anxious cords of people around the heart of the city. Much the same occurred in Bari, up the Adriatic coast. Many were curious and “wondered about the origin of such a prodigious occurrence,” while the more learned “glossed Aristotle’s Meteorology.” “And then, here came from Naples, distant eight days from Lecce, the ancient news.”4 By then the ejecta from the massive eruptive cloud was trailing well to the southeast, out past the tip of the Italian boot, over the Adriatic and toward the Ottoman Empire. The ash was unlike any Spinola had previously seen, but he surmised it had been created by some kind of combustion. When news of the eruption finally reached him, Spinola moved methodically to narrate and then explain. In the language of seventeenth-century empiricism, Vesuvius had experienced a casus analogous to how a doctor would have identified the instance of illness in a person. But the time-bound features of the eruption, as well as Spinola’s distance from it, exacerbated the problem of accurate description. The Leccese doctor might have had reason to concur with Agricola’s assertion in the first half of the sixteenth century that “on this thing neither is the opinion of the philosophers fully formed.”5 Illustrating the pattern of learned observation of the 1631 eruption, however, Spinola narrated a historia that could sustain a credible natural philosophical explanation. That he felt equipped to give an answer is perhaps more revealing than his theorizing, as it shows how humanism structured scientific understanding. The author had one especially vivid precedent for making a scientific announcement. Two decades had passed since the publication of the Sidereus nuncius in 1611, yet Spinola still seemed electrified by what Galileo had related about the moon’s rough and mountainous surface. By 1632, it was widely apparent to terrestrial observers that the moon had a surface that might have in some fashion resembled that of the earth. Spinola mimicked a similar expression of novelty in his Discorso. He wrote that “Galileo Galilei, among your most noble Florentine geniuses, illuminates that Sun which he has rediscovered.” Did that praise of observation mask a subtle inflammation?6 It is possible. Ritrovato­, as in the sun found anew, seemed to connote Galileo’s heliocentrism and, perhaps more specifically, his battle of words with the Jesuit mathematician Christoph Scheiner over sunspots. Spinola could scarcely resist bashing

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the “infinite mob of Aristotelians” who continued to obscure the progress of a new science. Galileo had developed this trope with formidable rhetorical acumen in the Saggiatore, portraying Aristotelian traditionalists as a storm of bickering starlings. The astronomer’s fate was still unknown in early 1632, of course, since the famous trial and condemnation of his Copernican views only came to a head between the summer and fall of 1633. Spinola would never have foreseen the impending trial. At the same time, he likely knew that that the De revolutionibus had been placed on the Index librorum prohibitorum (listing books prohibited by the Catholic Church) in 1616. Because of that ominous warning, perhaps, Spinola’s astronomical statements spliced Galileo’s observations to a theoretical construct that everyone knew the Tuscan astronomer completely rejected. Tycho Brahe’s was the alternate Jesuit-sanctioned model of planetary position that posited the earth at the center of an orbiting heliocentric swirl of the sun and planets around it. Spinola’s mixed metaphor might have been a disguise. The point really seems to be that the new astronomy served as a metonym for the novelty of a volcanic eruption. Around the same time, readers of Galileo’s Discorso su i due massimi sistemi del mondo (1632) would have discovered Ptolemaic geocentric theory, and more broadly Aristotelian traditionalism, pilloried as the teetering façade of a monstrous edifice, propped here and there by a grotesque support of cables, beams, and struts fashioned from the odds and ends of recalcitrant desperation. Spinola did not mount such a direct attack on Aristotle because there was no coherent alternative to existing theory. Traditionally understood, eruptions were rare and accidental phenomena that were ignited secondarily by the subterranean winds that were believed to cause earthquakes. Earth, water, air and fire formed the constituent swirl of the sublunary world that was ever in motion and recombination. The battle of the elements remained an elegant and compelling vision of natural processes, especially after it had been enriched by the picture of correspondences, affinities and occult forces developed by Renaissance naturalism. But Galileo had put certainty into question in ways that were epistemological and philosophical. Astronomy thus signified the reconfigured knowledge of the moderns. “Even if I might defend Aristotle, I say that others might pause a bit to think that we will sweat, and they will sweat to defend him,” Spinola wrote. He made this statement on the heels of a long digression on planetary motion, where he also asserted that “that infinite mob of Aristotelians, don’t know what the Heavens are, and as such dispute around the solidity of the [Celestial Spheres] and from this false proposition they run into other errors, since the Heavens are not like the layers of an onion, one upon the other.” Spinola

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announced his modernity, and perhaps his debt to Galileo’s writings, when he explained that “this truth is not discernible through opinions, but through mathematical demonstration.”7 Discorso actually touched a problem elaborated long before Galileo’s astronomy raised the stakes. That problem was the traditional opposition between philosophers and mathematicians regarding the real versus the hypothetical function of astronomical models. Ptolemy’s model worked mathematically, but synching all its postulated epicycles, equants, and eccentrics with an Earth-centered Aristotelian cosmology founded on uniform circular motion had never been easy. One way out of the tangle had been to consign astronomy purely to hypothesis.8 Galileo’s realist and not simply instrumentalist or hypothetical treatment of Copernicanism was surely already evident to many. Spinola was wise enough to see the risks of taking Galileo too far. He drew a line by asserting the reality of the Tychonian planetary model. The enhancements of Galilean vision were unmistakable, however. The planets, he wrote, “rotate like so many balls” in the orbits and were not fixed, as Aristotle had imagined, on concentric celestial spheres. The heavens had the sharp relief given them by the Tuscan astronomer’s telescope, and they whirred in the widening ethereal of the new astronomy. It was a cobbling together that Galileo would have fiercely rejected, but it enabled Spinola to position his explanation where he felt it belonged. Digressions on the new science allowed Spinola to trace his way back to the eruption itself, so their function was also methodological. He wrote, “I’m going to say that an ordinary Philosopher will feel stupid when he well considers why some plants, trees, buildings and fortresses notably of every sort remained intact near the mountain, while in more distant places were destroyed . . . I say that marvel arises from an ignorance of causes.”9 This assertion was in many ways deeply traditional, since it harkened back to the suspicion with which medieval natural philosophers had treated wonder as a good starting point for natural inquiry. Spinola did not jettison the authority of Aristotle, but he adamantly maintained the validity of other epistemologies. Vesuvius, for example, evidenced the astral affinities that flowed like channels from the heavens to the earth. Not only astronomy but also its then-kindred science of astrology highlighted a sort of renewed knowledge: “How truly Astrology might be excellent Philosophy, because it discerns primary causes and discovers the far secrets of nature.”10 It was a typically syncretistic statement combining the formalisms of Aristotelian science with the Renaissance sciences. Like other tracts from the early 1630s, the Discorso had an uneven afterlife. Much later, in the 1770s, William Hamilton read it when he was writing Ob-

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servations on Mount Vesuvius, Mount Etna, and Other Volcanoes, Published in a Series of Letters (1774). Like his predecessors in the Renaissance and the baroque, Hamilton scoured the historical record left by previous observers.11 Spinola’s observations, in fact, helped the Englishman discern the pattern of Vesuvius’s previous eruptive plumes. Despite this reliance, Hamilton wrote of the eruption in 1631 that “the inhabitants were very greatly alarmed, not being able to conceive the occasion of such a phenomenon.”12 He was perhaps a little more sanguine about the abilities of some Italian observers, like Spinola and Giulio Cesare Braccini, the latter whom he admired for having had the pluck to measure the eruptive cloud’s altitude. Any such recognition on Hamilton’s part, however, had to run countervailing to his impression that local sensibilities pulsed toward hyperbole. More fairly, Neapolitan baroque views of Vesuvius acknowledged less separation between what we might term “nature” and “culture” or “history.” Vesuvius singulares est mons (Vesuvius is a singular mountain), penned one unknown writer in Naples, as he compiled a jumble of quotes and fragments of description on the volcano in an attempt to determine whether its two peaks constituted a single mountain—a question of etymology but also of science.13 The historical and natural features of the volcano were inseparable. After his own observations of an eruption in 1767, Hamilton intuited that the 1631 eruption was vastly more powerful than anything he was likely to observe in his own lifetime. He reached this conclusion because the appearance and dynamics of that eruption suggested to him that the previously obstructed conduit was now freed up and able to release the volcano’s pent up forces with less violence.14 Baroque observers were not dissimilar from Hamilton in this very crucial respect—indeed, later observers relied on this method of inquiry, which had established precedents. For Spinola, historia and causa were fundamentally linked. This meant that the “history” of the instance, or the casus, was vital to discerning what had occasioned it. In that respect, the Discorso’s movement from description to final causes fit a pattern. The volcano watcher assembled historia from experience—experientia—and proceeded to causal reasoning. But if the record of ancient observers was credible information, Vesuvius chroniclers also knew they had in one terrifying pulse vastly expanded the inheritance of previous authoritative accounts. Things seen and related were ultimately related to a more theoretical question: from whence and through what ignition? For lettered and learned observers of the eruption, the causes of volcanism could only be assembled through accurate historical narration. That type of chronicling projected scientific curiosity onto a landscape previously fashioned by humanistic discourse.

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ignition A vast and smoldering scar stared back at Naples. For many who surveyed the aftereffects of the 1631 eruption closely, natural inquiry was not separable from devotion. Pietro Asterio prefaced his Discorso aristotelico del terremoto novamente accorso nella fidelissima citta’ di Napoli by asserting that “it should not generate marvel to see that to the institute of pious works there is today added the curious labor of discovering the secrets of nature.” Asterio might have felt a survivor’s sense of relief. Like anyone in Naples, he could have looked out over the ravaged slopes of Vesuvius and felt himself witness to a sort of fragile grace. From the Vomero hill set against the back of the former Spanish encampment that grew into the Spanish Quarters and on which loomed the sentinel bulk of Castel Sant’Elmo, the view out past the city walls would have made amply visible the scarring flows. Naples lay intact amid a devastated countryside; such a prospect required prayer and reflection but also fostered an urgent and practical need to understand. What had happened? Asterio proclaimed his intent thus: “So that the cause of this might be known, and from that some remedy be found.” “It’s the right question; the labor has the common good in mind” he continued.15 These impulses—explanation, prediction, even possibly prevention—had ample precedents in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writings on floods and earthquakes, so it is not at all surprising to encounter them in this instance. Asterio assumed that his readers possessed a common understanding of the empirical and observational dimensions of natural inquiry. That assumption oriented the most pressing question as a scientific one. Had the eruption been a fire, an incendio or conflagratio? Had it been an earthquake? Was it possibly the former triggering the latter, as the Neapolitan priest would eventually conclude?16 In spite of this typological uncertainty, it seemed possible to discern the contours of an explanation. Scraps of theory could be extracted from natural philosophy, astrology, alchemy, metallurgy, mineralogy, and pyrotechnics but also from what the historical record revealed. Asterio attempted an assemblage. The title page of his work included an engraving of a fiery Vesuvius accompanied with the motto terrat et illuminat: “It dismays and illuminates.” The assertion squared the reader to the necessity of discerning causes, so as to avoid the ignorant and contorted reaction the priest might have been suggesting was common to the masses of Naples. In a section titled “Declaration on the Causes and Effects of This Earthquake,” the priest advanced the analogy of a giant furnace. While the analogy helped, it did not contain all of the observed phenomena. Laboring over a

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distinction between the tremors felt preceding the eruption and the eruption itself, Asterio found it likely that the two things—shaking and ignition—were causally related. This “passion of Naples’s terrain” showed that the entire region surrounding the city concealed “in its bowels a mover of great violence.”17 Very likely, the more familiar terrestrial phenomenon had occasioned the latter, shaking a large store of combustibles into ignition. The crater of Vesuvius must have concealed just such a natural process: “It must be thus assumed as a natural truth, that this is the property of this mountain—to be a great fiery furnace, always apt to burn, whenever within her there is generated matter for combustion, as well as the fire to spark it and light it.”18 Others drew similar conclusions. On the subject of that spark, in fact, one might imagine the stroke of numerous pens, as in the convent of Santa Maria della Verità in Naples on March 25, 1632. That day, the discalced Augustinian friar Francesco Agnello finished the dedication to his treatise on Vesuvius. As the crow flew, it was roughly ten Roman miles to the shattered crater, but the view of it would have been at least partly obstructed by the caldera wall left over from the Plinian eruption of the first century. He must have worked hard over the roughly three months since December 16, managing roughly one hundred pages, and ultimately received the license to publish from his superiors three weeks after that, on April 12, 1632.19 Agnello’s dedicatee was Pio Della Marra, abbot and scion of a powerful family seated in one of the noble urban councils, the Seggio della Montagna. “The Mountain” was composed of baronial families located on the city’s higher ground—but in this instance the topographical designation might have occasioned an all together different and fitting resonance. The Augustinian friar struck much the same tone as Asterio, prefacing his work by noting that “you cannot penetrate the nature of whatever object if not through a knowledge of causes.”20 It is here apparent that the theological and philosophical thrust of Agnello’s approach might have been lost on later readers, as evident when the book was included in a nineteenth-century bibliography of works on Vesuvius but then junked for its unscientific approach.21 Intending to elucidate scientifically, Agnello addressed a question circulating among the “vulgar” and levied to him by fellow clergy as well. Were the recent fires of Vesuvius, the fires of hell?22 The query served to frame a natural explanation, first by highlighting the extremes of vulgar simplicity and second by scaling phenomena observed in nature. There were, the Augustinian noted, historical precedents for believing that eruptions of Vesuvius had on occasion been the result of God’s direct and presumably angry intervention in the order of nature and, therefore, miraculous.

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An unknown reader jotted down “471” in the margins of the Trattato copy I consulted, probably intending to refer to the large and well-chronicled eruption of 472. This marginal reference to a historic eruption appeared next to a paragraph in which Agnello cited Peter Damian’s chronicle of Ottonian Italy. That chronicle reported that a miraculous fire of Vesuvius had portended the death of the Prince of Capua.23 Would the reader have intended a contrast or a comparison? Agnello, we can be certain, would not have denied the possibility of Vesuvius being miraculously ignited. Yet he was not at all inclined to see the recent eruption as being anything but an infrequent though perfectly natural occurrence. Agnello was clearly working from modern sources as well, assembling them alongside the traditional body of historical and natural philosophical knowledge. Agricola’s De ortu et causis, for example, lent authority to one of the Trattato’s central assertions: “Here we have through natural reasoning proved the cause, not only of the earthquakes, but also of the fires of Vesuvius, to have been exhalation of spirits violently chambered, without there being the need to recognize any miracle, or infernal fire.”24 Agnello had read natural history, especially Agricola, who had done so much to give a breadth of subjects—including volcanism—elegant humanistic expression. In the eighth chapter of the book, titled “Digression: How Art Imitates Nature,” Agnello quipped about the way in which alchemists created their own miniature volcanoes when they sought the transmutation of metals in the furnaces they strenuously kept aflame—there was no better way to imagine, he noted, what might have been occurring on a far greater scale in Vesuvius. The image of self-immolating alchemists was comical, of course, but the furnace analogy was a deliberate heuristic that explained one way of getting at the matter of volcanic combustion. By citing alchemy, Agnello electively ignored Agricola’s suspicion regarding its validity in explaining volcanic ignition.25 Astrology figured prominently, in this instance also requiring some careful mending of ideas that were not always compatible. Agnello wrote that “I do not want to express my opinion on this, but [rather] hear the many excellent astrologers of this city, more so because astrological reasoning is not by all esteemed (though granted not by all of equal virtue).” Agnello seems to have been typical in allowing for explanations that could not be contained by traditional Aristotelian natural philosophy. It is on these terms that Agnello suggested his science of many tastes—in line with the culinary analogy that had opened the book. Every science by necessity pursued causes, “but they do not all seek the principal one in similar fashion” he explained.26 The Augustinian’s conclusion as to the most likely cause was not unlike Spinola’s in the Discorso,

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seemingly melding Aristotelianism with Renaissance science: “Many spirits having been gathered beneath the earth on account of the Sun’s force, with the coldness of the eclipsed moon they suffer greater contrariety, and so afflicted shake the earth.”27 Assembling the dynamics of eruptivity into an explanatory picture was a formidable task. At the same time as constructs like Agnello’s clearly positioned volcanism in the realm of natural processes made intelligible by Scholastic natural philosophy, alchemy and astrology, the peculiar and rarely seen features of volcanism required constant readjustment. It is striking, in effect, how this has always been something of the geologist’s paradox: empiricism, and yet the powerful necessity of inference, deduction, projection, and imagination when mapping what lies below ground or in the deep past.28 Was volcanic heat located at great depth, where not even the most daring naturalist had any hope of ever descending? Was it closer to the surface, as the majority of authors had postulated? How could this heat exist without air and without exhausting its fuel supply? Presumably, the long intervals between eruptions—now established by turning to historical evidence—suggested they accrued combustibles and then burned themselves out. Observation, history, and inference were all necessary. One might stress that it was this conglomerate of historical and recent observations, combined with traditional natural philosophy and other complementary bodies of natural knowledge, that allowed for a reasonable set of explanations for the 1631 eruption. Furthermore, important precedents for nearly a century—between the late 1530s and the early 1600s—had already established Neapolitan knowledge of volcanism. The obvious first instance had been Monte Nuovo and investigations of the Campi Flegrei, but there were other pertinent examples of naturalists turning their attention to volcanoes. Backtracking about a generation, one notable predecessor was Ferrante Imperato (1550–1625), a polymathic Neapolitan apothecary, collector, and naturalist active in the late 1500s and early 1600s. In 1599, Imperato and the printer Costantino Vitale collaborated on a vastly ambitious book titled the Historia naturale. The Historia approached natural history in a fashion reminiscent of Pliny’s: with an encyclopedic vision of nature that embraced everything worth knowing. But it also reflected the very current practice of display and collection of naturalia as a means to classify. Imperato fashioned his book into a literary version of his real-life museum. Ultimately, only rocks and minerals made up the vast bulk of Imperato’s book, possibly because the naturalist was pressed for time.29 Historians have suggested that the voluminous work was a good example of the effort to manage the expansion of knowledge resulting

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from both the wider availability of classical texts and the empirical information being compiled by naturalists, among whom Imperato certainly counted himself.30 The book was largely concerned with the materials of nature, even if it did not embrace the full range of the naturalist’s real museum collection. Folded into long and sophisticated explanations of minerals and the formation of fossils there were also significant passages on the causes of volcanism. The tenth book in Imperato’s study of minerals was titled “In Which We Consider the Generation of Subterranean Fires: and Their Various Effects, That Elementary Bodies, from the Force of Fire, and Light Originate.” The naturalist began with the observation that underground fires burned where there was alum, sulfur, and bitumen available for combustion, though he recognized that he had no clear picture of ignition or as to why eruptive activity endured in some places. In the bigger picture, subterranean conflagrations possibly pointed to a constant presence of heat in the earth. Adopting a microcosm/macrocosm analogy often employed in the natural disciplines during the Renaissance, Imperato argued that just like the human body was warm in its core, perhaps so too was the earth. He did not, however, go much further than this explanation, limiting himself to the observation that, “in all the earth the internal heat is gathered in its most intimate parts.”31 Evidence of heat abounded near Naples, even before Vesuvius erupted. Pozzuoli, “surrounded by mountains similar to a Theater,” was one of the principal places in the world where “fires” (the Italian edition of his work used alternately the words fiamme, fuochi, and incendi) habitually broke through the crust of the earth. Imperato offered some further conclusions on why it was that the Campi Flegrei, the nearby island of Ischia, Etna in Sicily, and, importantly, Vesuvius either were burning or had once done so in the past. Though Imperato argued for the existence of some inner heat intrinsic to the earth, he postulated that effects near the surface generated volcanism. Among these was the possibility that the sun heated reservoirs of marine water contained in the hollows of some mountains. The built-up heat, finding one vent blocked by the cool seawater, would exploit fractures in the earth such as volcanoes. This, he suggested, explained why volcanism existed near the coast of Italy and on islands.32 Imperato’s theorizing at least suggested that he grappled with the vast challenge of relating the observable surface effects of volcanism with what was latent, inscrutable, and subterranean. Familiar volcanic landscapes perhaps suggested to Imperato a concept vital to volcanology, even if he could not explain its deeper cause: the alternation of dormancy and eruptivity. He noted the following in the Historia: “There are some places that for a long period

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of time show no sign of flame, and then after a long rest hugely powerful fires burst forth from them. Such a place is our mount Vesuvius.” He had no answer as to why this occurred, though his immediate comparison to the “mountain said of ash near Pozzuoli, which was first a plain, then built up suddenly and vomited flame, and then there remained a cavity similar to that of Vesuvius,” possibly suggests that he believed that it took a long time for flammable materials to accrue again.33 How to fill the latent mystery and find the stuff of fire? It was possible to turn to mineralogy, metallurgy, fossil hunting, alchemy, iatrochemistry, botany, and even pyrotechnics to fill in the basic structure established by ancient theories—volcanoes as furnaces—with the matter of ignition.34 The decay of organic matter, for example, was identified with the formation of mineral substances like bitumen, associated with volcanism at least since Agricola’s writings in the sixteenth century. Tellingly, some of the most sophisticated students of Vesuvius’s eruption in 1631 would build on notions of organic and inorganic matter of the sort elaborated by Imperato.35 The boundaries and distinctions between organic and inorganic matter were very hotly debated in this period. This preoccupation was tied to the structure of how Renaissance naturalists sought to explain matter, reproduction, speciation, and the classification of things. Petrified wood, for instance, presented a baffling sort of problem, as it seemed to occupy a kind of middle nature. Federico Cesi, for example, identified officinae naturae, or “workshops of nature,” where the admixtures occurred. One of these was the ignificium Puteolarum, presumably the Solfatara crater near Pozzuoli (visited by Cesi in 1604).36 Experience with eruptions led naturalists to believe that they could locate such places and make them significant sites of empiricism and theorizing. Scipione Falcone, an herbalist who referred himself as a “spetial di medicina,” explained in his Discorso naturale delle cause et effetti causati nell’incendio del Monte Veseo (1632) that the recent eruption was analogous to the manifestation of illness in the human body. Working as a humanist, too, Falcon extracted from past accounts that the long dormancies of Vesuvius had subsequently ended in powerful eruptions. Like the diagnosis of disease, the vocano’s previous illnesses needed accounting. Vesuvius was sick, its morbo shown by its eviscerated and spent form.37 Through analogy and geographical specificity Falcone explained the relationship between watching and theorizing: Before continuing, it seems necessary for me to declare how this fire ignited these substances. For this reason, I say that it could have been an underground

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fire that ignited it, or perhaps some effect of a fixed star, or wandering one, like a crystal mirror in the Sun that ignites fire. Or perhaps, it might have occurred through Antiperistasis of contrary qualities as air vapors; or perhaps subterranean sulfur vapors. Or perhaps it was the concussion of rock against rock, as we might strike a flint stone. Be what it may, I did not see it.38

The natural philosophical elements in Falcone’s statement were recognizably traditional. Antiperistatic doctrine, for example, explained the action of two contrary qualities, such as heat and cold, whereby the action of one excited the other. Falcone included this as one possible efficient cause, as colder air vapors might have excited hot ones into ignition through antiperistasis. Falcone might have gleaned his understanding from influential Scholastic works such as that by the Jesuit Francisco Suarez (1548–1617), Disputationes Metaphysicae.39 The material cause of the eruption—adhering here to Aristotle’s notion of material, efficient, formal, and final causes—in contrast, could be found in the various combustibles like sulfur contained in the volcano. These were the things naturalists had to investigate first. The herbalist and apothecary wrote, “I say that the matter that keeps the mountains in Italy burning, and maybe all the other ones that from time to time are said to ignite (like the present Vesuvius) are certain fatnesses of the earth, generated beneath the sea.”40 He explained, also, that he had neither smelled nor heard reports of sulfurous gases during the eruption, even though he knew these to be associated with the fumaroles of the Campi Flegrei.41 Because of the very dark, dense, and enduring nature of the eruptive cloud, he also excluded a composition similar to gunpowder, since the latter tended to produce smoke of a lighter appearance that rapidly vanished.42 The eruption, conversely, generated the dark globular smoke of some other combustible, which Falcone concluded might have been a combination of dense bitumen compressed in the volcano’s core and an upper layer of liquid naphtha above.43 In what deep channels and for how long might Vesuvius burn? Falcone entertained the idea that an unseen web of fire stretched its fiery tendrils out beneath Naples to the Aeolian Islands and Sicily. The long dormancy of Vesuvius, alternatively, strongly suggested the rare and accidental quality of its eruptions.44 The historical record of these eruptions appeared in a table he and the printer Ottavio Beltramo placed in the book (fig. 3.1). If the draft of an unpublished manuscript on the eruption is any indication, it may have been common for authors to begin with this historical component.45 For his part, Falcone devised a table of the sequence, year, interval, and sources for all the eruptions recorded since the birth of Christ, coupling it with an avowal that it

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F I G U R E 3 . 1 . Table charting the historical record of Vesuvius’s eruptions, from Scipione Falcone, Discorso naturale delle cause et effetti causati nell’incendio del Monte Vesevo (Naples, 1632). Courtesy of Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Roma; unauthorized reproductions of this image are prohibited.

required further emendation, research, and correction. Notably, twenty-three different “ignitions” occurred, the last of which was tabulated with two clear claims by the author: “By me seen and written of.”46 This was a naturalist’s sort of autoptic testimony, leveraged in support of the table’s classificatory scheme meant to establish the periodicity of eruptions. Falcone’s table evoked those used by naturalists to illustrate collections of plant, animal, and mineral specimens and endow these with some semblance of classification. He very well could have been familiar with this type of illustration and its use as an organizational representation of pharmaceutical plants. The ignition table (“Tavola del numero dell’accensioni”) might rightfully be seen as essentially a variation on a schema naturalists generally put to other uses.47 Falcone’s table is a visual clue to how he imagined the natural history of Vesuvius might create a catalog of eruptions, their intervals, and their observed effects. Furthermore, by identifying the gaps in his historia and the need for progressive emendation, the apothecary acknowledged the place of the subject

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in a broader discursive field open to continuing revision. Seventeenth-century empiricism embraced history and nature, folding both into a common discourse enriched by the erudition of texts and by experience. The ignition table was a technology, a tool that helped arrange and classify an increasingly diffused body of knowledge on the natural world. It identified the growth of that knowledge as sequential. Ultimately, Falcone’s Discorso identified the continuous observation of  Vesuvius as a new purview for the local naturalist. In a landscape full of other natural attractions, the prospects for Neapolitan science had actually looked good for some decades. Backtracking to the very beginning of the 1600s, it is possible to see why the kind of naturalistic appreciation shown for the volcano was entirely consonant with earlier ambitions in Neapolitan science.

lincean ambitions In 1604, a young prince of Acquasparta, Federico Cesi, took his first trip to Naples, partly in an effort to distance himself from his father’s persistent efforts to quash his nascent Accademia dei Lincei.48 Cosmopolitan and bustling Naples had a number of attractions, not least of them two highly respected naturalists, Ferrante Imperato and Giovanni Battista Della Porta. Della Porta was really a figure of the preceding generation, an all-around expert on how to reveal the secrets of nature by reading its surface signs and characteristics, but the two struck up a lasting friendship. Imperato, younger, was renowned for his studies of fossils and plants, and beyond him, Cesi also befriended Fabio Colonna, a promising young botanist who pioneered the use of etching for the illustration of plants in his Phytobasanos (1592). The favorable impression Naples made on the founder of the Lincei was palpable. Of his first trip to Naples he wrote a friend: Naples, paradise of delights, full of amenities and pleasures, relaxed in its loveliness, most beautiful, gentle, and charming; the abode of fertile Ceres, abundant Neptune, and most pleasing and courteous Venus . . . there is much to tell you, but know how much I would have liked, if I had the Linceans with me, to establish my abode here.49

Cesi never realized this ambition, but in the years that followed, contact with Naples continued. He ventured south again in 1610, this time to offer Della Porta membership in the Lincei.

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Yet another Neapolitan joined the Lincei in 1612. He was Nicola Antonio Stelliola (1547–1623). Like the Dominican heretics Giordano Bruno and Tommaso Campanella—the former destined to be famously burned in Rome in 1600, while the latter languished in a Neapolitan dungeon for nearly three de­ cades—Stelliola had run afoul of the Inquisition in the late sixteenth century. He was briefly jailed for holding heretical views. Also like Bruno and Campanella, he later became an ardent supporter of Galileo and lent himself to the Lincei’s various projects.50 The number of fields in which he hoped to advance the science of the Lincei was encyclopedic, including architecture, botany, pharmacology, astronomy, mathematics, and a number of pursuits related to geological phenomena. Stelliola’s correspondence with Cesi in the 1610s reveals his ambitions for a new Lincei hub of scientific activity. In 1612, Stelliola told Cesi that he was working to promote the interests and pursuits of the Lincei in Naples, “seeing Your Excellency’s fervor for erecting the noble edifice of the sciences in Naples, and arguing that this be done with the generous spirit of illustrating with virtues the present and future centuries.” Stelliola referred to himself as an “Architect, Academic, Lyncean Professor of the Divine Science of the Encyclopedia” and offered Cesi, “proof of the worth of said science.”51 Believing that all knowledge descended from a single supreme science that had been entrusted to certain men in the ancient world, Stelliola proposed a return to an encyclopedic wisdom that might liberate men. His model was the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, who had moved his school from Samos to southern Italy. This fact echoed not only Stelliola’s desire for intellectual freedom from the constraints of Aristotelianism but also his engagement with fellow radical thinkers like Campanella, who envisioned the possibilities knowledge afforded for freeing peoples from tyranny and oppression.52 Stelliola hoped that Cesi would support his plan for an Encyclopedia Pythagorea, “recognizing the merits of this high speculation, mother of the arts and sciences, which has fallen into oblivion over the past centuries for lack of masters, will now restore it to the world with universal benefit and immortal glory.”53 The Pythagorean school he promoted was generally understood to be antithetical to Aristotelian doctrines and Copernican in its astronomical leaning. Stelliola was fascinated by the telescope and aimed to bring his expertise to bear on “celestial architecture,” but his encyclopedic range of interests extended to other applied sciences as well.54 In the same letter of 1612, Stelliola provided an initial list of the pursuits particularly suited to the Lincean enterprise in Naples:

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Of art and nature; Of the natural composition of the terrestrial orb . . . Of the diverse natural movements of waters and tides; Of Fire and its faith, and the reciprocal effects of heat and cold; Of terrestrial mines; Of animal structure; Of celestial structure; Of the structure and parts of plant life; Of the investigation of volcanism, and the admirable effects that derive from it.55

The two pursuits that preceded the investigation of vulcania on Stelliola’s list—botany and astronomy—dominated the most ambitious projects of the Lincei, and nothing ever seems to have come of Stelliola’s suggestion, which surely meant exploration of the Campi Flegrei. We find him three years later still writing Cesi, this time with a report on a possible location for a Neapolitan observatory. Stelliola wrote that he could scarcely imagine a better place than a location near the city’s Porta Reale. He explained that the location would work for celestial observations but was also spacious enough for other kinds of investigation and socializing.56 Not long after, he published what was essentially an index of the Encyclopedia Pythagorea, but his fullest ambitions were never realized. A Neapolitan community of naturalists continued to contribute significantly to Lincean projects, especially through Fabio Colonna’s botanical and technical projects.57 The patch of land Stelliola picked out along the tuck of the Posillipo promontory closest to Naples would have afforded an excellent and relatively safe view of Vesuvius’s eruption. When the eruption occurred in 1631, however, much had changed for the Lincei. Cesi was dead, as was Stelliola. There is some evidence, however, that Galileo became aware of the recent eruption thanks to a correspondent. In early January 1632, a letter from Lodovico Lodovici might have reached the astronomer. Lodovici reported that: Over the past few days in our lands in the Marches, as well as Spoleto and Perugia, a number of explosions, like cannon shots, were heard over the space of two days, on the 16th and 17th of the past month. It is thought that this may have originated in some way from the earthquake that happened in Naples on the 15th, or from the flames that came out of Vesuvius at the same time. We await your opinion on the matter, kissing your hands with the greatest humility and affection, and wishing also the happiest new year, and many more to come. Your most affectionate and devoted servant, Lodovico Lodovici.58

Whether Galileo ever contemplated clearing up Lodovici’s uncertainty is not easily determined, since no sustained reply was ever forthcoming. It would

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likely have been unwise for him to delve into the matter, especially since the Neapolitan Jesuits had their own version in circulation. Their voice was among the loudest in the chorus of scientific responses to the eruption. Father Giulio Cesare Recupito’s De Vesuviuano incendio nuntius was dedicated to Francesco Barberini, Urban VIII’s nephew. The Jesuit tract was introduced with the same mellifluous flattery that the Lincei had used to cultivate Urban’s goodwill in the heyday of Galileo’s success. Not the herald of any new discovery, however, the Nuntius might have seemed more like a champion of orthodoxy plated in the arguments of traditional Scholastic reasoning. Accounts of volcanology have accorded it little place, though it was among the most long-lived works on the 1631 eruption. In truth, ignorance of the work is unwarranted. The Jesuit’s tract illuminates a vital feature of the baroque response to Vesuvius. It demonstrates how erudition and history were vital features of seventeenth-century empiricism.59 At least in the seventeenth century, this book became part of the canon of understanding.

j e s u i t o b s e r va t i o n s Recupito’s volcano treatise bristled with erudition—its recondite Latin prose alone distinguished it from the majority of 1631 accounts written in Italian. The Neapolitan printer Egidio Longo was the first to print it in his shop and, soon after, Ottavio Beltramo followed suit. Both printers had been busy with works on the eruption for months, but Recupito’s tract enjoyed special importance because of its provenance and intended audience. New editions continued to appear at intervals in Naples, Rome, Poitiers, and Leuven well into the 1670s. The work was heavily didactic, doctrinal, and staunchly Aristotelian. It left no doubt where the Jesuits stood. The Nuntius would have drawn advantage from the author’s well-known sermonic abilities, as well as from his order’s great reputation for scientific acumen. It obviously aimed to a high readership as well, since it was dedicated to Francesco Barberini.60 One force behind the tract’s publication was the competition between religious orders. Such rivalries were a regular feature of Counter-Reformation ecclesiastical life, and Naples had a kaleidoscopic variety of religious institutions—churches, convents, orders, observant and regular clergy, and lay confraternities—that all vied for significance and prestige. Capuchins, Theatines, Carmelites, Dominicans, Augustinians, Jesuits, and regular clergy had jostled and shoved during the December 18 procession. They continued to do so figuratively in the weeks that followed the eruption’s wane, but the Jesuits were especially well equipped to be heard in this flurry

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of words since they possessed a wide network of correspondents around the world. Recupito, for his part, came from a prominent Neapolitan family and already enjoyed prestige as a preacher.61 Despite the existence of powerful tools of repression like the Roman Inquisition and the Index librorum prohibitorum, the Church was not singly bent on scientific obscurantism. The trial of Galileo in the spring and summer of 1633 would leave an enormously bitter legacy, of course. The Jesuits, as is well known, were initially receptive to Galileo’s astronomy. In this light, the Nuntius reflected features of its milieu. The opening up and unraveling of Aristotelian natural philosophy should not be viewed through a Manichean opposition between “Galilean” science and traditionalism. A more accurate picture is one of unfolding, coexistence, and competition between different traditions of natural knowledge. Furthermore, the Jesuits strongly defended Aristotelianism partly out of the assumption that natural philosophy fit progressively with theology, in an ascending epistemology that ultimately aspired to knowledge of salvation.62 Parts of the book were indeed a sermon that rose and fell with prose ekphrasis. Pliny’s pinelike eruptive cloud opened the scene of December 16 and 17, roiling above Naples and sweeping a mass of terrified people into the countryside. The Jesuit related how the Prince of Caserta, Antonio Matteo di Acquaviva, who had been called to the window by his fearful wife, passed from annoyance to blanched terror.63 This scene of the Neapolitan noble family urgently calling a priest in expectation of last rites was of the sort Recupito specialized in later years, when he wrote on the industry of a proper death.64 Recupito depicted the dawn on the first day of the eruption as the lifting of a curtain on a five-act drama that opened on a terrifying scene. Primus terror, terraemotus—first among the terrors had been the quaking ground, with an ensuing fall of ash, followed by stones and, finally, lava and the lahar.65 “On that day in which the Mountain was first observed to burn, ash rained on a good many cities of the Neapolitan kingdom, [like] Benevento, Barletta, Bari, Taranto, and Lecce: to which the ash cloud arrived at the twenty-second hour of the day, covering an eight-day journey in as many hours.” 66 This was the ash that Spinola saw cause great consternation among the Leccese on the night of December 16. “The third terror was the fall of stones,” wrote Recupito, splicing the recently transpired horrors into an image from Pliny the Younger’s letters: people had tied pillows to their heads for some protection from the pumice stones.67 Each terror was the historical sequence of a natural phenomenon. The citizens of Barletta on the Adriatic, for example, heard the loud booms and feared

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that two great squadrons had begun to clash beyond the horizon. Elsewhere, villagers ignorant of the natural causes of the powerful thumps they heard had rallied to arms.68 The scores of pages that described the natural features of the eruption—the earthquakes, the ash, the larger ejecta and clasts, the lava, and the lahar—recounted their particularity through the ars historica. Though it was necessary to distinguish between historia humana, historia naturalis, and historia divina, a shared trait of all history was that of recording time- and location-bound particulars and facts, the latter being an existing category of legal reasoning. History was a form of empirical knowledge propaedeutic to understanding causes.69 That is exactly how Recupito’s vivid narrative functioned in the Nuntius. To elaborate: the Jesuit’s empiricism was embedded in a rhetorical couching perfectly intelligible as scientific to his learned seventeenth-century readers. A history of the eruption served related and intertwined ends. It chronicled human action amid the calamity, described the course of nature, and ultimately embedded its pulsations—which were only the vexations and rhythms of the temporal world—within the general unfolding of God’s plan. “Vesuvius was, as we might say, two-headed, rising into the sky with twin and very high cliffs,” wrote Recupito as he drew to a sum of his observations and prepared to examine the cause of the eruption.70 He was repeating the humanists’ trope of twin-peaked or twin-headed Vesuvius, but that erudite reference introduced an observation of an empirical nature—to be precise, one derived from the experientia of local inhabitants just in advance of the eruption. Recupito noted that hunters who ventured high on Vesuvius always consistently described a relatively broad and flat plain separating the two steep peaks of the volcano. These hunters, however, reported changes in that appearance in mid-December 1631. “That [was shown], if faith is to be had in the inhabitants of Ottaviano who went to that place hunting a little before the day the conflagration was obstructed, by the two sides having come together”71 Recupito’s intuition was that some enormous obstruction had blocked the normal passage of humors from the volcano’s crater, generating these contortions of the rock before the eruption. One might consider how Recupito assembled this picture: Cassiodorus and Dio Cassius, cited in the margins, lent authority to Vesuvius’s normal biceps appearance, while the eyewitness reports of  huntsmen indicated its altered appearance on the eve of the eruption. Historical authority and even vulgar common experience sustained the description of how the mountain changed. “This is the state of the mountain, while I write this.” The Jesuit finished his history of the eruption with a survey of how the demolished volcano appeared

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in 1632 while he penned the Nuntius. The Somma caldera wall was traditionally considered to be one of the volcano’s two peaks; the sharp rise of the cone leading to the main crater had faced it before 1631. Now that other side sat far below like a mutilated and eviscerated corpse. Gutted and opened—Recupito labored the cadaver analogy—Vesuvius had collapsed in on itself. Thin trails of white, greenish, and black smoke whispered out of the cracked and creviced remains. A murmuring emanated from them, like the crackle of a low fire. Their tendrils first drew apart in thin meandering strands, then slowly converged together above Vesuvius, coalescing into a cloud that sat menacing over the shattered summit. “We fear its fiery storm,” he added.72 The description of the volcano’s appearance underscored a vitriolic attack on the ignorance of natural causes and, specifically, on those who attributed them either too generally or on the basis of false epistemologies. Recupito’s narratione—which had lasted some seventy pages to that point—thus established the groundwork for demolishing false theories of the eruption. This reasoning entailed a transition from historia to causa. The Jesuit framed it thus: “So that the cause and origin of the eruption finally agree with the end of this narration.” Astrology was the first target: why cite imbecilic concealed causes, when the specific ones might be discerned “openly and up close” (“apertas et propiores”)? Scarcely pausing, Recupito subjected the idea that the eruption evidenced permanent subterranean fires beneath the volcano to an equal dose of contempt. Dispelling the idea that Vesuvius contained within it a regularly burning core took some care, because the Campi Flegrei, the Aeolian Islands, and Etna had long shown signs of permanent subterranean fire. “I do not deny that subterranean fires burn in many places,” wrote Recupito. Why, however, had Vesuvius not shown any of the signs of such a fiery bosom in recent centuries? In the earth’s places of fire—Hecla, Stromboli, Etna—smoke darkened the days and flames lighted the night.73 There had been no such presage from the two-headed peak. Once again, accurate description revealed the particularity of Vesuvius in its present observable condition. There had been good observers previously, Recupito noted. Abrogio Leone—the doctor from Nola who described a steam burst from the volcano—had climbed the volcano in 1500 and had seen no signs of smoke that would hint at burning. What Leone had seen instead were sulfur-rich vapors and dry hot spirituous exhalations (“vapores spiritibus calidis immistos, sulphureo infusos halitu”).74 Leone’s inspection of the crater bolstered Recupito’s own observations and reasoning regarding Vesuvius’s cycles of dormancy and eruptivity.

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The Jesuit’s stress fell on the particularity—on what historia and experientia after 1631 put in evidence about the nature of the volcano. “Indeed, I do not deny that continuous fires at some point burned within Vesuvius,” he wrote in acknowledgment that it may have once behaved as some authors suggested. A body of ancient sources conspired to suggest that flames and smoke had been visible historically. Dio Cassius, Solinus, Procopius, and Cassiodorus all reported seeing signs of regular and ferocious combustion.75 These were authoritative accounts, but they did not trump more recent observations, all of which confirmed that the volcano had shown no evidence of fire before erupting. Experience—the lack of visible flames or black smoke and the strongly detected signs of hot vaporous exhalations—led Recupito to conclude that the periodic nature of Vesuvius’s volcanism might better be likened to ephemeral weather patterns in the atmosphere, which he found preferable to the unobserved idea that the volcano had been burning all along. That assertion was fundamentally an Aristotelian argument drawn from the Meteorology, but this did not mean that the Jesuit was simply relying on the rigid authority of the ancient philosopher. In Renaissance debates about the nature of weather, like those regarding the climate of the New World, Aristotelianism proved highly resilient, but even Aristotelians often discarded Aristotle’s errors when they perceived them to be discordant with experience. Furthermore, they did so with relative ease, especially when such errors did little to undermine the basic structure of Aristotle’s account of the natural world.76 Volcanism appears to have been just this sort of phenomenon. Ancient authority was still a valid guide and a template to be employed malleably. In this instance, it helped explain the puzzling absence of any indication of fire before December 1631. Recupito addressed an authoritative statement from the second book of the Meteorology in which Aristotle explained the similarity of certain natural phenomena: earthquakes happened in the earth, while thunder occurred in the clouds, for instance. Both were generated by the mutual interactions of the four elements. Depending on conditions, vapors rising to the clouds could generate hail, snow, rain, thunder, or lighting. Within the cavernous labyrinth below Vesuvius, sulfur-rich exhalations encountered hot and moist vapors excited by the heat of the sun. Heating and blockage generated the conditions for ignition. When that combustive mixture burned, the Jesuit concluded, it was “not always, not often, but in extremely long intervals.” He then elaborated on the conditions that made widely spaced reoccurrences possible. “Three are the things,” he wrote, “which bring forth rare and huge eruptions in Vesuvius:

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the vastness of its caves, the hold of the sun, and the abundance of sulfur and bitumen.”77 These mechanisms explained the volcano’s periodicity as the slow and concealed build up of combustibles deep within. The centuries’ long dormancy of Vesuvius had stretched beyond the limits of memory. Nonetheless, the ars historica and Aristotelian natural philosophy allowed baroque observers like Recupito to develop a causal explanation conversant with experience. Authority was only a partial guide. “[Cassiodorus] calls Vesuvius a perpetual furnace constantly hurtling sand and pumice,” the Jesuit noted, but then pivoted on a correction, writing that the volcano ignited by “no perpetual fire shut up in that place, but with the expelled supply of matter generated by means of intervals.”78 Natural causes underpinned this intermittence, and that was why Vesuvius had appeared to ignite suddenly, absent any visible signs of fire and smoke. Had natural observers simply missed the signs? The Jesuit thought about this, too, in a way that reflected the sermonic and naturalistic qualities of his tract. He recounted a prophetic episode in 1630, evidencing the powerful resonance of portents and prophecies in seventeenth-century culture but also signaling that he was doubtful of many of the popular tales in circulation after the eruption. According to this story, a peasant named Giovanni Camillo had gone to his farmhouse on the mountain Easter eve. Feeling unusually exhausted, he fell asleep without a meal, only to awake shortly thereafter as he if had been transported to another place. Instead of the familiar forest that stretched beyond his hut, he found a continuous long stretch of wall broken only by an enormous gate. Before this gate, he encountered a Franciscan friar—Recupito noted that common opinion had this person as Saint Anthony of Padua—who at first appeared to repulse Camillo but eventually let him through the door. Once through, the Vesuvian peasant came across a dense concentration of buildings horridly aflame from all their windows. Restored to his senses the following day, and returning to his town, the peasant warned of the impending catastrophe. Despite his charred and blackened appearance, he was initially taken for a drunk or a fool. Time had shown him a prophet of the eruption.79 Recupito recounted the story of the prophetic peasant with no sense that it obfuscated the historical and philosophical thrust of the work. Rather, the sermonic story immediately preceded and set up the Jesuit’s lengthy final elaboration of natural causes. Here the stress lay on the utility and correctness of using sight and reason. Having related the account of the peasant’s prophecy with a reminder regarding the many mendacious and superstitious voices in circulation, the Jesuit related that he intended to discern the forces of nature at work inside the volcano. He would begin, he announced, by relating the aspectum,

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situm, figuram, and historiam of Vesuvius: its appearance, site, form, and history. Recupito framed his attention to natural causes thusly: “Likewise, that I briefly approach these, reminded, that he who might be able to shed light, does not accede thanklessly; if he will have come near to the appearance, site, form and history of this Mountain—as much of that as is possible to do with eyes and spirit—in a brief and restricted narration.”80 Considering the tract’s ensuing editions, Recupito’s account of Vesuvius was persuasive and well-received. He wrote about an earthquake in Calabria a few years later, in 1638, and saw through the reprinting of his Vesuvius tract in Rome six years after that.81 The tract further evidences the extent to which Neapolitan authors treated the chronicle of the eruption also as a subject of natural history and natural philosophy, marking that exercise as one of devotion as well. The fragments of surviving correspondence from 1631—like the letters the priest Ascanio Capece wrote to his brother Antonio in Rome—suggest that it was strongly expected that observers in Naples like Recupito would have a leading role in accounting for the eruption.82 For example, Vincenzo Alsario, himself the author of a Vesuvius tract, reported that the miserable news of the eruption had quickly reached Rome, raising debate about whether it had been a supernatural occurrence. Alsario, a well-established professor of medicine in Rome’s university, acknowledged that the volcano’s long silence made its awakening appear portentous. Some—miracula vocant—failed to discern the many natural causes accessible to reason. “Physice loquor” (I call them physical), he corrected. The erudite Republic of Letters clearly expected a version of events that satisfied a naturalistic explanation. As Alsario envisioned it, this was the exercise of a learned community of trained men adorned by complex training—multiplici disciplina perornati—busy relating, discussing, and explaining.83 Neither Falcone’s nor Recupito’s approaches disappointed the expectations of a scientific audience, and the evidence shows that there were naturalists also in Rome for whom a scientific history of the volcano was a meritorious exercise. Pietro Castelli’s L’incendio del Monte Vesuvio (1632) evidenced exactly what Alsario intended about a scientific community. It should be noted that like many of the other baroque writers on Vesuvius, Castelli did not fare especially well two centuries later. In 1847, L’incendio was listed in a bibliography as a peddler of the “usual fantastic opinions.” According to this nineteenth-century assessment, Castelli had seen nothing, had gotten his observations from a local priest, and had mustered up little of note except the “declaration that the eruption of cooked fish from Vesuvius was true.”84 In reality, Castelli enjoyed

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the respect of many of his contemporaries and was undoubtedly a good botanist and natural historian. It is also true that the Incendio remains something of a peculiar book, both for its relationship to the rest of Castelli’s oeuvre and for its relative isolation. The Incendio yields, however, further evidence of where Vesuvius fit in baroque empiricism and science, as well as revealing the role of local observers. It is an interesting juxtaposition to Recupito’s work as well.

t h e vo l ca n o a n d t h e c i v e t In the weeks that followed the eruption of Vesuvius, Castelli—botanist, doctor, anatomist, and professor at Rome’s La Sapienza—could rightfully claim exhaustion. “I have ridden hard with my brain,” he wrote “and it is time that I rest in Mount Vesuvius, the reason for this voyage, having seen with my mind many places, many fires, having sought countless mines and burned the midnight oil, putting my life in danger for the harsh labor, and risking my honor at the censure of contrary opinions.”85 In the span of two weeks between February and March of 1632, he penned a treatise on the curious and novel phenomenon that had only recently electrified the circuits of natural knowledge between Naples and Rome. It was a virtual tour of Vesuvius and volcanoes around the world undertaken from the safety of the Eternal City, though, as Castelli noted, the labor had left him spent. He paused to catch his breath after a whirlwind summary of all that ancients and moderns knew about the topic, and now—midway through the tract—he marshaled his resources to explain the strange event observed in the South only weeks previously. He loved to put his fingers in the dirt and sully his sleeves with the splatter of dissection, but describing the December 16 eruption presented no small challenge. “I was not an ocular witness to this case that I recount,” he asserted flatly.86 Unlike Neapolitan witnesses, he had not seen the thing. Castelli, however, was hardly blind. Drawing from Aristotle, medical knowledge, botany, alchemy, and iatrochemistry he threw himself at an unfamiliar task with practiced acumen. He had built a reputation in Rome for correcting the errors of doctors who had little firsthand familiarity with the herbal simples or medicines they prescribed. On these merits, he received an invitation to establish his own botanical garden in Messina, where he would take up residence in 1634. Here he tended plants, explored the countryside nearby, received specimens for study, and corresponded with his colleagues elsewhere in Europe.87 Written shortly before the move to Sicily, the Incendio del Monte Vesuvio was one of Castelli’s more important works and was undoubtedly intended to manifest its author’s versatility, though there were ample precedents for some-

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one of his expertise examining such a phenomenon. Thirty years previously Marsilio Cagnati’s De tiberis inundatione had explained the 1599 Christmas Eve flood of the Tiber in medical terms, complete with prognostications and remedies for the future.88 Drafted along somewhat similar lines, the Incendio manifested all the salient features of Castelli’s natural inquiry, absent sight. As a foil of sorts, it is possible to compare the work on Vesuvius to another of his investigations of nature, this one conducted on a dissection table. Early modern naturalists intensified their efforts to describe an indigenous European nature as Europe expanded commercially and imperially across the globe. An awareness of the greater world—peoples, places, plants, and animals—directed the attention of naturalists close to home as well. The impulse to explore native landscapes was not disjoined from the desire to catalog, record, and describe the features, flora, and fauna of locations outside of Europe—arguably, natural history at home shaped the understanding of the exotic.89 Castelli was primarily a naturalist concerned with local things. Much of his career was dedicated to what he had close at hand—the plant specimens he gathered in the fields and groves outside of Rome and eventually on the slopes of Etna, or the insects he collected and possibly sketched with Agostino Scilla. The ambitious list of “works in progress” appearing in the final pages of the Incendio included mention of a work unfortunately lost: a monumental two-volume illustrated study of insects, De insettis, worked on by Scilla and perused by John Ray later in the century. In 1668, the Englishman included Castelli in high company alongside Aristotle, Pliny, and Ulisse Aldrovrandi as the author of “an ample and satisfactory work of great thickness, with drawings by his own hand, regarding which I do not know whether it will ever have been seen in public light.”90 Ray was right about the book’s fate. In at least two instances, however, we can recover how he grappled with both local and global dimensions of nature—affording us also a glimpse into the circulation of information, objects, and ideas that enabled him to confront such a task. The first instance was Vesuvius. Responding to the 1631 eruption forced Castelli to draw from text, related experiences, and the eyes of another observer. Volcanoes had also been observed in the Americas, where they were associated with exotic and distant landscapes. As volcanism in southern Italy drew greater attention in the seventeenth century, these Mediterranean landscapes appeared to be a more proximate exotic.91 But Castelli could not talk about volcanoes without taking into account the changes that had taken place in geographical knowledge. His zoological studies might help set this requirement in context, suggesting a parallel sort of processing.

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The dissection happened a few years after the eruption, when Castelli had established himself in Messina. Here he received the carcass of a civet belonging to a family of animals distributed in Asia, Africa, and parts of Europe— now classified as Viverridae. It had been sent to him by Cassiano Dal Pozzo, evidence that Roman circles that reached as high as Urban VIII’s nephew Francesco Barberini still sought his expertise. He excitedly cut it up, despite the overbearing stench that reputedly nauseated him and his students, and he eventually published a tract titled Hyaena odorifera (1638).92 As he claimed in the introduction and conclusion to the book, he picked the bones clean of flesh and returned them, figuratively, for view. Broadly speaking, the tract was a contribution to the archive of text and image compiled by European naturalists of the period, as they explored nature’s forms and grappled with questions of order and classification. The natural history of the African civet featured the likeness of the animal Castelli had dissected along with that of an exotic specimen from the Americas. This second creature was pivotal in the author’s attempt to classify the animal before him. In its case, he had observed nature up close. “It made me,” he thanked Dal Pozzo, “an eyewitness, fair judge and expert teacher of the anatomy.”93 At the antipodes of Castelli’s own experience, volcano and civet nonetheless engaged similar reflexes. One was an attentiveness to how autochthonous nature—or, if not strictly so, at least nature long known by ancient naturalists—compared to more exotic and recently encountered forms. Identified in classical sources, but either so infrequent in their manifestations or distant that they scarcely registered in the first surge of empiricism that characterized Renaissance natural history, volcanoes belonged to the Old World and the New. Indigenous and exotic—this was a rare quality indeed. By the 1630s, European naturalists had become versed, but also invested, in the enormous task of identifying, describing, and incorporating new things in the body of natural knowledge. It was an important impulse when it came to the flora and fauna of the New World, one that produced splendid works like the Lincei’s version of Francisco Hernández’s monumental natural history of Mexico, the 1651 Thesaurus published in Rome.94 Castelli was familiar with this work long before it went to press. It is possible that he derived the illustrations for his book on the civet from earlier versions in circulation after 1628, part of a dizzying sequence of transmission beyond Hernández’s originals.95 An African civet and a South and Central American coati appeared in the Lincei’s book, but it has been easy for historians to miss that there were at least two “civets” circulating—in body and image—during the first half of the seventeenth century and that they actually represented species from different continents. While it is less

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apparent in the voluminous Thesaurus, in Castelli’s earlier iteration of the two animals the comparison figured in an effort to classify nature belonging to both sides of the Atlantic. Talent, reputation, and expertise made Castelli a leading man in Rome to comment on the novel occurrence in Naples.96 Pressure to write the Incendio had come from patrons and colleagues and, also, from his Roman printer, Giacomo Mascardi.97 The latter trusted that the author of numerous successful works would produce yet another popular seller for his shop. “Here is a work I lifted from the hands of the Author at great labor,” Mascardi announced. The reader was warned, he went on, to take into account the urgency behind bringing the work to press so soon. Castelli was laboring at the same time on his two-volume study of insects. Mascardi bemoaned the fact that the author’s skills would be triumphantly evident if only he could afford to print the ambitious illustrated work.98 A decade earlier, Castelli had published with Mascardi his revisions on the Antidotarium Romanum (1585), the standard tract on preparing pharmaceutical simples. Another work, the Discorso della duratione de medicamenti (1621), gives a picture of what readers could expect from Castelli. “It’s experience,” he wrote, “that will show us when and how something spoils.”99 Castelli could claim no such autoptic experience in 1632. Still, the book on Vesuvius began breathlessly, with a virtual voyage that swept the author through time, across oceans, and into the realm of battling elements. It drove him into the bowels of the earth and spun him into the upper reaches of the air, where ash clouds roiled, thunder clapped, and lightning flashed. “Beginning with America, the most recently discovered part of the world dubbed the Western Indies, there is the Kingdom of New Spain. In the province of Nicaragua the Spanish have observed more than ten mountains, which burn continuously like so many Etnas.”100 Castelli’s geography of volcanoes began by locating objects far afield, attaching them, however, to more proximate and familiar terrain. Here the voyages of others were of considerable assistance. In 1616, Jacob le Maire and Willem Schouten had rounded Cape Horn, having set out from Holland in the search of an alternative to the Straits of Magellan. Schouten’s account was published in the Netherlands by Willem Blaeu in 1618, and an Italian translation was available by 1621, titled Giornale di Guglielmo Carlo Scutenio (1621).101 Castelli may have leafed through this edition as he penned his treatise, since he cited it and knew that the Dutch captain had written about a fiercely burning volcano—most likely one of the Fueguino lava domes at the end of the Andean range—as he began to sail northward along the South American continent. In this instance, evidence of volcanoes’

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global distribution accorded readily with ancient authority. Aristotle placed volcanic eruptions in the category of meteorology, along with thunder, lightning, and other manifestations of motion and change in the corruptible realm of the elements. In fact, Castelli found further confirmation of other volcanoes in the Indies amid the neo-Scholastic commentaries on Aristotle’s meteorology and astronomy published by the Jesuits of Coimbra, Portugal, at the turn of the century.102 Voyages of discovery and venerable tradition thus helped Castelli journey figuratively from the Americas to Africa and Asia and, finally, to Europe and Vesuvius, where, as he noted, he paused to rest. Having ranged far afield, he nonetheless recognized that he had been no closer to a volcano than the muzzle of a musket. Along with an alchemist’s furnace, the firearm was an analogy that could bring the author’s own experience to bear on the eruption he had not witnessed. “We have seen harquebuses fired in Rome” he announced as he passed to the tricky question of whether nature produced her own gunpowder.103 The best evidence Castelli could find to accord his own experience with a volcano was that of a Saxon doctor, Andreas Libavius, who had submitted that “in the Province of the Guatemalas there is a certain sulfurous Peruvian substance, which is a gunpowder without artifice.”104 He was likely referring to the volcano Pacaya, which had been active in the 1560s.105 Such a combination of sulfur and niter spirits “battling in a narrow cavity while it erupts” could be stored up in a volcano as they might be crammed down the barrel of a gun. “[This] is indeed the cause of underground murmurs, which follow earthquakes and the violent egress of fire, just as Vesuvius and Etna.”106 From Rome, Castelli was improvising as best he could—this meant citing a German source reporting secondhand about a Guatemalan volcano. The sources Libavius used are unclear, but they show the filtering of transatlantic knowledge. Cortes’s soldiers, for example, had tried to climb Popocatepetl in Mexico in 1519, essentially predating the most important early accounts of volcanism in Europe. On March 6, 1633, six weeks after the eruption, Castelli finally received the eagerly awaited responses of a Minorite Franciscan, to whom he had sent a questionnaire. Castelli’s questions resembled Scholastic quaestiones in form, although they aimed at the empirical and the particular, hybridizing a form intended for syllogistic argument. The appended questionnaire, therefore, functioned as a sort of check on Castelli’s original response, and it appears to have been added for reassurance at the last minute: “I was not an ocular witness to this case I recount, so I have strived to use the testimony of accurate and diligent people, and then investigate the causes with reasoning, as art and

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nature best enable me.” Padre Egidio reported that the trickle of people boldly ascending the mountain had grown rapidly after the eruption and that late winter snows were sticking, evidence of cooling.107 Castelli’s template may have derived from traditions of pedagogy and argument suited for university debates, but the questions were tailored to substitute sight, hearing, smell, and touch: How do you get to the top? How wide is the crater? Does it smell like sulfur? Padre Edigio’s replies were detailed, enabling Castelli to address them with a sustained commentary, especially when they suggested some equivocation with what had been asserted in the body of the treatise. The question of sound, for example, yielded a revealing exchange between the book-bound naturalist and his eyes on the ground. When Egidio responded that daring climbers had heard something like the gentle boil of cauldrons and not the expected artillery-like booms, cracks and reports, Castelli cautioned the reader that sounds could be misleading. “[Pietro] Bembo said something in this regard,” he quipped, acknowledging the cardinal humanist who had been to Etna’s crater around 1500—Europe’s first acknowledged volcano climber. If Egidio’s assertion caught him a little flatfooted, there was a ready response: “Besides, the depth of the mountain . . . makes the boiling seem more than it is.”108 Castelli had not been able to look into Vesuvius, but he did, however, peer into the animal before him a few years later, using its bits and pieces to offer a new classification of related species across both sides of the Atlantic. The Hyaena odorifera he dissected in Messina was almost surely an African civet, already illustrated in one of Vincenzo Leonardi’s stunning floral and faunal drawings.109 It appeared again alongside another New World omnivore in the eponymous book. That second animal was actually a coati, a Central and South American mammal that belongs to the raccoon family. Its image in print was extremely rare, one of the first times any reader would have ever seen a Catus zibeticus. A decade earlier, Federico Cesi had partially accomplished the monumental task of publishing Francisco Hernández’s natural history of Mexico. Bringing the animals to print had been the personal undertaking of Johann Faber, who had managed to compile some eight hundred illustrations by 1628. To date, there has been little evidence of whether the result of this effort circulated—Castelli attributed his image of the coati to Faber and may have seen the early published version. The Catus was the same animal that showed up in the Thesaurus that the Lincei finally published in 1651. The comparison of the African civet and the coati ordered Castelli’s taxonomy more explicitly than would be evident in the larger and later work: “The odoriferous and musk-bearing hyaena is twofold: Arabian and American­.

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They both come together in the generation of musk, but they also do differ a bit, unless the illustrator has led us astray with the American one. Indeed the American musk-bearing animal has this appearance, as Nardo Antonio Recchi showed in image.”110 Recchi, the personal physician to Philip II, had been ordered by the king to copy parts of Hernández’s natural history in 1580. This became the main source through which the original work was disseminated to European naturalists.111 From Messina, Castelli envisioned himself as collaborating on a great enterprise of amending, even correcting the knowledge of the ancients.112 “Under what genus of animal the civet should be placed”—so began the pivotal passages in the Hyaena odorifera that contained the images and descriptions of the two animals.113 Having pronounced that they could be paired, despite differing outer appearances, on the basis that they “come together in the generation of zibeth,” Castelli argued that a true taxonomy was to be sought in the sexual organs and musk glands of both animals, which manifested obvious similarities. Thus, while the Hyaena odorifera and the Catus zibethicus looked different in many respects, looking beneath the differing tails revealed the commonalities.114 As he had done six years previously with Vesuvius and other luoghi ardenti throughout the world, Castelli located the distribution of the newly classified creatures. Ubi nascuntur, he asked in a following section. “[Andrea] Mattioli saw one in Venice that had been brought from Syria,” he wrote referring to the African civet. His description revealed a network of correspondence and objects—including specimens of this animal, or portions of it—that had been passed between naturalists from Portugal to the Baltic. Retracing them helped Castelli establish the animal’s distribution. He even entertained the possibility that its range extended to the frigid north of Europe. A detached musk gland and a moose hoof—an animal that was indisputably indigenous to northern Europe—had been sent to Rome years before by a Lithuanian apothecary. The coati’s range was even vaster. It extended, Castelli surmised, from at least Guatemala to Brazil.115 “Among them they unite in a single class”—this best summed up his effort to attach, synthesize, classify, and order the disparate animal parts, sketches, bits of text, and strands of experience at his disposal.116 Along with his lost insect studies, the volcano and civet works were instances of Castelli at work in natural history. He had studied with the late sixteenth-century botanist Andrea Cesalpino, whose efforts at classification and taxonomy may have left a lasting impression: the focus on the genitals and musk glands of the civet parallels his teacher’s aim to define species repro-

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ductively.117 Though he presented writing on Vesuvius as a torment of sorts, Castelli surely gained by the effort. The work had been commissioned by Lelio Biscia (1573–1638), who was made cardinal by Urban VIII, and the Roman naturalist became an authority on volcanoes.118 A good measure of Castelli’s reputation ultimately derived from his botanical works on the Farnese gardens and on the orto he founded in Messina—and that makes sense considering the privileged place of botanical studies in natural history.119 There is no doubt, however, that the study of volcanoes remained an important part of his work once he moved to Sicily. In the years he spent on the island, it was Etna that continued to pique his interest in volcanism and served, vitally, as the landscape from which he gathered many of the plants that he planted in Messina’s botanical garden. Castelli wrote Cassiano Dal Pozzo in April 1635 that on reaching that city he had quickly begun to enjoy the benefits afforded by the location. Three years later, he reported Athanasius Kircher’s departure to Dal Pozzo—and some of his own longing for a return home to Rome. “And if, for being in this far limb of Italy, I am almost excluded from human commerce, no less do I wish to show myself a man, and still alive: thus last August I climbed Mount Etna to make it companion to my Vesuvius.”120 This new volcano study, he noted in the letter, had proved more challenging than he expected—was it Etna’s size?—so he planned to return and explore it again the following summer. A few months later, in June 1638, he wrote Dal Pozzo again, this time remarking that “I had the daring to send this crude little booklet (the odoriferous hyena) to Your Excellency not because I deem it worthy of coming into your hands, but because it was my burden of debt.” On the heels of this gratitude, Castelli offered Dal Pozzo the promise of his ongoing investigation of the Sicilian volcano: he had spent much time on that mountain, sketching plants, collecting stones, and tracing the formation of its slopes. He also related that he would turn his attention to the substances ignited in eruptions, like bitumen.121 Castelli recalled attention to his work as a naturalist and asserted his place in the Republic of Letters. That he would choose to do so by highlighting Etna underscores what he wished to stress were the unique advantages Sicily offered, but it also likely identified a topic on which he felt himself an authority. Furthermore, like the corals harvested in local waters, which Castelli also promised to treat in his studies, Etna exemplified the spectacular natural features of that far limb of Italy. Although the naturalist never fulfilled his promise to make Etna Vesuvius’s companion in print, he was largely successful in drawing attention to his work in Messina.122

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It seems clear, therefore, that in the decade or so after the eruption of Vesuvius Castelli nurtured the ambition of a greater volcano study, sensing too, perhaps, that his new proximity to Etna allowed for what he had not been able to achieve in writing about Vesuvius in 1631. Athanasius Kircher’s visits to both Etna and Vesuvius not long after Castelli wrote Dal Pozzo provide further evi­ dence that volcanoes attracted the interest of leading scientific figures and patrons in Urban VIII’s Rome. Why then, considering the burst of Vesuvius literature, as well as Castelli’s ambitions in the years following, does a gap appear between scientific responses to the 1631 eruption and a body of volcanological texts like Kircher’s Mundus subterraneus published in the late seventeenth century? Situated before this apparent lacuna, the earliest seventeenth-century tracts on Vesuvius seem to have spun strands that led nowhere. Another answer, however, is that the gap was in many respects only circumstantial and illusory. If Castelli never succeeded in writing a companion treatise on Etna, as mentioned, it was because the challenges of assembling the historical, natural historical, and natural philosophical dimensions of such an ambitious study were considerable indeed. Furthermore, volcanoes are peculiar things: their silence misleads. Vesuvius did little between 1631 and 1660, after which its eruptivity intensified. Strikingly, in the late seventeenth century both it and Etna experienced notable eruptions, and it is in this period that scientific attention to both volcanoes increased significantly. Nonetheless, the record of Neapolitan cultural life in the decades following 1631 shows the extent to which many had been awakened to the presence and force of Vesuvius. Interpreting that power and newly felt proximity could never have been exclusively a subject of science alone, even if one wished to imagine the latter’s heuristics and epistemology as self-standing. Natural inquiry did not exist in isolation from Christian and theological concerns, or from the long unraveling of humanist historical narratives, or even from the city’s fraught political life. In short, what was at stake in understanding the volcanic companion to Naples was nothing short of a fundamental relationship, one between the sociability of human life—the city and the urban community—and nature.

periodicity Observers of Vesuvius were historians as much as naturalists, turning to the past to make the volcano’s present form and activity intelligible. Writing in the 1750s, the Neapolitan abbot and celebrated expert on Vesuvius, Giovanni

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Maria Della Torre, noted that witnesses in 1631 had erred in believing that a great rush of seawater entered an erupting Vesuvius because they had been enveloped by the fog of calamity, terrified, and unable to see clearly. He nonetheless made ample use of these observations.123 Historical erudition had been of powerful assistance in the 1630s, and it continued to be so more than century later. Vesuvius erupted again, in 1660 and 1693, and throughout the eighteenth century. While the inner workings of volcanism could not be seen, the outer form of the volcano was open to exploration. The 1631 eruption directed the tradition of description that had emerged in the later Renaissance increasingly toward natural history and, on the heels of that, toward more vexing questions about the hidden cause of eruptions lurking within. A body of scientific writings grew apace with the volcano’s periodicity. Periodicity is the pulse of every volcano, the very beat of its eruptions. The violent expulsion of magma is difficult to predict even for today’s volcanologists, despite the advanced monitoring technologies they possess. History is a vital heuristic because past activity generates clues about a volcano’s nature. That history is not just recorded in past observations. It is embedded within the very structure of a volcano, which is a thing likely to have risen, shattered, and been rebuilt numerous times. A cooled course of lava, for example, marks a past vitality, yet it also foreshadows the pattern of future extrusion. Coupled with other data—like the viscosity of the magma and the concentration of dissolved gases—the record of the past drives modern scientific nomenclature. A volcano can be effusive or explosive, and its eruptions might be deemed Strombolian or Plinian. For all that difference, volcanologists recognize all volcanoes as two things: an opening from which magma in its various forms is ejected and the structure formed by that ejection. It is an acknowledgment of mechanism and place. What of baroque observers and their vocabulary? Much of the perplexity about Vesuvius in the immediate aftermath of 1631 lay at first in the long intervals between its eruptions, like a puzzle seeded in the marked contrast between laxity and force. As we have seen, both dimensions of the mountain had been richly recorded. To Recupito, that misleading silence was entirely unlike that of Etna, a volcano he found to be archetypal of places qui ignes nutriunt—places that perennially nourished inner fires and evidenced their doing so. There was no discord between ancient voices and modern observers when it came to the fact that Etna regularly appeared smoke-shrouded and firescarred.124 Vesuvius, conversely, was distinct, its sources of ignition concealed­

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and peculiar­. Two fundamental intuitions arose from having observed Vesuvius’s radical transformation from dormancy to eruption, though the terms could not be fully formed immediately after 1631. In large measure, the traditional Aristotelian system of nature offered a persuasive account of why volcanism occurred, but it was also strained by the particular observations—the historiae—that made Vesuvius its own particular thing. The eruption was not just like a thunderclap breaking overhead, some fleeting collision of elements that vanished with the return of serene air. It also marked a place from which such forces would regenerate and recur. Proximity and ongoing description would thus shape the scientific discovery of the volcano, at once sharpening the understanding of mechanism and intensifying the notion of place. Partly because of the volcano’s physical presence, however, the strands of natural history and natural philosophy that ran through Vesuvius tracts did not exhaust the possibilities of interpretation. On the matter of periodicity, another explanation competed with the Aristotelian account for decades after 1631: through God’s will and anger, Vesuvius was reactive to Naples.

chapter 4

Contesting Vesuvius: Discordant Meanings in the Context of Revolt

In Camillo Tutini’s hand, possibly, or maybe others’: a scribbled narrative cov­ ers the lower half of a page, then scrawls on to another bound with it. On the verso, there are more paragraphs about Vesuvius, segmented into fourths along folds of the quarto sheet in both directions. “On 16 8ctober 1632 Thurs­ day there was a procession,” begins the paragraph on the lower part of the first page. Eight months after the eruption the relics of San Gennaro were once again borne in a procession, this time in thanks for having protected “the city of Naples from the fire and destruction that the eruptions of Mount Vesuvius cause.” The record is of a solemn affair. The procession included, besides the clergy, also the Spanish Count of Monterrey and the four other members of the governing Collateral Council, as well as the heads of the urban districts. 1 Manso would have been present close to the baldachin with the blood and skull of the saint,  joining in singing the Te Deum laudamus. It was the denoue­ ment of the tragedy, meant to confirm the coming together that had ultimately spared Naples a deeper disaster. Among the same jumble of notes that evi­ dence the October 16 procession, there are fragments of writing. “The present calamity of Vesuvius has moved the city of Naples to erect a new temple to the same saint, to be built on the slopes of the said Mountain.” Elsewhere, in an entry for February 9, 1632: “It has been decided . . . to erect a church to the glorious San Gennaro on the flanks of Mount Somma on the side of Massa and Pollena, in order to have from God through the Saint pardon and to placate His ire so that these eruptions might forever cease.”2 Urban memory had begun to commemorate the end of disaster. The comfort derived from

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the restoration of harmony was, however, a tenuous thing, easily altered when order broke down. Gioseffe Mormile’s L’incendii del Monte Vesuvio (1632), for example, pre­ sented the disaster narrative that appealed to the archbishop of Naples and the governing Spanish viceroy. Mormile wrote that “[Vesuvius] will smoke for some time . . . so that from the sight of these fires, everyone might learn to root out vice and sin, to live well, and heed conscience, for is man’s intellect so stubborn that he cannot grasp that the fires of Hell will be minister and castiga­ tor of his crimes?”3 Neapolitans, he stressed, would behave differently in the aftermath of disaster, ceasing their seditious and irreligious ways. Highlighting both the clergy’s and the secular authorities’ role in invoking the saint’s assis­ tance, the first accounts of the disaster portrayed Naples as penitent and loyal to Spain. The evolving iconography of saint and volcano after 1631 was evi­ denced by artists such as Domenico Gargiulo, who formalized the represen­ tation of San Gennaro as the city’s celestial protector.4 Vesuvius could thus complement a prevailing vision of Habsburg rule over the city as ordained by God, despite past flare-ups like an urban rebellion in 1585.5 Other ideas existed outside the prevailing sentiment of loyalty, though. “Pause traveler! Behold bleeding Parthenope between two mounts. One roar­ ing, the other ruling . . . that one gives forth flames, this one hunger. That one drives out swine, this one his own.” These angry Latin verses were aimed at Naples’s viceroy, the Count of Monterrey. In the marginalia of what might not have been an uncommon invective, one finds the following words, of unknown hand: “Don Pietro Grimaldo, curate of Santa Maria Maggiore of Naples was the author of this epitaph for the Count of Monterrey in the time of Vesuvius’s fire of 1631.”6 The discontent of common citizens was not recorded in the pre­ vailing account of San Gennaro’s miracle. By the 1640s, however, conditions in the kingdom had worsened. In January of 1641, an embassy to Philip IV of Spain expressed concern regarding the worsening situation, highlighting a proliferation of onerous taxes and the heavy burden on peasants caused by the levying of a citizen militia.7 As part of his brief, the envoy was warned “that if by sinister fortune the letters be intercepted and fall in the hands the enemies of the King of Spain, they would come to know the weakness in which this Most Faithful City and Kingdom find themselves.”8 Although it was the seem­ ingly unassailable mythology of the ruling class, Spain’s grip on Naples was not without question. Since its conquest of southern Italy in 1503, Spain had sought to integrate the kingdom into its imperial system and had largely been successful in garner­ ing the loyalty of Naples. In other words, there was no essential rebelliousness

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against the Spanish crown, which brought patronage, protection, and prestige to the city. Perceptions, however, could sometimes run counter to what was largely a process of Neapolitan integration into the Spanish imperial system. In moments when order broke down, as it did especially in 1647, Vesuvius took on a peculiar resonance. The city’s integration into the Spanish imperial system was essentially a twofold process that garnered both loyalty and resistance. On one hand, Spain required Naples’s subordination to the demands of the crown, especially after the late stages of Philip II’s reign at the close of the sixteenth century. This meant political control and the power to extract the fiscal, material, and human resources the empire required. On the other hand, Spain guaranteed a high degree of institutional and legal autonomy, much to the benefit of the Neapoli­ tan baronage. Domination and aristocratic consensus are thus the operative terms.9 The governance of Spanish Naples was structured around a backbone of Castilian and local Italian elites. For the Neapolitan baronage and Italian aris­ tocrats in general, integration into the Spanish system often meant campaign­ ing with imperial armies and navies, in the Mediterranean, on the contested borders with the Ottomans, and in the Netherlands. Service for Spain thus guaranteed participation in a system of common interests with the accompany­ ing interchange of favors and influences at home and abroad.10 These complex relationships found a focus in Naples, the kingdom’s great­ est urban center. A demographic surge beginning in the late sixteenth century meant that by the first third of the seventeenth century the city had around three hundred thousand inhabitants, many of them destitute poor fleeing an agrarian crisis in the countryside.11 Because of its size, monarchical dynastic tradition, and social composition, governance required complex alliances. Naples claimed traditional fiscal immunities and possessed a strong tradition of communal government dominated by the nobility. These upper orders as­ sisted the viceroys over the course of the sixteenth century, with varying de­ grees of success. As the Neapolitan nobility was drawn to the seat of Spanish administration in southern Italy, the viceroys ably pitted an increasingly urban baronage against the citizenry, including the togati. The latter professional class would in time become central to articulating resistance to Spain. As one historian has put it, “It was the only subject city possessing real contractual power with the Spanish Crown.”12 By the first third of the seventeenth century, however, a number of long-term political, social, and economic trends exacer­ bated tensions in the kingdom. A central feature was the pronounced slippage of wealth and power into the hands of an entrenched landed aristocracy, who

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were increasingly able to assert their own legal and economic prerogatives over peasants and, at the same time, dominate the political life of the capital.13 During the early period of Spanish domination, the viceroy Pedro Toledo (reigned 1532–53) managed to curb the political power of Naples’s nobility somewhat, but in general the Spanish government encouraged the baronage’s long-standing, and still growing, predominance over the kingdom’s rural and urban populations. This garnered loyalty. The alliance between the Neapolitan elite and the kings of Spain fostered a particular set of common interests that did not favor the kingdom’s lesser inhabitants. Over the course of the late six­ teenth and early seventeenth centuries, Neapolitan landlords expanded their judicial and administrative powers, largely because the cash-strapped Spanish government sold off villages and towns formerly part of the royal demesne. These sales were made both to the native aristocracy and to a growing number of parvenus Tuscan and Genovese financiers who sought to consolidate the fortunes they had made in loans to the viceroyal government. The Thirty Years’ War intensified these pressures, further complicating the downturn of the southern Italian economy already underway by the 1580s.14 As might be expected, conflict between the orders was most exacerbated in the capital, where the local baronage dominated the city wards. The wards were six Seggi, five noble and one representing the common citizenry. The popular ward was inevitably outvoted. The masses of Naples had, however, grown dramatically over the course of the late 1500s and 1600s, a demographic explosion partly explainable by the fact that the city’s residents were exempt from direct taxation. The fiscal burden, therefore, weighed on merchants, peasants in the countryside, and the city’s poorest consumers. Historians gen­ erally agree that the Spanish government, by so markedly favoring the nobility and by increasing fiscal pressures, systematically worked to greatly accentu­ ate already present injustices and inequities.15 Still, it is probably a mistake to see the breakdown of order in the mid-seventeenth century as the necessary consequence of Spanish misrule. Nonetheless, for some, this was very much the perception. On July 7, 1647, Neapolitan commoners rose in revolt against the viceroy, reacting to higher prices, higher taxes, and feared food shortages. The rebels were led initially by the fish monger known to his followers as Masaniello. Masaniello became a figure of renown throughout Europe, largely because he seemed to personify the initial burst of popular anger that swept through the city. Following rumors of a new tax on fruit, tensions broke into the open. Peaches, melons, figs, and the like were vital to the generally stark gastronomic

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world of the poor. In the fracas that followed an inspection of melons in Piazza del Mercato, stands were tipped over, fruit smashed, and weapons drawn. Re­ bellions had occurred in Naples back in 1547 and, more significantly, in 1585. On the latter occasion, a mob lynched a city official, Vincenzo Starace, and cannibalized his body.16 This time, however, resistance was even more fierce and widespread. Within hours, Spain’s grip on the city seemed to loosen. In the initial outburst of violence on that day in 1647, the Neapolitan mob drove the viceroy, the Duke of Arcos, from his palace and temporarily confined the Spanish to one-quarter of the city. More importantly, the rebellion created a temporary alliance between the lazzaroni and a cadre of citizens, the popolo civile, which included lawyers and lesser officials who had reformist visions of their own. This troubled union resulted in the revolt’s most significant out­ come, the attempted creation of an independent republic.17 The ideological architects of the short-lived experiment sought French support, marking a historic attempt to break definitively with Spain.18 Largely inspired by the Venetian model, rebel leaders offered supreme command of the republic’s military forces to the French Duc de Guise, in a move meant to equate their new protector’s powers with those of  the Doge of Venice. Guise accepted, motivated by personal ambition and the possibility of finally restor­ ing the Angevin claim to Naples. Despite the attempt to draw France in, the rebellion failed. By April 1648, the Spanish controlled the city and undertook a brutal repression. Nonetheless, one of the largest and most sophisticated cities in Europe had, however briefly, seriously challenged the might of Spain.19 The activity of Vesuvius did not pass unobserved by political agitators who must have seen eruptions in a different key than the prevailing story. In 1631, Neapolitan secular and ecclesiastical authorities managed the meaning of volcanism to their ends. Histories that celebrated San Gennaro’s protection of a repentant Naples worked a good measure of control over the disaster, also when they were painted.20 At the close of the 1640s, however, smolder­ ing political resentments created a contested metonymy. For some, the fact that the rebellion had occurred less than twenty years after the eruption, and that the fighting had been followed by another eruption, could not be without meaning. Something had to be deeply wrong for the volcano to erupt again so soon.21 The eruption in 1649 was minor, but this volcanic activity followed on the heels of the 1647 revolt and its ensuing repression. Was it a sign that the struggle against Spain would continue in the face of ongoing repression? The ways in which Vesuvius represented nationhood and resistance to tyr­ anny can be gauged. A few copies of a manuscript pamphlet circulated in the

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months after the revolt, possibly passed around rebel circles exiled in Rome. Here, Vesuvius voiced the anger of Neapolitan rebels who claimed to have gone from simply resisting an unjust fiscal burden to articulating a sense of independence and of belonging to an ancient nation—a patria as they called it. The circulated work was titled Prodigiosi portenti del monte Vesuvio.22 Its author was Tutini. He wrote anonymously shortly after he had fled the city, passing copies among sympathizers to fuel their resistance. We can see the volcano as the metonym of a counternarrative. As early as 1630, Tutini had been a proponent of reforming the city’s fiscal and governing institutions, which he found to be disproportionately tilted in favor of the nobility. His principal work on the Neapolitan Seggi only appeared years later, in 1644.23 His principal role in the rebellion seems to have been that of adviser to one of the republican leaders, Vincenzo D’Andrea. In the spring of 1648, after having first fallen out with his fellow rebels and then been hounded by Spanish agents, he barely made it out of Naples alive. For the remainder of his life, he lived as an exile in Rome, where he nonetheless continued to write profusely. Lucky enough to find protection in certain Roman ecclesiastical cir­ cles, he voiced a citizen’s vision of Neapolitan autonomy.24 Tutini’s most notable work on the events of 1647–48 was his Racconto della sollevatione di Napoli, a lengthy chronicle based on an earlier manuscript by another author and fellow rebel, Marino Verde. Tutini subsequently picked it up, edited it, rewrote large portions, and circulated numerous manuscript copies. This reckoning of the revolt was a day-by-day account of six months in which the antifiscal popular rising developed into a movement for autonomy and independence. His chronicle highlighted the volatility and unbridled fe­ rocity of the Neapolitan mob with a mixture of revulsion and fascination. Tutini attributed the revolt to the staggering fiscal pressures exerted by the Spanish monarchy on the city, but this secular causation observed that the violence was also God’s punishment. Lifting the Spanish yoke was the only accept­ able historical outcome.25 What the Prodigiosi portenti shared with Tutini’s other works, and more generally with the propaganda of the most dedicated rebel faction, was this conclusion. Before exploring the significance of  Tutini’s inflammatory vision of Vesuvius, it is necessary to understand the intellectual context in which he wrote, as well as some of his better-known printed works. This involves considering the development of, first, reformist and, then, more radical political circles in Naples in the early seventeenth century and, finally, how the 1647 rebels got to the point of formulating their ideology of a Neapoli­ tan patria liberated from Spain.

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p o l i t i c a l a n d c u lt u r a l m i l i e u The radical vision of an independent and republican Naples that motivated the more ardent intellectual leaders of 1647 only developed slowly in the early decades of the seventeenth century, as the Kingdom of Naples passed through an important cultural and political phase. The establishment in 1611 of the Accademia degli Oziosi was one important step in the evolution of these later ideas. The Oziosi came together with the support of the viceroy, the Count of Lemos, in a moment of consensus between the Spanish and the Neapoli­ tan aristocratic and cultural establishment. Lemos, however, is also widely remembered for his failed attempts to reform the finances of the kingdom in the first decade of the seventeenth century, causing one historian to note that this period was one “of reformist illusions in the political and cultural life of Naples.”26 The Oziosi were presided over by the Marquis of Villa, who was none other than the 1631 eruption eyewitness Giovanni Battista Manso. This influential and powerful figure would give this academic society its stamp until his death in 1645. Beyond prominent nobles like Manso, the intellectual circle of the Oziosi included the poet and dramatist Giovanni Battista Marino.27 Because of its “complementary function with respect to civic and religious power,” the society tended to promote a vision where the nobility and the popol­o civile were harmoniously cooperative.28 Thus, even at its most inclusive extreme, the Oziosi vision at best suggested a favorable dialectic and alliance between the nobility and the professional and cultural class tied to the viceroy’s administration.­29 It was largely thanks to some of the academy’s members, however, that the idea of an ancient republican Naples enjoying a privileged relationship with Rome took shape. This would have political repercussions, despite an out­ wardly conservative posture. The Oziosi’s motto of non pigra quies, a “quiet labor,” was meant to suggest a cultural space where establishment figures could pursue philosophy, historical studies, and poetry. The concept rested on the classical notion of otium—the disengagement from mundane affairs that was required for the proper pursuit of such disciplines. Historical and antiquarian studies that stressed, among other things, Naples’s ancient Greek origins had, however, long-term implications for the development of political ideologies fa­ vorable to reform and eventually independence.30 Significantly, this historical linkage to an idealized classical past was connected to a tendency to imagine that the “Republic of Letters” could direct political reform in the city.31

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One of the most important Oziosi, Francesco De Pietri, argued for a direct line of continuity between republican Athens, Rome, and Naples. In the intro­ duction to his Problemi accademici (1642), he declared that Rome had received laws and learning from the Athenians and that Naples alone had preserved these institutions intact after Roman authority in the West collapsed, being “a republic free from that barbarity.” It was a notion that he took to the extreme. Considering the greatest military victories in history, he announced that none surpassed the Athenian defeat of Xerxes and, therefore, “all the more glory to our Neapolitans, sons of the Athenians.”32 Claims of this type were not unique to Naples, even though the Athenian pedigree received understandable emphasis in a city with Greek origins. Roots in classical antiquity were a fundamental part of the Italian humanist discourse on the foundation and native sovereignty of the city-state, as was evident in the notable example of the Florentine humanist Leonardo Bruni’s fifteenthcentury Laudatio florentinae urbis (1403–4). Composed shortly after the death of Milan’s despotic ruler, Giangaleazzo Visconti, the Laudatio was a panegyric that deployed a particular founding myth to emphasize Florence’s republican­ ism. Referencing the speeches of the second century AD Greek orator Aris­ tides, who had described Athens as a bulwark that withstood the despotic Persian Empire because of its political superiority, Bruni equated Florence to the savior of republican Italy in the face of tyrannical Milan. Republics, he argued, were by nature better suited to cultivating the talents of citizens. Fur­ thermore, Florence had been founded during the Roman republic—unlike im­ perial Milan—and had therefore inherited its ancient spirit for liberty.33 Iberian humanism constructed its own myths. During the reign of Charles V, Spanish historians became increasingly concerned with the place of ancient Rome in Spain’s past. At the same time, they turned their rhetoric toward ex­ plaining and legitimizing their increasing dominance of Italy. Two historians, Florián de Ocampo and Ambrosio Morales, authored a widely circulated and officially sanctioned history entitled the Crónica de España that established Spain’s ancient heritage in distinctly Iberian terms. The work was published ten times between 1541 and 1604. 34 The Crónica made Greek and Roman cul­ ture dependent on Spanish precedents, contrasting the entire tradition of  Ital­ ian humanism. Romulus and Remus were presented as apocryphal creations, eliding the fact that Rome derived its name from Romi, daughter of a native Spanish king. The alternate history did two things: it made Rome dependent on Spain, but more importantly it justified Spanish control and interference in Italy.35

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The language of historical connection and conquest between Spain and Rome became more intense in the 1530s and 1540s because of the Habsburgs’ deepening economic ties and political control of Italy. Spanish hegemony was increasingly entrenched after the failed French effort to take Naples in 1528 and, then, confirmed after the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis of 1559 effectively ceded that nation’s claims to the peninsula. Spain’s influence was strong in ar­ eas under outright control, like Milan and Naples, but it was also felt in Rome, where Spain began a period of influence that would not be challenged seriously until the papacy of Urban VIII (1623–44). The Habsburg monarchs, beginning with Charles V and, increasingly, with Philip II, became the de facto military protectors of the Papal State and the pope’s most powerful patrons.36 Just as imperial apologists intensified their explorations of Roman antiquity in the period of Spanish ascendancy over Italy, Neapolitan historians voiced their own distinct myths of urban history. These myths were entwined with the reality of being subordinated to a greater power. As a whole, Neapolitans identified their city’s greater antiquity than Rome, its Greek origins, and its continuous traditions of civic government and autonomy as mainstays of a glo­ rious past. In this fashion, the historical works of the Oziosi contributed to an evolution of ideas that would eventually inform the radical political stances taken by Tutini and others during the 1647 revolt. At the founding of the academy in the early seventeenth century, the histori­ cal and antiquarian studies of a number of scholars working in the city sought to uncover the continuities between the city’s past and its present. In this ear­ lier phase, much of the rhetoric continued to bolster the image of a Napoli fedelissima as a loyal partner to the Spanish monarchs.37 Giulio Cesare Capac­ cio, author of the Campi Flegrei guide La vera antichità di Pozzuolo (originally Historia Puteolana), reflected that inclination. Counted among the Oziosi, Capaccio (1552–1634) studied with important humanists in Bologna, and by the early 1600s he was deeply involved in local antiquarian studies, especially in the Campi Flegrei. The civic humanist and city secretary saw the plebeian order as existing outside of political enfranchisement, but he also expressed reformist ideas in arguing for a broader participation of the popolo civile in city government. Importantly, he was one of the most methodical local scholars in­ terested in reconstructing Naples’s past from antiquity to his day, and he used his historical studies to bolster the case that the city’s orders should relate in accordance to ancient prerogatives and privileges.38 These were ideas that matured throughout his life and culminated in the Forastiero (1630), a huge narrative description of the city modeled after the

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conversation between a foreigner and a local sage, imagined as taking place over the course of ten days. His work was part of the historical and geographic genre that became popular in the later sixteenth century. It was, in fact, just the type of book he had helped establish with his earlier guides on the antiqui­ ties and natural marvels of the Campi Flegrei. It was also akin to D’Engenio Caracciolo’s Napoli Sacra (1624) in its historical treatment of Naples’s sacred sites, martyrs, and saints’ cults. Capaccio’s detailed descriptions and historical narrative embraced both the pagan and the early Christian period, from which the city’s present political institutions and religious traditions were thought to have originated. Throughout, he paid considerable attention to the social and political life of Naples, highlighting the central role of the city’s most “useful” classes: the nobility, the magistrates, and the merchants.39 The writings of another historian associated with the Oziosi, Giovanni Summonte, exercised a more direct influence on the rebels of 1647 than Ca­ paccio, who was ultimately an entrenched representative of the Neapolitan establishment allied with the Spanish viceroys. Summonte’s Historia della città e regno di Napoli (first edition in 1601) was more markedly antiaristo­ cratic in tone and an explicit critique of those who exercised power in Naples. It ended with an account of the infamous lynching in 1585 of the city official Vicenzo Starace, an episode recounted to highlight both the brutality of the lower classes but also their justified rage at abuses.40 Francesco Imperato, the son of the naturalist Ferrante Imperato, was es­ pecially active in advancing a reformist vision of Napolitan civic life. He pub­ lished a tract titled Discorso politico intorno al Reggimento delle Piazze e della Citta di Napoli in 1604. In it, he asserted that, “if the people intervened in government, its Republic would be more secure and would do, in sum, more good than harm.” He never intended the lazzaroni, of course, but rather a strengthening of the popolo civile’s clout, which was limited because the five noble Seggi could always outvote the single popular one. The masses, in fact, were, “the excrement of the Republic, and for this reason inclined to sedition, revolution, and to disturb the laws, customs, and obedience of superiors.”41 Clearly, there was still a ways to go to the extremes reached in 1647, but as one important historian of the revolt has noted, the foundations of a “popular movement” existed.42 Most reformist arguments targeted the viceroy’s abuses but never suggested a rupture with Spain. Still, the notion of a distinct Neapolitan patria was un­ doubtedly evolving as local antiquarians and historians worked to recover, and in many cases to invent, Naples’s history. The patriotic construct of nationhood was linked to fedeltà, or loyalty. From the beginnings of Spanish occupation

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in the early sixteenth century, the Neapolitan baronage had given its loyalty to the Habsburgs monarchs, embracing the idea of a Napoli fedele. Importantly, it had also steadily refused to acknowledge the parity of proclamations of similar fidelity offered by the city’s other lesser orders. Suspicious of popular motives, the nobility was openly contemptuous of the citizenry’s proclamations of fedeltà, a posture meant to negate the latter’s very political identity and existence. The word, however, never ceased to circulate even in popular circles, and it was here that it would eventually undergo a radical shift in direction toward a Neapolitan patria continuous with the Greek and Roman periods—and away from Philip IV of Spain. It is with this type of rhetoric that the radical vision of Vesuvius discussed below should be situated.43 The Oziosi placed a very high value on juridical studies, and consequently much of the fodder for later assaults on the legitimacy of Spanish domination came from just that sort of analysis. Scholars like De Pietri, and later Camillo Tutini, proclaimed both Naples’s ancient and independent legal tradition and, also, the fundamental importance of the togati—lawyers, notaries, and advisers—to good government. A recurring theme in De Pietri’s work was the notion that jurists were fundamental executors of rationality in govern­ ment. For this reason, they were as essential as kings and emperors. This was an argument that had important consequences because it identified the legal professional class as mediators between two poles in Neapolitan political life: the institutions of the Regno (with its established laws, or patria leges) and those imposed by the Spanish monarchy. The Oziosi emphasized that ideally this was meant to be a partnership of sorts that involved mutual recognition and respect. Along these lines, De Pietri suggested that “the greatest King and Monarch of the world” was the “king of Naples and Spain.”44 The notion proposed by certain members of the Oziosi like De Pietri iden­ tified the Neapolitan patria as existing in the mosaic of the Spanish imperial system, with its own sovereignty intact but participating fully in the defense of Habsburg interests in Italy and abroad. Significantly, civic and social life in Na­ ples itself, the capital of the kingdom, was supposed to reflect this consensus and partnership by allowing a greater place in political life for the professional class, who were seen as guarantors of reason and legality. In the 1620, however, significant tensions emerged within the city, as well as between it and Madrid, as the Duke of Osuna appeared to acknowledge some of the demands made by reformist intellectuals. This viceroy’s efforts to open avenues to the popolo civile eventually caused his recall to Spain on charges of sedition.45 The Oziosi were inevitably caught up in these debates, nearly thirty years before the revolt. In May of 1620, the popular representative (the eletto del

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popolo­) Giulio Genoino wrote the members of the academic society, articu­ lating his complaints with the existing political situation.46 Genoino was one of the most vociferous and active leaders of the popular faction, although he always positioned himself as someone who would seek compromise with the Spanish monarchs. Even though he was in his eighties by 1647, he would lead the early phases of the revolt, only to be marginalized as it became more radical. Earlier, during the Duke of Osuna’s short reign (1619–20), Genoino worked closely with the viceroy to promote a number of reforms aimed at limiting the nobility’s power over Naples’s governing institutions—a power exercised most effectively in a five-man counsel (the Collaterale), which often checked the power of the viceroy himself.47 Historians are uncertain as to Genoino’s specific audience within the Ozi­ osi.48 Whether he was trying to convince enemies or, perhaps, also gain favor among supporters in the society, his contact suggests very strongly that the “quiet labor” of its members was linked to political reform. The episode sur­ rounding the Duke of Osuna’s and Genoino’s attempts to limit the baronage manifested the fractures within the citizen body of Naples, but it must also be stressed that the latter’s conversation with the Oziosi never suggested anything but loyalty to Spain. In fact, Genoino would protest even after the revolt that he had always had the best interests of Philip IV in mind and that he had simply tried to guide the uprising to constructive ends. Patria and fedeltà supported the aspiration to strengthen popular representation in government by giving the popular Seggio del popolo greater parity with the noble Seggi. Genoino and De Pietri idealized a senatorial model of republican government. The former suggested that the representatives of the popular assembly wear the garb of Roman senators, while the latter hugely exaggerated by claiming that “the Sen­ ate of Neapolitan Magistrates, direct heir of that senate that governed ancient Naples, has with its authority caused marvel and stupor among all others in the world.”49 The reconstructions of Neapolitan historians in the first decades of the seventeenth century lent justification to a reformist vision of nationhood and republicanism.50 While some imagined a Real Repubblica Napoletana partnered with the Habsburgs, Tutini had more radical ideas. He later recalled that supporters of the viceroy went “about Naples with [my] book on the Seggi in hand, saying that I was the cause with this book that the people had revolted.”51 The book in question, Dell’origine e fundation de’ Seggi di Napoli, was published in 1644 after having appeared in an earlier form in Francesco Orilia’s Zodiaco, over, idea di perfittione di prencipi (1630).52 In 1644, Tutini was also contributing to revisions and expansions of Summonte’s Historia. All of these works engaged

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civic and political reform, making it evident that by the 1640s the Neapolitan historiographical tradition had converged with a particular reformist vision.53 Tutini’s central argument in his history was the ancient and continuous nature of Naples’s reggimento, denoting both the formal institutions and the aggregated social orders that governed the city. The five noble Seggi and the lone popular one were the organizing structure and source of identity of the urban ruling class. There was serious debate as to the origin of these district assemblies, and on this matter he disagreed with Summonte. While the latter dated their foundation to the Angevin period, Tutini aimed to prove that they were directly continuous with the ancient Greek city. If this had the effect of  stressing the pedigree of  the nobility inscribed in the rolls of  the vari­ ous Seggi, Tutini also meant to suggest a ruling partnership between citizenry and baronage.54 Citizens were elevated by virtue of their learning and office holding; they were the humanists, lawyers, notaries, and merchants comprising the popolo civile. History showed a partnership and mutual respect between the two orders, he argued, that had only recently been corrupted by Spanish tyranny. A Neapolitan republic had continuously existed in praxis, even when no longer in name.55 This vision largely collapsed in the years to follow. The invective Tutini directed at the Neapolitan baronage in the Prodigiosi portenti del Vesuvio arose from his sense that it had betrayed the citizenry after 1647. In his previous work on the Seggi, Tutini recognized both the ancient and democratic aspects of the nobility’s role in government. He wrote: The existing Neapolitan nobility is presently divided in five Seggi, or piazze, the Capuana, Montagna, Nido, Porto, and Portanova . . . today there is no major­ ity or prerogative one has over the other, so that in the city tribunal, where the noble eletti assemble, each representing a Seggio, there is no precedence, and the first to arrive has precedence and takes the bell. This Nobility is very con­ spicuous for its antiquity, for its lordship over vassals, for its titles, its honors, its family ties to great lords, for its high magistrates, for its ecclesiastical titles. It competes with all the noble families of Italy, and even if it is not a free nobility, but has been subject to the highest crowns of Europe, it glories nonetheless to have ties of parentage with the Kings that have lorded over it. In this brief nar­ rative we will show, even though many writers have written about it, something of its magnificence.56

At this point, only a few years before the 1647 revolt, Tutini still felt that the popolo­ civile’s natural ally was Naples’s oldest nobility. The Neapolitan no­ bility and citizenry, Tutini had hoped, could justly collaborate. It seems that

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this idea broke down when the battle cries for an independent Naples were raised, and probably not just for Tutini.57 It is at this political juncture that his circulating manuscript might be located. Vesuvius was raising its voice in anger at the Spanish and at the baronage. The manuscript medium of this expression locates the ideas clearly at the edges of the Spanish and aristocratic consensus that ideologically sustained the restoration of order in Naples. The market for print in these years was ex­ tensive and lively, even of “massive proportions.”58 Yet, many things were said and thought that were not printed. Published accounts of Vesuvius after 1631 had been folded into the dominant political ideology. They hardly exhausted, however, the process of interpretation that was elaborated in lengthier treatises and chronicles but that also took place in the margins and at the interstices of a prevailing culture. Especially in the shadow world of furtive missives, scurril­ ous and seditious poems, and rebel schemes, Vesuvius gave voice to resistance. In that we can see that metonymies of nature were unstable, as unstable as the volcanic landscape itself. They were subject exactly to the kind of contestation that Tutini envisioned. Despite the instability accentuated by political and natural circumstances, the kinds of interpretations that emerged regarding Vesuvius were hardly pecu­ liar to humanistic and Christian understandings of history and nature. Neapol­ itan humanists had charged the landscape with particular moral and aesthetic qualities for centuries. Naples was no exception to the laudatory descriptions of cities and their settings commonly printed in Italy, as we have seen.59 The garden-like setting of the Bay of Naples, along with its volcanically active areas, offered a favorable contrast to less spectacular places and was often conjured up to win beauty contests with rivals such as Rome.60 Even older conceptions of urbe and contado, integral to the vision of the medieval city’s relationship to the countryside and the environment, must have persisted in the 1600s.61 Cities asserted human dominance over nature, a feature expressed in the ef­ forts to control landscape and its resources, as well as in the superiority that urban denizens felt toward their rustic counterparts.62 Still, both physically and aesthetically, nature helped to define the Italian city. Naples’s proximity to a volcano was peculiar, but a diversity of natural settings was common on the Italian peninsula.63 Tutini may have been to an extent improvising when he invented a Vesuvius angry at Spain out of the circumstances of 1649, but the point is that he did so by inflecting an existing culture of representation. Indeed, even Tutini had written on Vesuvius previously, combining human­ istic chorography with religious history. In 1633, he published a hagiography of San Gennaro. Written shortly after the devastating eruption, the tract was

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openly inspired by the saint’s most recent miracle on the city’s behalf. It also referenced the first wave of reports, in this instance for the sake of recounting the pivotal episode in which the great procession of the city’s inhabitants, led by the Cardinal Archbishop, confronted the threatening volcano. As Tutini described it, the looming cloud bowed and receded before San Gennaro’s rel­ ics, while the saint himself was said to have been spotted above the processing crowd. In contrast to his later unpublished writings, Tutini’s first reconstruc­ tion was in tune with the line taken by the majority of accounts. It expressed a common effort to restore order in the aftermath of disaster: “The eruption of Vesuvius, which has stirred many pens to write, has likewise inspired this undertaking.”64 In truth, however, the printed tract by Tutini gave little clue as to the war of words he would subsequently wage. In the early 1630s, accounts of the disaster had reflected both symbolic and concrete efforts to heal. One illustrative example was the establishment of a special congregation of nobles and citizens who met in the cathedral every Tuesday after the midday meal to commemorate the saint’s miracle.65 Simi­ larly, the viceroy and ruling council’s decision to relieve the tax burden on the worst-affected population in the city’s hinterland was meant to convey compassion, and probably did lessen the suffering in the countryside.66 Such harmony, however, was tenuous at best.67 Shifting from the printed word to the world of ink and quills reveals deep fractures around the interpretation of Vesuvius. Tutini would write again about the volcano, and this time he flashed different colors.68

prodigious portents When Tutini wrote his pamphlet, he was in Rome under the protection of Cardinal Francesco Maria Brancaccio and other churchmen of the French faction.69 One copy of the piece, which Tutini left anonymous, is in the Na­ tional Library of Naples, and at least one other copy exists in the Vatican.70 In gratitude for the protection he had been offered by Brancaccio, Tutini donated most of his manuscripts to him, so they became part of an extensive library that was eventually transferred back to the southern city in the late seventeenth century. The jumble of missives and manuscripts collated with the Neapolitan copy of the Prodigiosi portenti suggests a desperate mood, as the rebels and their supporters tried to make sense of their failure and attempted to galva­ nize new energies and allies for a renewed effort. Along with the pamphlet, there are letters from the republic’s hoped for protector, the French Duc de Guise, and his officers, mostly making excuses for the failure to aid the rebels

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in 1647–48. The piece itself is a hurriedly scribbled thing, outraged, vehement, and conspiratorial­.71 Some time earlier, in May of 1648, the papal nuncio in Naples had writ­ ten back to Rome that the new restoration viceroy, the Count of Oñate, “took a great pleasure in seeing that the city was free of people who might cause tumults.” Oñate undoubtedly counted Tutini among these men. The threat of capture made life for the exiles in Rome very difficult, but as the nuncio reported, many of them were not willing to accept failure, even after a wave of arrests and executions in May, June, and November.72 Instead they continued to plot and to write their own accounts of the events that had transpired since July 1647. In February of 1648, less than two months before Oñate triumphantly en­ tered Naples on April 6, an anonymous Relazioni e riflessioni politiche sul reame di Napoli was circulating in Rome. Its author identified all the usual Spanish crimes: onerous fiscal burdens and the complicity of the baronage in consuming the wealth extracted from the kingdom. He described the revolt as a glorious enterprise shared between the lowest orders, or popolo meschino, and the popolo civile, aimed at “freeing the patria from noble and Spanish tyranny.”73 Another similar work exalted the Neapolitan republic, appealed to the baronage, and simultaneously accused it broadly of betrayal. Polemically, its author asked, “To support war, to be tyrannical, to bloody your hands with Neapolitan blood, does this make you Neapolitan?”74 Tutini wrote the Prodigiosi portenti in the last weeks of 1649, as new reports of Vesuvius reached Rome in the still-violent political climate. It was the first significant activity since 1631, lasting from November 28 to January 14, 1650. Tutini seized the occasion to write and circulate his first commentary on the revolt, even as he was beginning his collaboration with Marino Verde to write the much longer Racconto della sollevatione di Napoli. This pamphlet did two things: it identified Vesuvius’s reactivity to Spanish tyranny and then restated the declarations made by Neapolitan rebels in 1648. Essentially, it called for a second revolt. “The eruption of Vesuvius was judged a prodigious thing,” Tutini began. He continued: We saw recently, considering the horrible and terrifying fire that occurred the 16th of December 1631, that after sixteen years Naples rose in rebellion chasing the Spanish from government . . . the Popolari of that city having chosen leaders and received obedience from the entire Kingdom and lorded over all affairs. All

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the more prodigious does this new evaporation of this year 1649 present itself, since after a mere eighteen years from this episode Vesuvius has made ash, fire and earthquakes, and it is not at all usual for eruptions to occur, because the burnable matter that the volcano hurtles outward requires the passage of many centuries to generate in its bowels. But if these clamors and shakings of the mountain reflect a higher principle, we would see them almost as natural signs that the earth in shaking speaks that it will no longer endure tyrannical Spanish Domination.75

The vehement and impassioned first lines of the Prodigiosi portenti inverted the message of 1631. Rather than confirming Spanish hegemony over Naples, Vesuvius was seeking to shake its grip. Tutini called prodigious causes into play in his cry for a second rising; the second eruption had occurred less than two decades after the first, when presumably it took volcanoes a long time to build up their store of combustibles. All the catastrophes—eruptions past and present, the failed and future revolt—were divine castigation operating through different agents: the wild burning volcano and the rage of Neapolitan commoners. Tutini never ceased to find the masses contemptible, terrifying, and quite literally wild. They were a force of nature the popular leaders needed to use, check, and control to the right ends. In a letter that was one of his earliest comments on the revolt, he wrote, “In 1647, on the 7th of July, Naples rose and the excrement of the city, barefoot and vile men, from the Lavinaro, Mercato, and Conciara districts, caused a great tumult.”76 Giulio Genoino, the main popular leader in the early phases of the revolt, felt the same way. He also com­ pared the plebeian mob to a natural disaster, unleashed on Naples as God’s punishment­.77 These sentiments, which equated the urban masses to the destructive forces of volcanism, also surfaced in the Racconto della sollevatione di Napoli, the work Tutini wrote later in collaboration, and with considerably more care and reflection than the Prodigiosi portenti. Here he explained: What happened was clearly God’s castigation for the little reverence the nobles, the people, and the Spanish showed to the archbishop cardinal Filomarino, with their behavior provoking Divine Justice, which quickly sought revenge (as you will discover) against those who vilipended the reputation of the Church, so that there were violent deaths, the burning of homes, people ripped apart, and irreparable ruin and damage.78

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Disaster was the habitual condition of a city prey to impiety and tyranny. More precisely, Vesuvius was reacting to Spanish injustice. “Habitually,” Tutini wrote in 1660, “Mount Vesuvius travails Naples and the Kingdom with its eruptions . . . and thus it is that after this mountain’s fires there occur novelties, ruin, and new dominions in the Kingdom of Na­ ples, which we will show on another occasion.” In another passage of the same work, he addressed the eruption of 1631. “The eleventh fire of Mount Somma in 1631,” he announced, “was so awful and sad that it ruined and consumed everything nearby . . . and we were spectators to this great eruption that pres­ aged risings and pestilence, not without great pain.”79 If Tutini’s collaboration with Marino Verde in the Racconto della sollevatione di Napoli produced a lengthy analysis and apologia for the Masaniello revolt, his earlier pamphlet on Vesuvius was meant simply to inflame. It was an expression of rage and despair solicited in large part by the volcano’s new­ est eruption. Very tellingly, the Neapolitan exile began each new paragraph with the heading “Terra Clamat” (“The Earth shouts”). His first target was the Count of Oñate, the new viceroy who entered Naples in early April 1648 and began a fierce repression. He also identified “the false oaths of the Spanish . . . as they promised to forgive the Neapolitans who were forced to tear apart these Barbarians, who have bled, impoverished, and reduced to misery Naples and the Kingdom together.”80 The volcano wanted to “take revenge on these Moors, these Barbarians, revenge our injuries and martyrdoms, and the Mountain seems to say to the Count of Oñate, do you think to root Spanish Domination in the kingdom by spilling so much innocent blood?”81 The triangulation of saint protector, vol­ canic punisher, and the impious tyrannical viceroy could be cast into an appeal to unleash Neapolitan anger anew. The viceroy’s brutal treatment in the spring of 1648 of a city that had risen in justified rebellion—its martyrdom under a new Diocletian—would continue the cycle of punishment. San Gennaro’s blood, which was treasured in the cathedral in ampoules alongside his severed head, failed to liquefy during the mass of December 16, 1649. It was the eighteenth anniversary of the saint’s miraculous intercession on Naples’s behalf, and nearly one month into that year’s protracted erup­ tion. Unlike the Count of Monterrey in 1631, Oñate presided over a miserable failure. The absent miracle marked ongoing discord and the now apparently unbridgeable rifts in the community. Exhaustion and fear saved the viceroy, the clergy, and the nobility from yet another outburst of popular violence. Tutini declared under the usual heading that:

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The Earth shouts—to the Neapolitans almost as if God and all the protectors of this city wished to show their anger against the barbarian Spaniards and they already give sign of this, since the blood of San Gennaro protector of Naples, which when placed before his [severed] head right away liquefies to the marvel of all. In this year 1649, celebrating the anniversary of the eruption of Vesuvius that occurred on the 16th of December, having brought [the relic of blood] in ceremony it did not liquefy, propagating in this way grave catastrophes and coming war in the city and the kingdom. In the past it has been observed­ that in the ceremonies of this saint, which bring together his head and blood, when it does not liquefy miserable things and war occur in the city and the kingdom­.82

The volcano’s anger and the saint’s refusal were read in a common key, reflect­ ing the contest to appropriate castigator and miraculous protector for a vision of Naples free from Spain. Tutini also inveighed against the baronage, “infinite traitors, who to be re­ warded by the Spanish and receive their favor have carried out infinite be­ trayals against the patria and themselves.” He then continued, “Don’t these villains know that one loves the betrayal and not the betrayer?”83 His accusa­ tions, however, were also aimed at the leaders of the popular faction, who had been unable to form an alliance with the nobility in the most delicate phases of the revolt. This inablity proved decisive when the fleet of Don Juan of Aus­ tria, son of Philip IV, entered the Bay of Naples to restore order on October 1, 1648. Recalling the betrayals and mutual accusations between the popular fac­ tion and the baronage that began almost immediately on Don Juan’s arrival, Tutini compared the fate of the Neapolitan citizenry to the victimization of New World peoples: The Earth shouts—against the Nobility and the Popolari of Naples who are unjust and do not realize their ruin in being disunited, because the Spanish foment discord to keep them divided, so that they may more easily exterminate the nobility and keep the Popolari enslaved . . . and if you do not abandon your particular interests and embrace the public good you will be treated worse than Indians by these inhuman people. . . .84

When he discussed the backstabbing between social orders in his later Racconto­ sulla sollevatione di Napoli, Tutini recalled that on the fleet’s arriva­l the nobility had gone about the city “all sparkling and threatening.” He also

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remembered that on this occasion he exchanged words with someone he disparagingl­y called “a certain little knight, who said, ‘you’ll see now that the armada has arrived, what will happen.’ ” Tutini had let the noble know that “this is a very beastly mob” and that was not going to be easily suppressed.85 The rising was crushed six months after Don Juan sailed into Naples. As the repression continued, voices circulated in Naples that the lackluster per­ formance of San Gennaro and then the eruption at the end of 1649 showed displeasure with Neapolitan rebelliousness. That both saint and volcano had been appropriated in the name of restoring order was thus also evident. Tutini railed that the Spanish and their supporters were continuing a propaganda campaign in Naples and in Rome aimed at these ends. His pamphlet waged a war of words with the broadsheets that “the Spanish allow to be posted on the pulpits of their preachers, saying that Mount Vesuvius with these bellows and trembling threatens to sink Naples that is faithful to neither King nor Spanish.” This was nothing short “of deceit,” he fulminated, “since Vesuvius shouts to Neapolitans that they shed the yoke of these wicked, atheist men, whom the earth can no longer bear as they are without God, religion, and peace.”86 As Tutini drew toward the conclusion of his pamphlet, he became even more explicit. “I chase out the King and the Spanish,” a personified Vesuvius now declared, “and this must be done because the people make the King, and not the King the people, and God places princes in kingdoms so that they may govern as fathers and not as tyrants.”87 In the final lines of the Prodigiosi portenti, Tutini concluded by promising the Spanish “greater extermination of their flesh than in the past, and the same for the betrayers of the patria.” Independence had been occasioned by severed vassalage, a bond of mutual responsibilities the foreign occupiers had treated with utter contempt. This justified the rupture between the two nations: A vassal of a King is therefore a vase in which there is a plant, which emits pleasant odors and brings enjoyment to the Prince with its fruits. He picks the flowers and fruit that it produces when they are owed, and the Prince with the wing of his diligence and protection defends it from snow, frost, and any sinister accident: this is what it means to be a vassal. But if the Prince were to continu­ ally prune that plant it would certainly wither . . . so have the Spanish done to the poor city of Naples, with their daily taxes on the vassals they have stripped them of bark and desiccated them so they can no longer live. In fact, by having given the reins to the Baronage they have thus stricken their vassals with their cruelties so that they can no longer stand upright or give fruit. Naples—you

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have the example of so many foreign Peoples and Kingdoms, knowing well what they have done to free themselves of oppression. Do not fear these impi­ ous men, this is what the Mountain exclaims.88

Importantly, there were significant commonalities between the sense of nation­ hood expressed here and the proclamations made by the rebel leadership in the fall of 1647, as any hope that Philip IV would negotiate with Neapolitan rebels faded. Tutini had been among those who favored severing all ties with the Habsburgs, even if the rebel leader Giulio Genoino sought to curry the favor of Philip IV, arguing that Neapolitans had only taken up arms against corrupt ministers and nobles.89 The Prodigiosi portenti del monte Vesuvio offered no vision, practical or theoretical, on how to fashion an independent Naples from the ashes of a new rebellion. Instead, it was an outraged expression of patriotic sentiment that reclaimed Vesuvius from those who would misuse it to suggest that volcanic fire was punishing the people for their sedition. Unlike the relationi of 1631, which portrayed the viceroy and the archbishop as essential in evoking San Gennaro’s aid, the terrible strife of the late 1640s had opened up a permanent rift between the Spanish and the most radical Neapolitan patriots. In 1665, an aging Tutini finished the manuscript of his Anatomico discorso del Regno di Napoli, purportedly occasioned by ongoing disparagement of his city. It was an exhaustive description of Naples aimed at silencing its enemies. Using medi­ cal and anatomical terms, Tutini compared the city to a great living organism afflicted by illness. In a frequently employed baroque analogy, the city’s ailing body would be cured with the right intervention, much as medicine provided remedies for human afflictions.90 “Finding myself distant from my patria and ever recalling the glories and beauties of  the Kingdom of  Naples, and the no less magnificent and illustrious Parthenope,” he recognized that, “it was from time to time afflicted now by fires, now by rebellions, and by pestilence.”91 This was a direct reference to the eruption of 1631, the 1647 revolt, and the plague of 1656, which now featured in a late seventeenth-century retrospective on a difficult century. Tutini’s three calamities—which he called morbi, or “illnesses”—were identical to the ones identified by the historian Pietro Giannone, exiled at the beginning of the En­ lightenment.92 While remaining critical and bemoaning the continuing Span­ ish presence, the Anatomico discorso was less laden by the sense of crisis that had pervaded Tutini’s earlier account of Vesuvius. It was prescriptive rather than inflammatory.

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The volcano figured from the start, signifying the contrasts of a city that had “an abundance and superabundance of everything nature produces, and yet chooses to be slave to a barbarian people rather than govern itself.” A relatively quiescent Vesuvius exemplified Naples’s cure: its natural wealth. Echoing Renaissance humanist praises of the Neapolitan landscape, Tutini wrote that “the Kingdom of Naples is the most beautiful part of Italy, and all of Europe for that matter, and it was endowed by God with diverse natural gifts.”93 The pages that followed this description are a stunning historical record of Medi­ terranean biodiversity, which ranks very high among world eco-regions.94 “The abundance and variety of fruit, both in summer and winter is some­ thing I can scarcely comprehend,” Tutini declared in his description of the base of the volcano. He then composed extensive lists of fruits, legumes, and other cultivars that flourished on its slopes. Wild game and domesticated ani­ mals figured as well, along with an inventory of local marine fauna. There was a very important reason for lavishing so much attention and detail on the gifts nature had given the city.95 He deliberately paired each example of natural bounty with a trade or profession—suggesting that if Neapolitans had been left to their own devices and justly governed, they would have been happy and prosperous, not the ferocious mob they became in the late 1640s. Comments followed his lists: “There are two hundred shops in Naples that sell fresh fruit” or “what should I say of the fish market and the fish mongers who are over a hundred distributed throughout Naples.”96 Read alongside the evidence of abundance, these were loaded references to the political tumult of the preced­ ing decades, since the revolt of 1647 had begun in the city market. Spain had won the contest for Naples in the seventeenth century, but Habsburg hegem­ ony did not assure control over urban memory and its symbols. Vesuvius was among the most compelling. Tutini’s fiery pamphlet suggests José Antonio Maravall’s observations on baroque culture’s relationship to power: the constant perception of crisis stim­ ulated the mechanisms of control to stir and impress souls toward obedience, but also produced resistance.97 Vesuvius accounts in print generally manifested these features of control, stimulating the dissemination of information and in­ terpretation in the aftermath of disaster. Tutini’s 1649 manuscript, however, reveals that Vesuvius was a landscape not easily appropriated by any single vision of the community. Alternately threatening and generous, the volcano was far less stable than the prevailing myth implied. Instead, it could be fiercely contested, especially by those for whom it expressed ideals otherwise silenced. At stake was a natural ally that had the power to speak for both the governing and the unjustly governed, like a great voice manifesting God’s anger.

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fa d i n g a n g e r ? Sometime before 1637, Antonio Suarez Messina, prefect of the local roads, erected an inscription at the base of the volcano. It stood near the towns of Torre del Greco and Portici, where the destruction had been terrible.98 This location would nonetheless acquire a new significance over the course of the seventeenth century, as it was traversed by a growing number of Vesuvius climbers. An engraving done half a century later shows three gentlemen stand­ ing before the inscription. While the ongoing warning is evident, so is the heightened curiosity of these later visitors (fig. 4.1). Composed in Latin, the original inscribed verses surely were not intended for the local villagers who had died in the thousands. They were meant for erudite and philosophical observers. As these became more frequent in subsequent decades, curiosity may have been winning out over anxieties. “Posterity, Posterity,” began the inscription, “this has to do with you.” It continued: One day bears the torch for the second day after, so listen. Twenty times, from the shining of the sun, if history does not lie, Vesuvius burned, always with a great massacre of those who linger. So that in the future it not take those who doubt, I warn you. This mountain is gravid with bitumen, alum, iron, sulfur, gold, silver, nitre, and springs of water. Sooner or later it will ignite and give birth to a flooding sea. But before it suffers, shaking itself and the ground, it smokes, it vibrates, burns, and shakes the air. It roars horribly, bellows, thun­ ders, and chases inhabitants from its borders. Flee while you can! Here it tears itself apart, here it bursts, and it vomits a lake of fire. It comes precipitously down, preventing late flight. If it overtakes you, it is over, you are dead!99

Vesuvius’s angry reactivity to the state of Neapolitan affairs appeared most evident to some observers during the phase of acute political conflict sur­ rounding the revolt of 1647, but ultimately there was no essential persistence of these views. By the later 1600s, Vesuvius appeared less terrifying than the Latin verses of 1637 had predicted. The volcano was almost continuously ac­ tive between 1696 and 1737, flaring up nearly every year. This activity contin­ ued beyond that. There was a large eruption in 1767 that actually raised the height of the cone and another powerful one in 1794.100 The mountain even visibly grew through its ejecta and its extrusions. Giulio Cesare Recupito had described Vesuvius as decurtato and eviscerato in the 1630s; the volcano lay mutilated and eviscerated.101 He expected that

F I G U R E 4 . 1 . Illustration showing visitors to Vesuvius viewing the Latin inscription erected at the base of the volcano sometime before 1637. Pompeo Sarnelli, Guida de’ forestieri (Naples, 1697). Courtesy of  The Watkinson Library.

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Vesuvius would return to the sort of deceptive silence documented in the his­ torical sources. For roughly thirty years, expectations were actually borne out. An uneasy quiet settled over Vesuvius. Perhaps this is why Tutini seized the unusual activity in 1649 as an occasion for political diatribe. As eruptivity grew more frequent in the latter decades of the century, however, something else also occurred. Eruptions were spectacular and still dangerous, but they never matched 1631 in violence.102 The terrific vengeance of Vesuvius had a transitory quality rather than a stable permanence in Neapolitan learned culture partly because of this reason. Altered moods altered perception. The spiritual pro­ tection received by Naples and the question of loyalty to Spain did not recede entirely. But metonymies shifted significantly again, now more closely in step with the practice of observing and exploring a volcano that remained, in large part, approachable. Renaissance humanistic and chorographic traditions had primed the urban literate response to Vesuvius in important but also unstable ways. Neapolitan humanism found a new lease on life through the description of Vesuvius, merging now with the kind of naturalistic curiosity and scientific knowledge expected of the qualified observer. The excursionists shown paus­ ing before the 1637 memorial would seem to have identified with recogniz­ able gestures of observation that set native practices in a widely cosmopolitan context. Approaching Vesuvius required expertise. That expertise took em­ piricism inductively toward theoretical natural philosophical constructs, but it also required deep historical erudition.103 A new way of seeing Vesuvius, and volcanoes more generally, was in the making.

chapter 5

On the Face of This Earth: Vesuvius and Its Kind

Writing in 1632 about the eruption he had just witnessed, Scipione Falcone briefly entertained the possibility that fiery channels reached below Vesuvius and connected “beneath the earth with Pozzuoli, Mongibello [Etna], Lipari, Volcano, and all the mountains of Italy where there are open mouths of fire.”1 Would the recently erupted volcano now continue to burn and draw fuel from these places? Would it erupt like Etna, more frequently observed to have erupted in the past? Falcone surmised that it was more likely that the now-shortened and collapsed appearance of Vesuvius signaled a return to the brooding silence that had lulled so many into forgetting. It would take centuries, perhaps, for the gradual accretion of sulfur and bitumen to prime a new charge in the crater. But contrary to what historical sources and personal observation led Falcone to think in the early 1630s, the volcano actually had begun a period of intense activity. There was a large eruption in 1660, followed by bursts in 1682, 1689, 1694, and 1698. The significance of these bouts of volcanism­ lay in the cultural response they generated, rather than in their power or destructiveness.2 The history of volcanology in this period was not, however, a simple progression of expanding knowledge. There was, for example, no clear breakthrough in terms of theorizing how volcanism acted in the inner economy of the earth—this was not something geology achieved until the twentieth century. Falcone’s doubts about how deep and interconnected volcanism was persisted throughout the 1600s. Were the features of Vesuvius singular and isolated? Were they distributed across the earth and the heavens? Two oppositional but also overlapping analogies employed by seventeenth-century science—body

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and machine—sustained these questions and the ensuing theorizing. Differently, but often together, organic and mechanistic analogies transferred the meaning of particular bouts of volcanism to a structure of theory. The especially dense concentration of volcanoes in New Spain made the most sensible parallel to southern Italy. Comparisons became one feature of explanation, as Pietro Castelli explained in 1632: We know about many Fires in America, in Africa, in Asia, and in Europe. Beginning with America, part of the world recently found, which we call Occidental India, there is a Kingdom called New Spain, where in the province of Nicaragua the Spanish have observed more than ten Mountains, which like many Mongibelli­ [Etnas] burn continuously, hurtling at a distance and spreading wide ash, burning stones. By day one sees their smoke, by night fire: for this reason they are called Volcanoes.3

Castelli expressed dissatisfaction at the pronouncements of earlier authors because their vague theories looked increasingly insufficient in the face of experience, which was showing both the ubiquity and complexity of volcanism. The subject needed a new precision capable of elevating observation to theory. “Physically speaking,” he declared, “we must first explain what is Fire, its various sorts, and their respective origins; to say this from the start, I have not found a single Author until now, among my few books, who gives me satisfaction.” He continued: “I would really like to know why it burns, what its essence is, and what substance it has.”4 He intuited, like a succession of seventeenth-century observers, that the outward behavior, structure, and material features of individual volcanoes were the key to revising theory. Volcanoes do seem wonderfully suggestive of visibility and concealment, even today. What do outer appearances suggest about what happens within? As the seventeenth century progressed, the intention of making this discernment became a paramount feature of observation. Vesuvius is a squat bulk more impressive for girth than vertical prominence. The elevation today barely exceeds four thousand feet. The summit would have been lower still after 1631. It was never a daunting climb and it was close to Naples. It was far more approachable than Etna, being less than half its elevation, and it did not require the sea voyage it took to see the volcanic Aeolian Islands.5 By the mid-eighteenth century there were three well-trod footpaths that wound upward to the summit, though it very likely that these were much older.6 With reasonable effort a strong person could reach the crater within hours.

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1638: measuring vulcan’s forge When Athanasius Kircher arrived at Portici, a few miles away from Naples at the base of Vesuvius, the volcano still bore the scars of the eruption seven years earlier. Debris and the charred hulks of houses, aristocratic villas and churches lay strewn in a path of destruction descending down its seaward side to the towns and hamlets below. Local barons had long favored these lower slopes of the volcano for their suburban retreats removed from the bustle of Naples. They paid a heavy price for their leisure during the eruption of 1631, as many of them were trapped outside the city. Kircher was undoubtedly familiar with Pliny the Elder’s account of the ancient eruption, which he might have read, like many, on hearing news of the recent cataclysm.7 Something of that scene had been repeated in the early hours of December 16, 1631, as the first horrific signs of eruption had sent thousands fleeing toward Naples and the sea. When he approached the volcano from the west, most likely from the littoral road that ran east from the Porta Capuana, he was retracing what had been for many a desperate escape. He would have arrived at a vantage point somewhere in the middle of Vesuvius’s two peaks, looking up at the broad valley from which most of the destruction had come. It afforded him a close look at the conditions that had prompted the Spanish viceroy and the city’s governing council to take the extraordinary step of granting five- and ten-year relief for the affected population.8 Kircher’s attention, however, was by his own account fixed on the crater and on a climb that conveyed something of the urge to explore that had gripped earlier Italian humanists. He had seen Stromboli and Etna erupting just previously, but this approach would be closer than he had ever been to viewing the earth’s central fire.9 As related in the Mundus subterraneus, the climb bore a resemblance to Petrarch’s allegorized experience on Mont Ventoux in southern France three centuries earlier. The thrills of exertion and the aesthetic rewards of the summit structured an inner experience. Another literary precedent was Pietro Bembo’s ascent of Mount Etna in the 1490s, undertaken when the young Venetian was finishing his humanistic studies in Messina. Unlike Petrarch’s ascent of the extinct Provençal peak, Bembo’s climb had been of a spectacularly active volcano. The dialogue in Aetna explored the ties of filial and paternal devotion that bound the younger Bembo to his father, but it also contained up-close descriptions of volcanic activity typical of natural history. Surely Kircher relished this parallel, too. Bembo gave a vivid account of tempting fate with a close approach to the crater, writing: “But didn’t you know that Pliny the Elder died

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like that, when he was too thorough (I won’t say too rash) in his investigation of the fires of Vesuvius?”10 The ascent began in the dark, as the Jesuit was led by an experienced local guide, whom he had selected as a “rustic companion knowledgeable in the route.” Lest anyone suspect that he repeated Petrarch’s famous error on Mount Ventoux—the fourteenth-century humanist had allegorized his failure to follow his brother’s example in choosing the arduous path up the mountain as hesitation before the path of salvation—Kircher recalled that he took the most direct route to the summit. “Climbing along difficult, rough and arduous paths” he wrote, “I reached the crater with him, horrible to recount, and observed it before me aflame with burning bitumen and enveloped in noxious sulfur fumes.”11 He wrote that “feeling the horrible moans and shudders of the mountain, the unbelievable stench, and seeing black smoke mixed with globules of fire erupting continuously from eleven different places, both in the base of the crater and the flanks of the mountain, compelled me to erupt in the same fashion: Oh the immensity of divine power and God’s wisdom, how incomprehensible are thy ways!”12 Standing on the rim stimulated a related reflection, which he recalled in the Mundus: “If, in your power, you display such formidable portents of nature against the duplicity and maliciousness of men, how shall it be in that extreme day when the Earth, plunged under by your fury, is dissolved by heat into the elements?”13 Here Kircher conveyed the gestures of prayer, observation, and measurement that had consumed his encounter with the crater, as well as one current of thought in late seventeenth-century geology that posited the existence of a deep ignited core.14 Kircher also reported that his horror diminished with the rising dawn, when the light enabled him better to gauge his surroundings. The assistance provided by the guide was undoubtedly helpful, as it had been for the Spaniard Oviedo one hundred years earlier in Nicaragua. Kircher claimed to have lowered himself some distance down into the crater. Earlier authors, like Ambrogio Leone, attest to the fact that local people knew the terrain because they thought that exposure to fumaroles would cure ailments, because they foraged there, or because they led their flocks in search of pasturage. Whatever the Jesuit contrived, it was surely with the assistance of his rustic guide.15 The employment of such people had been a practice even before Ferrante Loffredo’s explorations in the Campi Flegrei in the late sixteenth century. Kircher, however, may have been one of the first to bring scientific instruments up the mountain, along with his native guide. His intention was to survey the size, shape, and depth of the crater. The Jesuit had taken care to equip himself with an instrument whose later

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versions were dubbed the “pantometrum Kircherianum” in a 1660 work by Kircher’s assistant Gaspar Schott, who was reputedly extremely adept at us­ ing it.16 Published in Würzburg, Schott’s manual described it as a sort of all-inone instrument, “that which singly measure all, witness latitudes, longitudes, altitudes, depths, and surfaces, terrestrial and celestial bodies, and whatever indeed we are all accustomed to doing with other instruments, and beyond that it has other innumerable uses.”17 In 1638, Schott had possibly devised a similar instrument for the Knights of Malta.18 That instrument bore some resemblance to other computational devices that had been built since the late sixteenth century for a wide range of functions that included arithmetical and geometrical calculations, computing interest and exchanging currency, determining volume and area, as well as surveying and gauging artillery fire. Related examples included Galileo’s “compasso geometrico e militare,” but there were others as well, such as Michel Coignet’s “compasso pantometro,” both dating from the late 1590s.19 In the crater, Kircher “drew out” his instrument, sectioning its nearcylindrical shape. He estimated its circumference to be just short of a mile and the depth to be approximately eight hundred paces. Beneath him, he observed “sulfur, bitumen, and other minerals” roiling up from occult underground origins. All around, portions of the crater appeared to have shaken loose and tumbled back into the fiery chasm. Despite this, however, Kircher estimated that the crater was growing. He grasped, in fact, the process by which a new cone had formed in the few years of continuous eruptions following 1631, where extruded material had built an ever growing and rising ring around the newly active crater.20 In the thirty-odd years between his first encounter with Vesuvius and the completion of his book on the earth’s interior, the volcano remained active. It had two other eruptions in 1649 and 1660, the latter of which Kircher studied closely. These later eruptions made him think that the process of accretion whereby a new cone was created could be reversed in the case of a large eruption like the one of 1631.21 Kircher envisioned a process of ongoing volcanic dynamism: the transformation of the earth’s surface was driven by spasmodic cataclysms that either lifted or collapsed its surface.22 Vivid memories of the volcano colored Kircher’s works, including the cosmological dialog called the Iter extaticum (1657) and, later, the Mundus.23 What he may have calibrated as a result of volcano watching was a special attentiveness to processes in nature, a kind of awareness of phenomena that must have arisen from, but also contributed to, the delight he found in places like Vesuvius, which seemed to him like theaters of nature.24 It was like peeking into the back of a stage and seeing all the wonderful machinery. Kircher’s

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measurements and his broader intuition about geological processes were arrayed alongside traditional Christian and classical meanings of nature, and in this respect he continued to share much with preceding traditions of natural history and aesthetic appreciation. Naturalists of his time went into nature bearing the text, both literally and figuratively speaking, so that erudition filtered experience. The scientific work of measurement, the physical effort, the words spoken in the vernacular to the native guide, and also the Latin prayer, were simultaneous. Taken together in memory, these things were a vision of the earth revealed. There were many things that Kircher could not have seen readily, however, though they too were happening right at his feet. Life had begun to cling on the lava of 1631, for example. The first living things to appear after an eruption are an endemic lichen species called Stereocaulon vesuvianum. Stereocaulon usually develops seven to ten years after an area has been covered in lava, in this case roughly coinciding with the Jesuit’s exploration. It coats the rock and begins to break it down, giving the surface a gray hue.25 About four years after the first emergence of Stereocaulon, flowering plants like red valerian make their appearance in depressions and cracks broken down by the lichen, especially where soil has formed. This first colonization leads to the gradual increase in vegetation, as roots begin to work their way into newly formed soil. Broom, with its distinct yellow flowering, is one of the first shrub plants to emerge—one might well imagine that by the publication of Kircher’s Mundus in the 1660s those parts of Vesuvius not touched by continuing volcanic activity would have already shown significant flowering in spring.26 Though freshly scarred at the time of the 1638 climb, the volcano must have been a dramatic sight, appearing in the hue and blush of different colors—green and rust, yellow and red, gray and black. The appearance of Vesuvius in this period struck observers with its contrasting features of dynamism and destruction. Could the mountain grow consistently, and generate new material, or was it simply splaying itself out, dumping out its insides in a squat and malformed version of its former self ? It became increasingly evident that the form and behavior of volcanoes—that is to say their shape, their material composition within, and their periodicity—made them sui generis features of the earth’s surface. Frequent eruptions of Vesuvius and Etna in the seventeenth century only intensified interest in each volcano’s peculiarities, nudging volcanology toward a specificity that had not existed in traditional Aristotelian natural philosophy, where volcanism was explained—like earthquakes, storms, and so forth—as a rare phenomenon in the system of nature. This is not to say that the writers of volcanological tracts

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ignored the relationship between the empiricism of exploring a particular volcano and the causal explanations of natural philosophy. Quite the opposite, authors of Vesuvius tracts grappled with relating their natural histories to a causal model. The movement between specificity and theory in understanding volcanoes, however, was hardly resolved between the 1630s and the 1700s. What stood was a wonderfully fluid and imaginative picture. Some rather considerable leaps of the scientific imagination make especially evident the qualities of these perceptions. It is perhaps especially revealing that by the 1640s more than one astronomer imagined the existence of distant volcanic mountains on the moon and, in one unusual case, possibly on the surface of Mars. That conjecture had at least as much to do with astronomy as it did with geology, but it does suggest that the growing number of modern accounts of volcanoes and volcanism increasingly displaced the limited certainties of ancient sources. If montes ignivomi were widely distributed on the terrestrial globe, might that ubiquity not extend to extraterrestrial topographies as well? Volcanoes in the heavens were an argument in favor of nature’s uniformity, erasing the traditional Aristotelian distinctions between the terrestrial and the celestial, much like Galileo’s mountainous moon had. Perhaps this is why astronomers began to see them.

vo l ca n o e s a b ov e As he had done since at least two years previously, when he first saw it, Francesco Fontana trained his telescope on the black Martian spot. The ater conus or “horrid cone” was visible in Naples on the night of August 24, 1638, firmly fixed in the center of the bright red planet. By his own accounting, the Neapolitan telescope maker had been making observations of the moon and planets ever since he had devised his instrument some thirty years earlier. On that August evening, the Martian surface formation looked like a dot surrounded by a vast and discolored ring (fig. 5.1). Fontana strained considerably to resolve the image, but he thought that he could see signs of fire in the circular form. Was the entire formation a great protruding cone, he wondered, or was he looking at its opposite, a great inverted conical depression in the body of Mars? Whatever it was, it was at the limits of resolution, so Fontana remained undecided. It is unclear whether he believed that he was looking at an enormous volcano, but it is possible.27 The moon was resolvable with much greater clarity than Mars, however, and Fontana had spent considerable time looking at it as well. Galileo had already described the lunar surface as earthlike in the Sidereus nuncius, but

F I G U R E 5 . 1 . Illustration of Francesco Fontana’s first observation of Mars in 1636, from his Novae coelestium terrestriumque rerum observationes (Naples, 1646). This item is reproduced by permission of  The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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Fontana pushed the semblance of mountains, valleys, and bodies of water on the moon toward much wilder speculation. His nomenclature for the geological features of the lunar surface included new terms like fontes and fonticuli— these were in reality impact craters of various sizes but looked to Fontana to be springs or founts. The astronomer also described linear rivos radiating out from these fontes, mistaking surface fractures for liquid flows on a watery moon. Elsewhere, Fontana identified margaritales and gemmales. These pearl and gem-encrusted formations gave the lunar surface a sparkling mineral-like appearance. The entire nomenclature was wildly fantastical, and even selfreferential, but it was logical. Fontana’s fons, for example, gave a lunar feature his family name; the word also commonly designated sources of water, hot springs, and volcanic areas. It would continue to be in currency among volca­ nologists well into the seventeenth century.28 Furthermore, the fons was a word humanists used in their descriptions of the Neapolitan landscape especially to describe its most beautiful autochthonous qualities. The “geological” term may have resonated for this local quality, as if to attach familiar and even particularly Neapolitan qualities to the moon.29 Few believed Fontana when he finally published an illustrated account of his observations in 1646. One cannot doubt from the Neapolitan’s tone that he felt that his telescopes and observations received short thrift and little acknowledgment.30 The Novae coelestium terrestriumque rerum observationes was in truth a more deserving work of selenography than Fontana’s detractors made it out to be. The instrument maker had tried to demonstrate his abilities since at least the late 1620s—in 1625 he also showed off his microscope to the Neapolitan Jesuits, for example.31 He also circulated astronomical observations in letter form but generally failed to garner credibility from more established astronomers.32 Ultimately, the Neapolitan got, instead, the reputation for being something of a hack. Nothing he did was able to save his tract on lunar and planetary observations from the savaging it received by contemporaries like the rival Italian telescope maker Evangelista Torricelli.33 Fontana’s reputation is less the concern. His mysterious Martian dot merits a moment’s analysis exactly for its speculative and imaginative qualities. It shows that alongside other prominent features of the earth’s surface—like mountains, valleys, lakes, rivers, seas, oceans—volcanoes had evidently entered astronomical nomenclature. That projection was evident in a much more successful work than Fontana’s. This was Johannes Hevelius’s Selenographia, which appeared in print in 1647, just one year after Fontana’s unfortunate Novae coelestium.34 Both selenographies together show that active geological features like thermal springs and volcanoes featured in planetary description

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by the 1640s. These terrestrial terms may have indirectly challenged the Aristotelian system of nature by implying that corruption and change occurred on the traditionally unchanging planets. Regarding the niger pilula vel conus—“black pill or cone”—the scant information given in the Novae coelestium does not really confirm whether the Neapolitan astronomer actually imagined it as a giant volcano, conical like Vesuvius or Etna, nor is it certain that he even saw anything real. Quite possibly, as most have surmised since, he was misled by a flaw in the lens into “seeing” a large and mysterious formation on Mars. All the same, a glance at Hevelius’s near-contemporary work confirms that prominent and highly visible geological features like volcanoes were at least thought to exist on the surface of other planets. In fact, conjecture that montes ignivomi existed specifically on Mars continued throughout the early modern period. In 1781, the German-born English astronomer William Herschel also observed a dark spot on the Martian surface, but unlike Fontana’s case, that observation was less likely to have been the result of telescopic error.35 Instead, the dark mass was the geological formation of Syrtis Major, already observed by Christian Huygens in 1659.36 One significant detail of Herschel’s astronomical observations is that he conjectured the existence of Vesuvius-like volcanoes on the moon. Certainly, better telescopes brought planetary surfaces into greater focus. Telescopes were more powerful in the 1640s than Galileo’s had been in 1610, further fueling the speculation the Tuscan astronomer had already launched regarding the height of lunar mountains, for example, or the presence of large bodies of water, and the generally terrestrial appearance of the lunar surface.37 It is also possible that natural histories of volcanoes such as Vesuvius and Etna may have been a stimulus behind the fanciful planetary topographies in later decades, since it seems only reasonable to assume that the projection of volcanoes on the moon derived from familiarity with them on Earth. What does seem certain, in any case, is that even astronomers such as Hevelius did not ignore the natural history of volcanoes. In the Selenographia, in fact, Hevelius developed a strategy of using terrestrial nomenclatures and proper place names to map lunar features. That strategy was at once descriptive, assistive, and explanatory.38 The shadow line of the moon’s phases, for example, or the ecliptic shadow during eclipses, moved across features that Hevelius endowed with earthly place names so that they might be tracked more easily: Corsica, the Adriatic Sea, Persia, Palestine, and so forth “appeared” on the moon. The Selenographia’s two most impressive depictions of the lunar surface were of the full moon as magnified by the telescope and accompanying that plate, as if brought into even sharper

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F I G U R E 5 . 2 . Map of the moon demonstrating Hevelius’s strategy of using terrestrial nomenclatures and proper place names to chart its features. Johannes Hevelius, Selenographia (Danzig, 1654). This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California­.

resolution, there was another with a representation of that same full lunar face mapped out with Hevelius’s terrestrial nomenclature. A familiar geography was in evidence as well, making the moon at a glance appear to contain its own version of the Mediterranean, Europe, the Levant and the East, and North Africa (fig. 5.2).39 As Hevelius explained it, his schema of projecting terrestrial nomenclatures would serve to orient observers on the face of the moon. To further this end, he included a lengthy list of place names matched to their extraterrestrial equivalent.40 The schema was peculiar and short lived, but it bore some re-

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semblance to Fontana’s even more fantastical one, and ultimately to Galileo’s pioneering drawings in 1610. In fact, Hevelius cited both Fontana and Galileo, but he only reserved praise for the latter, whose previous lunar observations appeared stitched into the text of the Selenographia.41 Hevelius’s terrestrial nomenclatures, however, served more than the sake of convenience. They underscored the thrust of Galileo’s argument decades earlier, which had been partly to challenge the Aristotelian dictum of the immutability of the heavens on the basis of a set of singularly piercing observations. The telescope had revealed to Galileo the moon’s earthlike surface, and this was an argument that Hevelius was more than willing to pick up. In open and visible conjecture along these lines, he argued early in the massive tract for the ample evidence of corruption and mutability on the moon—an argument sustained, strikingly, by a body of evidence that we can observe to have wavered between the telescopically visible and the imaginary. It did not follow, Hevelius explained, that if something had not been seen it was not there. Rhetorically, the assertion reversed the general empiricist dictum of trusting the evidence of the eye, but that only had the effect of reinforcing the empiricism of the claim itself. To be sure, such seventeenth-century astronomers were hardly above letting their imaginations fly.42 Hevelius made the statement that “it does not follow, therefore, that when we see nothing that on account of this there is nothing, nothing at all,” a claim to the heuristic value of that imagination.43 The statement prefaced an argument about the corruptibility and mutability of the moon: only recently, Hevelius, recalled, the moon had been deemed an incorruptible body, but this was because no change had been observed on its surface. Reversing perspective, he speculated, would the earth’s inhabitants or its cities and signs of civilized life be so visible to lunar dwellers? Invisibility did not mean nonexistence, so Hevelius surmised that it would be foolish to ignore the possibility of an inhabited moon, itself the home to vast forests, oceans, cities, and living things of innumerable variety. They were all there, previously unseen features of a world with its own rain, wind, storms, and eruptions.44 Hevelius’s comments clearly targeted arguments like those of the Jesuit mathematics professor Mario Bettini, who sustained the long-held belief that visible lunar imperfections, or maculae, resulted simply from its varying density.45 The telescope had revealed something else all together different. The appearance of volcanism on the moon was only a tangential topic in the Selenographia, but it became quickly evident that to sustain the existence of lunar volcanoes was—like the very adoption of a terrestrial nomenclature—a way to underscore commonality of nature beyond the earth.46 Again, it is vital

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to note that it was visual evidence that stimulated Hevelius’s conjecture. Volcanism could “be seen” as another highly likely lunar phenomenon that flew in the face of its long-surmised appearance. One of the most prominent landmarks in Hevelius’s geography of the moon was a volcano he called Etna—the feature he described is actually what modern astronomers now call the Copernicus impact crater. The astronomer claimed to be able to spot volcanoes on the lunar surface by identifying their difference from other types of mountains. The highest and craggiest montes Lunares were definable as montes petrosos, or rocky mountains, while apparently softer and less edgy forms were montes arenosi, that is to say, sandy or dunelike mountains. Elsewhere, he discerned formations of a reddish and porphyry type that looked like places on Earth where niter and sulfur were present. Referencing this terrestrial analogy, Hevelius wrote: “Therefore, I have it for certain that fire burns perpetually, and I believe that a number of these are ignivomous, as are among us Mount Etna, Hecla, Vesuvius, and others.”47 It obviously does not make sense to force the Selenographia or Fontana’s Novae coelestium into a clear progression of volcanological thinking. Both works were astronomical in nature; volcanoes came up as extensions of argument. It is also not possible to resolve whether the eruption of 1631 had any impact on Hevelius’s musing. He made no obvious reference to these tracts and did not actually give the name Vesuvius to any lunar mountain. Evident, however, is how far speculation about volcanism could go by the 1640s and 1650s, especially when the telescope tickled the imagination. Back on Earth, alternatively, volcanology required other sorts of imaginative leaps. Rich as these were, too, they were rooted in the practices we have seen: climbing to the crater and reading the accounts of earlier observers. The science would thus build on a tradition of proximate investigation—and for the late seventeenth century, that increasingly meant southern Italy.

the 1660s: ash crosses and fire hearths The breaking dawn of July 3, 1660, cast its rays over the Mediterranean and Naples, brightening the sea and the city. With the sun rising at its back, the western slope of Vesuvius was lit last, but by that time Neapolitans had spotted an ominous shape clinging to the mountain’s silhouette. A dark, globular cloud spotted with flashes of fire sat on the volcano, as if impeded from rising any further. Gaspar Schott added this description to the preface of a tract Athanasius Kircher wrote in 1666 explaining a mysterious phenomenon associated with the volcano. Following an eruption, strange little ashen crosses had begun

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to appear on items of clothing and other wood throughout the Neapolitan hinterland. During this later eruption, Schott explained, the brightening dawn had been fortuitous for revealing the stunning spectacle, “so that there was not absence of spectators to the famous tragedy.” In truth, the ensuing eruption turned out to be much lesser than the one of 1631, and it is evident that Schott assumed a new familiarity with Vesuvius. Nec novum est, nec rarum—“neither is it novel nor rare”—he asserted, noting that the famoso and calamitoso incendio had made scholars and naturalists cognizant of the volcano’s eruptivity once again.48 Schott’s account may have modified the shock registered by observers thirty years earlier with a sense of recognition, but it marked no caesura with earlier baroque writings on the volcano.49 Quite explicitly, instead, he noted and built on a canon of new observers. Citing ancient sources was in obvious keeping with established tradition. A body of recognizable modern observations that might at once dispel or corroborate past voices had not existed in 1631, however. To cite one example, Schott explained that Procopius had recorded ash falling as far as Byzantium in his account of the Gothic Wars. He found that Recupito had described the same phenomenon. By adducing the Greek’s account with the more recent observations of a fellow Jesuit in the 1630s, Schott concluded that eruptions of Vesuvius had often scattered ash very widely about the Mediterranean. From what he could learn from the 1631 tracts as well, the recent eruption appeared to be demonstrably less powerful. No historical sources, however, had ever reported the puzzling phenomenon observed in the summer of 1660. As ash rained down on all sorts of surfaces, some of them yielded the appearance of many differently shaped and sized crosses. The occurrence was greeted with predictable wonderment—ingenti hominum stupore—throughout parts of southern Italy. According to Schott, Kircher had been pressed and queried on the matter, eventually sending a manuscript to Rome for printing. Vesuvius seemed an endless source of natural novelties.50 Kircher’s Diatribe de prodigiosisi Crucibus seems to have appeared peculiar from the start. It barely reached publication.51 Even in failure, however, the work is revealing of the traction volcanism had on one of the more fertile imaginations of the period. Kircher explained that prodigies fell under a threefold classification: those occasioned by the direct miraculous agency of God, those operated by His permission—as might have been the case by prodigies constructed by angels or demons using enhanced natural powers—and, finally, those prodigies that were purely of Nature’s imperium. The latter he termed naturae miracula, noting that the concealment of natural causes was a call to exercise the human powers of investigation and reason. Notably, a wide array­

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of phenomena fit under that latter category, each classified with respect to where they occurred. In caelo such prodigies included the appearance of a new star; in aquis they included great devastating floods; and in terra volcanic eruptions. The crosses that appeared around Naples fit the latter category. For an explanation, Kircher argued for the necessity of rational and empirical explanatio­n.52 A pattern of inquiry is discernible. Authors of the 1631 tracts had believed that there was sulfur, niter, and charcoal (all contained in gunpowder) in the volcano’s eruptive cloud. This conclusion derived from the practical knowledge of mining, metallurgy, and pyrotechnics formalized in the works of Agricola and Biringuccio. It was commonly observed, for example, that various precipitates, like niter (potassium nitrate), resulted from the combination of substances like ash with water.53 The attribution of subterranean heat to chemical reactions between sulfur and iron ore originated from frequent experimentation with the former substance in metallurgy, alchemy, and pyrotechnics. What was commonly called oil of vitriol (sulfuric acid), for example, was part of the reactions generated by alchemists. The relation of sulfur to fire explored by both alchemists and pyrotechnical experts in the sixteenth century seemed, to many, a plausible starting point for explaining Vesuvius’s repeated ignitions. Crucially, these ideas had a long life in early volcanology, as they were present in theories regarding the combustion of sulfur—which was attributed to a spiritu­s nitrus-aerus present in the air.54 Sulfur figured prominently, for example, in the later chemical theories of Robert Hooke (1635–1703), who studied the various phenomena of heat very closely. With a “nitro-aerial” theory of combustion, he likened a number of things—thunder, lightning, and volcanic eruptions—to explosions of gunpowder. Volcanic activity could thus be understood to emanate from sulfurous vapors seeping from below ground. The frequency of volcanoes near the coasts and on islands appeared to confirm the belief that seawater produced some kind of fermentation resulting in sulfurous minerals.55 In 1669, for example, an anonymous correspondent of the Royal Society of London asked whether the ignition of volcanoes might not be explained by understanding how “sparks meet with Nitro-sulphureous or other inflamable substances heap’d together in the bowels of the earth.” This chemical model of ignition was debated in articles of the Philosophical Transactions published by the Royal Society— as the correspondent above reveals—but also in papers by members of the French Academie des Sciences (established in 1666), and, importantly, in Robert Hooke’s lectures on earthquakes. One of the common themes was that volcanoes burned a combination of sulfur compounds and assorted “bitumens.”56

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Kircher’s Diatribe summarized the belief that Vesuvius contained a core of combustible minerals. Mons ipse varia mineralium foetura gravidus: for Kircher, the “mountain itself [is] swollen with young shoots of minerals.” The 1660 eruption had occurred on a warm summer day, under climactic conditions the Jesuit deemed ideal for the observed condensation of vaporous mixes emanating from the eruptive cloud, itself resulting from the combustion of sulfur, bitumen, salt, niter, and alum.57 Between mid-August and mid-October, Kircher had the opportunity to observe various crosslike and starlike shapes on linen cloth. He did so by traveling to the Ottaviano and Somma hamlets near Vesuvius. Subsequently, he also gathered the reports from elsewhere in southern Italy, such as the letter sent to him on October 6 by the Jesuits of Lecce. That letter related that a young woman there had discovered one of these crosses, provoking an urgent session of city magistrates.58 Kircher concluded that very specific natural conditions had worked to create the unusual appearances. Nitro-bituminous vapors had condensed on cloth, whose particular texture, under specific temperature conditions, had resulted in the guttulae nitrosae—nitrous drops—forming the observed shapes.59 This natural explanation for the appearance of the mysterious ashen crosses in the Neapolitan hinterland must not have been especially convincing. Eleven years after Kircher’s Diatribe made it to print with Schott’s help, Gioseffo Petrucci defended the Jesuit from the accusation of credulity. That defense, the Podromo apologetico alli studi Chircheriani (1677), made no specific mention of Vesuvius but did include a picture of the volcano randomly tucked into its pages. Perhaps, figuring the volcano reinforced the image that Kircher had gathered a vast storehouse of experiences. The great sage exemplified what it meant to observe nature unencumbered by preconceptions, Petrucci explained, for it was vital that naturalists “believe everything that they see, and then assert what authors spoke only when they have experimented what these have said, and this is the surest way not to err.”60 The strongly defensive tone suggests that what passed for empiricism could also look like credulity and far-fetched speculation. Among Kircher’s more impugned works, the Diatribe must have been vulnerable to the accusation of credulity. In other respects, however, the work manifested a pattern of inquiry and reasoning used by everyone who wrote on volcanoes in the period. Kircher divided the first two-thirds of the Diatribe into a pars historica and pars physica, formalizing a schema that set the descriptive histories of the phenomenon in front of the explanation of natural causes.61 That structure inhabited tracts on volcanoes into the eighteenth

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century, certainly enabling natural histories of volcanism to flourish. Natural histories were the record of observation, as well as the historical accounts relating previous patterns of eruptivity. The empirical and historical dimensions of seventeenth-century volcanology were thus reinforced. The description of single eruptions, however, begged another question, one that I argued at the opening of this chapter had been entertained by Scipione Falcone in 1631: How like its kind was Vesuvius? Kircher climbed Vesuvius in 1638, but he only published his observations decades later in the monumental Mundus subterraneus (1665). An early manuscript draft of that work included a breathtaking rendering of the Campanian volcano, as it poured forth a stream of lava, which Kircher concluded had to be a pitchy mass of naphta and bitumen. The final printed version of the volume also included similar depictions of Etna, showing how chambers, channels, and chimneys of fire extended down toward the earth’s center.62 As per this portrayal, subterranean fires were a central feature of understanding the structure of the globe. This made volcanoes very significant indeed, as they were the most obvious evidence of vastly distributed inner heat. One chapter of the Mundus was titled, “Mountains Visible on the Telluric Surface Amply Demonstrate That the Earth Is Full of Fire.” Based on observations made in 1637–38, the Jesuit natural philosopher argued that sulfur, niter, and bitumen filled “innumerable perforations,” along with “mines and sub­ marine channels,” that connected the volcanic Aeolian Islands with Etna and Vesuvius. These mines extended, he imagined, along the Appennine chain down the toe of Calabria—this also explained the devastating earthquake Kircher witnessed on his Mediterranean journey.63 Envisioned thusly, volca­ nism was a living process of the earth, analogous to the flux of humors and blood in the human body. Kircher was notably influenced by William Harvey’s studies on the circulatory system, which he found helpful in explaining not only the nature of subterranean heat but also the circulation of water in the oceans and beneath the surface of the earth.64 Indeed, the Mundus was full of analogies to the human body. One chapter began with the heading: “On the Universal Distribution of Subterranean Fire: And Why in Certain Places It Is Perpetual and Others Not?” The author answered this by determining that, “what spiritual blood is in the human body, thus is subterranean fire in the veins of the earth.”65 The baroque polymath had a title that matched the huge scope of his system: Theoretical System of Subterranean Fire-Hearths, from Which Volcanic Mountains Protrude, Like Some Sort of Breathing-Fissures. Rendered as a visual schema, it was breathtaking. The earth was shown in cross-section, with a great raging central core,

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F I G U R E 5 . 3 . Cross-section of the earth showing a raging central core connected to numerous other “fire-hearths” by channels that wind their way to the surface and burst forth as volcanoes. Athanasius Kircher, MundusSubterraneus (Amsterdam, 1678). By permission of Special Collections, Honnold/Mudd Library of the Claremont Colleges.

connected to numerous other “fire-hearths” by channels. These wound their way to the surface, bursting forth as volcanoes. Kircher recognized that no human observation could confirm his theories and that many were likely to find them far-fetched. He asked: “Who indeed has observed this? Who among men ever entered here?” He went on to stress that his speculative schema was merely an attempt to envision what the fire-hearths might look like. There was no doubting, however, that the earth’s central fire was connected to volcanic phenomena on the surface. As had been the case with the authors of the 1631 tracts, Kircher recognized the insurmountable hurdle of never being able to observe these things ad vivum, as one might train the eye on the heavens with

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the telescope. His speculative schematic cross-section of an earth encrusted with volcanoes was a spectacular, but not widely agreed on, view of volcanism in the telluric system (fig. 5.3). The observations of another volcano, this time Etna, roughly contemporary to Kircher’s descriptions of Vesuvius were less imaginative, but at least as significant because they were in disagreement. The patterns of science and description evidenced for Etna were not unlike those of Vesuvius historically, even if the two volcanoes are in many ways greatly dissimilar in size and eruptive patterns. Etna, in the same historical period, had its share of naturalists exploring it. In particular, the example of Sicily in the late seventeenth century once again shows a natural environment encouraging scientific culture. The imaginative progression charted thus far—Falcone’’s and Castelli’s musings about global volcanism, Fontana’s and Hevelius’s planetary volcanoes, and Kircher’s vision of the earth’s fiery core—was not possible without the experience of seeing volcanoes up close. While it might be argued that Vesuvius was more approachable than Etna, it was, in the late seventeenth century, rivaled in historical and scientific significance by the latter.

1669: borelli’s etna On March 11, 1669, enormous flows of lava began to spill down the flanks of Etna, having emerged at about eight hundred meters in elevation near the town of Nicolosi. As the lava advanced relentlessly, it drove thousands of people to flight. At its most acute phase, the eruption that generated the flows tore an enormous gash into the mountain’s southern slope. Fiery torrents subsequently reached the edges of Catania.66 It was among the largest eruptions ever recorded on Etna, although it may have been surpassed in volume by the near-continuous flow of lava that had seeped out of secondary vents between 1614 and 1624.67 The 1669 flows were a slow and inexorable disaster—different from the mighty explosive pulse of Vesuvius three decades earlier.68 This eruption took its course over the span of months, though it experienced a few powerfully violent phases, such as the one that occurred when the summit crater collapsed on March 25.69 Nonetheless, it was not as explosive as the one that occurred on Vesuvius in 1631. Because of the nature of the 1669 eruption, and also because of the context in which it was reported and described, it further illuminates the examples examined so far. Giovanni Alfonso Borelli’s Historia et meteorologia incendii Aetnaei anni 1669 (1670) was in many ways an original work, and not one closely tied to the accounts of Vesuvius written either in the 1630s or, later, in the 1660s. Borelli

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worked out one of the most significant and widely used explanations of volca­ nism of the period. 70 When he set about writing the Historia et meteorologia, Borelli had only recently completed two works, one in 1666 and another in 1667 on the motion of the Medicean planets (the moons of Jupiter) and on percussive force, respectively. He wrote these works as a prominent member of the Accademia del Cimento in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. That academy of experiments had formed a decade earlier around Galileo’s students Evan­ gelista Torricelli and Vincenzo Viviani. In the 1660s, the society connected the leading figures in Italian science to the orbit of the Medici court of Ferdinand II and his cardinal brother Leopold.71 Borelli’s prominence at that point belied, however, extremely humble origins. His birth in the Neapolitan dungeon of Castel Nuovo in 1608 fueled the long speculation—as reported by the renowned late seventeenth-century bookseller Antonio Bulifon—that he was the son of the heretical Dominican Tommaso Camapanella, then imprisoned. More likely, however, Borelli’s mother was a Neapolitan woman and his father a Spanish soldier garrisoned in Campanella’s dungeon.72 Borelli moved to Messina in the late 1630s, following an invitation to lecture on mathematics in the city’s university. He eventually went to Pisa in 1656, where he studied anatomy and physiology. At the time of the eruption of Etna, Borelli was back in Messina. It was here that he received a request from the secretary of the Royal Society, Henry Oldenburg, that he describe an eruption that his peers abroad in the Republic of Letters were eager to have explained. Borelli had climbed Etna previously, in 1637, and was on the mountain again in 1670, but not during any eruption.73 It would have been dangerous for him to try to climb the volcano in the spring of 1669, even if by August a number of people had reputedly tried to get close to the lava and the summit. Age may have been a factor. When Borelli made it part way up Etna in 1670, he was in his early sixties. He returned again in 1671 as well.74 The Historia et meteorologia did benefit immediately from the assistance of other observers. The Syracusan gentleman Franceso D’Arezzo who corresponded with Borelli vaunted an important network of correspondents and was deemed capable of making credible observations.75 The aristocratic D’Arezzo had a talent for verse and drama, but he also possessed a penchant for chemical and alchemical experiments. In his letter to Borelli, he quipped that a previous attempt to sublimate sulfur while living in Palermo had resulted in the release of foul smells throughout a wide portion of the city—and had nearly provoked serious trouble with the authorities. D’Arezzo related this fact lightheartedly to Borelli, evidently enjoying the latter’s respect. As it turned

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out, D’Arezzo’s familiarity with the properties of sulfur also influenced Borelli’s thinking about lava.76 One might seek parallels: were there any precedents for exploring these torrents on Vesuvius? There indeed had been previous attempts to get close to lava near Naples, but according to one skeptical Spanish source these attempts had yielded little in terms of natural inquiry.77 Neither the 1631 eruption nor the one in 1660 generated the kind of flows seen on Etna in 1669, so it is to be expected that lava received patchy and uncertain description in previous Vesuvius tracts. There was at least one instance, however, that makes an instructive comparison to D’Arezzo’s letter to Borelli. That example comes from Pietro Castelli. Castelli belonged to an earlier generation than Borelli, having taken a professorship in medicine at Messina in 1634, but his anatomical, botanical, and medical studies—including ones relating to the medicinal properties of sulfur—were well known.78 Back in March of 1632, before he moved to Messina, Castelli received answers to the questionnaire he had sent to a Minorite Franciscan in Naples while writing the tract on Vesuvius. Castelli appended that report to the end of his treatise and appended his own critical assessment of the observations related to him. When Castelli asked what had been seen in Vesuvius’s crater, the Franciscan replied that some had seen and smelled signs of sulfur amid the dark smoke roiling up from its depths. Castelli then confirmed the father’s reports in his own summary, citing that the observations concurred with the wide agreement that sulfur was present in and around volcanoes. One such instance came from reports made in the Campi Flegrei decades previously: sticks inserted into venting fumaroles came out encrusted in “minute grains of sulfur.” In a related query, Castelli asked the Franciscan to describe the appearance of Vesuvius’s “fiery torrents” after they had cooled. This time the Neapolitan observer replied with less certainty, noting that the flows looked to be of indeterminate nature and only in some places appeared sulfurous. “I asked this question,” Castelli explained, “in order to know if the fiery torrents, which they say came out of Vesuvius, were of similar substance as that which comes out of Etna.” The question sprang directly from the fact that Castelli had read the work of a Dominican, Tommaso Fazello, who had climbed Etna in 1541. From it, he had gleaned that volcanic torrents cooled into the appearance of rock. The observations from Vesuvius, however, did not convince him that they could necessarily be equated to Fazello’s, so he concluded that the substance extruded by the two volcanoes was likely dissimilar.79 Since seventeenth-century tracts on volcanoes focused on the historiae of specific eruptions, they rarely attempted such comparative treatment—at least an

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analysis that went beyond asserting that there were numerous other montes ignivomi elsewhere in the world. This should be stressed: the lack of sustained comparisons underscored the persistent challenges inherent to relating volcanism to a telluric world system. Borelli benefited greatly from D’Arezzo’s close-up view of Etna’s lava in 1669, however, since his friend’s scouting party returned with one influential observation. Both men, in fact, had read that a predominance of liquid sulfur and bitumen was to be expected in the liquid torrents. D’Arezzo—who could claim a firsthand familiarity thanks to his experiments—was quite surprised to encounter little that suggested that Etna’s lava was liquid sulfur. Instead, the torrents seemed to behave in a vitreous fashion. Heated, the lava flowed with a viscosity similar to that of molten glass, while cooled it became frangible and easily separated from the ground over which it had passed. Everything D’Arezzo knew about sulfur suggested to him that it stuck to the surfaces with which it came into contact.80 Subsequently, D’Arezzo’s observations have appeared in some modern accounts as the discovery of a revolutionary theory of how silicate melts in lava.81 While the letter influenced Borelli’s Historia et meteorologia, these observations were hardly without precedent, nor did they dispel the idea that sulfur was a substance combusted in volcanic eruptions. In fact, Castelli had intuited something similar when he read the Neapolitan Franciscan’s replies to his questionnaire on Vesuvius. As noted above, the friar was very tentative in describing lava to Castelli—claiming he could not see it well—but he also explained that the different rocks hurtled from the volcano appeared to be metallic and sulfurous in nature. The Franciscan further noted that he was familiar with these volcanic rocks because he saw them regularly in Naples—apparently, they were frequently used by peasants to adjust and balance the loads borne by their animals. Perhaps because of this little rustic detail, Castelli recalled one of his own: he knew Roman glass makers had tried to turn fragments of cooled lava into glass. While the artisans had related their inability to do so, the appearance of the cooled lava described by these Roman informants led Castelli to conclude that Vesuvius and Etna extruded different types of flows. The different substance of both volcanoes was thus evident in their differing periodicity, as well as in the behavior of the lava flows and their appearance when cooled.82 Borelli, conversely, had almost nothing to say about Vesuvius. He may have chosen to ignore it because he also realized that the comparison between the two differently behaving volcanoes was simply outside the realm of immediate possibility. That would have required not only compiling two sets of histories

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but also collecting valid observations for both. I have found only one indication that Borelli wrote about Vesuvius at any length, but that intimation was in a cryptic reference by the late seventeenth-century Neapolitan bookseller Antonio Bulifon. It is more likely, however, that the bookseller may have been mistaken.83 Thus, while there is no strong evidence to suggest a direct causal connection between the scientific study of Vesuvius and of Etna—that, in other words, interest in one directly stimulated interest in the other—the patterns of inquiry were similar and might thus be understood as strands moving toward some convergence. The most distinguishing aspects of the Historia et meteorologia were Borelli’s advances in developing a vocabulary of volcano terms and his open disengagement from both ancient and then-prevailing theories of volcanism.84 Seventeenth-century ideas on the subject remained poised between inherited terms and the need for new ones. These more novel dimensions of the Historia et meteorologia also reveal the similarities and differences with Vesuvius in the later 1600s. It appears evident that both volcanoes were most often treated in isolation from each other for the practical reason that volcano treatises tended to appear after specific eruptions. In short, histories of eruptivity set up theoretical discussions, but that did not mean that such probing into the cause and extent of volcanism easily yielded sustained comparisons. Examining the Historia et meteorologia further sheds light especially on the significance of topographical description, a kind of description attuned to particularity. The treatise opened thus: On the eastern shore of Sicily, between the promontories of Peloro and Pachino, there rises a mountain of immense magnitude, solitary, almost conical in shape, whose base extends over one hundred miles from the city of Catania, through Aci, Nasso, Taormina’s shore, Tissa, Cento Ripe, Adrano and Inessa. The flanks measure, from the coast of Trapani to the summit nearly 30 miles, but from the shore of  Trapani they do not exceed 20 miles. The latitude of the region is 37 degrees and 40 minutes, and the longitude is 38 degrees and 21 minutes.85

The first chapter, which began with this paragraph, was titled “de Aetnae Montis Topographia.” The modern term would be orography, or the study of a mountain’s geography. The point I mean to draw attention to in that opening is this: a descriptive or, better, orographic and historical reckoning of Etna was prescriptive to any further inquiry. Borelli’s dismissive attitude toward previous explanations of volcanism can thus be somewhat misleading and should

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be read carefully. Of course, there were many instances like D’Arezzo’s reports that convinced him of previous error. More to the point, however, Borelli was reputed for an experimental and mechanical view of nature that combined at once the inheritance of Galilean science—and its strong currents in the Accademia del Cimento to which he belonged—as well as the reception of Cartesian philosophy in Italy. As might be expected, therefore, he did not labor on a review of ancient authorities. He did, all the same, maintain elements of the structure already seen in the Vesuvius tracts. He moved systematically through the historicus apparatus exactly as the phrase implied: the opening account of the 1669 eruption and its precedents was the “historical preparation” for the meteorologia developed in the subsequent portion of his tract. That latter term denoted in turn a formal relationship to historia. Borelli envisioned a new science of Etna couched in a traditional term, however, since his meteorologia alluded to the traditional conception of volcanism as a meteorological phenomenon—something of the Aristotelian key thus remained, if reformulated.86 The tract’s orographic elements established the vital foreground for Borelli’s “meteorological” treatment of volcanism. Etna had is own tradition of humanistic description. A body of “modern” accounts gathered into the work’s opening historical apparatus, as Borelli described it, evidences the value of humanism to this reputedly new science of volcanoes. An example that appeared early in Borelli’s tract was the Aetnae topographia Aetnaeorum incendiorum historia, written by the Sicilian jurist Antonio Filoteo Omodei. Published in Venice in the early 1590s, it included the author’s personal account of Etna’s 1536 eruption—a text Borelli deemed superior to ancient accounts.87 In addition to this and Pietro Bembo’s wellknown climb of Etna in the late 1400s, Borelli also included the Dominican Tommaso Fazello’s exploration in 1541.88 In many respects, these works paralleled chorographic accounts of Naples after the 1540s. Readers of the Historia et meteorologia who perhaps had never seen Etna— one might imagine the members of the Royal Society that received the book— must have been struck by its impressive description. Borelli speculated that the great cone rose into the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Three broad zones were visible on its giant form. One, the lower, was “entirely populated” and fertile. Farms, villages, towns, and cities ringed the base, which was also fed by numerous rivers. Rising higher, a next zone of dense forest appeared. Stands of oak, beech, pine, and spruce gripped the mountain’s flanks, eventually yielding to the increasing pitch of a barren pyramid of burnt stones and sand. This was the final zone, topped by the fiery crater. Everywhere, the slopes appeared pockmarked and scarred with crevices, fractures, and burned out runs of lava.

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In spite of what D’Arezzo had reported about the lava, Borelli described the strong presence of sulfur and bitumen all over the volcano. He estimated the volcano’s elevation at six Roman miles. In an evocative if inaccurate analogy, Borelli explained that climbers on the summit of Etna at dawn would see the towns and cities far below, lucid and twinkling as one might observe a stone magnified through water in a small pool. That was because the vantage point was above the thickest portion of the atmosphere, which, densely concentrated, magnified the perspective. “I myself saw it in 1637,” he wrote.89 Although Borelli recorded a few ancient histories of Etna, he explained that he believed modern accounts to be more credible. On the basis of these more recent histories, he offered his readers a relatively current summary of the volcano’s eruptivity since the beginning of the seventeenth century. Even if there was no concentrated burst of narratives similar to the one following the Vesuvius eruption of 1631, the literature on Etna had in fact also increased over the course of the seventeenth century. For example, Pietro Carrera’s Il Mongibello descritto in tre libri da Don Pietro Carrera, published in Catania in 1636, was very similar to nearly coeval tracts in Naples in that it also narrated the intervention of local saints. Borelli hardly deemed the report of miracles in Carrera’s history of Etna a disqualification; he cited the work and used it. Eruptions between 1603 and 1607, and a more powerful one in 1634, as related by the likes of Carrera, gave Borelli a picture of Etna’s eruptive patterns and allowed him to relate a vivid picture of the volcano’s most recent history in his own tract.90 Paralleling the case of Vesuvius, historiae Aetnaeorum were thus vital for assembling a pattern of eruptivity, for recording changes on the mountains, and ultimately for grappling with the question of how, why, and with what frequency it erupted. There had been a thirty-year silent interval at the end of the sixteenth century, Borelli explained, followed by a surge of near-continuous activity in the seventeenth. The Historia et meteorologia’s precision increased as the narrative approached the spring of 1669. Noting, among other things, that “these things I grasped from others,” Borelli gathered reports like D’Arezzo’s into a picture of what Etna’s mechanisms might be. Location and time were vital details, for example. “Half an hour later,” Borelli narrated in one description of a major lava flow, “a second mouth appeared to the South, two hundred paces from the other, from which huge clouds of smoke and horrid thunder, and this second mouth was aligned in the same direction as the preceding mouth and fissure, and was on the same meridian.”91 Later in the tract, Borelli sectioned the volcano as a giant right triangle with a line of fissures and secondary vents he described in the historical section as descending along the hypotenuse—

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these vents appeared labeled geometrically dropping from the summit as H, G, F, E, D, C, B, and A, with H being the summit crater. One might imagine Borelli’s description of that specific flow thusly: he described a straight line of fissures and bursting secondary vents appearing in sequence down the slope of Etna. The motion of the lava was explainable by analogy to the mechanics of fluid flow in a siphon. 92 Vitally, that mechanism had been reconstructed thanks to the history of the 1669 eruption and previous ones. Borelli explained that “the exact description of the torrent of liquefied stones that flow through the fields is also pertinent to this historical introduction [historicam preparationem].”93 The history of how the lava had flowed in 1669 thus drove Borelli’s conceptualization of the volcano machine. Red-hot torrents of viscous matter poured out of the crater, but as they cooled in contact with the air, they grew dark and encrusted. The cooling crust slowed the impetus in some places or forced the hot channels below ground again, where they scoured new paths subsurface. Elsewhere, flows continued, bearing dark cooled scabs on top that sometimes amassed again, slowing and redirecting the torrent. The entire machine—tota machina torrentis—did not flow as one, or evenly, but rather varied depending on temperature, depth, and the morphology of the terrain.94 The mechanics of flow, however, were constant. They were the same as the lava extruded from what Borelli imagined to be a shallow crater or, as it flowed, ad extra, along the surface of Etna’s descending flanks.95 The line of vents related above manifested these mechanics. The Historia et meteorologia’s mechanical and geometric rendering of Etna evidenced the direction of a new “meteorology” and at the same time shed light on the woeful imprecision of ancient ideas—that was its thrust, at least. Borelli wrote that he had “finished the historical apparatus, and before we tackle the meteorology of Etna, it will not be useless to recall with what distraction and fantasy this argument was treated by the ancients.”96 That assertion crowned a confident rejection of the ancient belief that volcanic eruptions happened when trapped subterranean exhalations ignited combustible substances within the earth. For Borelli, ancient thinking about volcanoes had been speculative and unsubstantiated. The same error persisted in the schemas of modern authors. Falcone’s and Castelli’s uncertainty about the interconnectivity of volcanoes, and certainly Kircher’s even more wildly speculative schemata, were examples of modern error. To Borelli, nothing in the 1669 eruption’s flows suggested that there were caverns connecting the Sicilian volcano to Vesuvius. In that respect, Borelli found some recent authors as speculative as ancient ones. Both ancient theories and new geographical knowledge sustained the

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idea that volcanoes were connected by deep subterranean channels. Borelli, however, resolved to treat the abundant geographical evidence of volcanoes throughout the world in a radically different way than did Kircher. For the latter, the many cones in Africa, Asia, and the New World only confirmed the world’s breath and pulse as he had observed it on Vesuvius and Etna. Instead, the Historia et meteorologia rejected the notion of central fire found in the works of the Jesuit. The tract’s targets were twofold. One was the antiquated Aristotelian and Roman model of ignition that seemed to Borelli to be nothing more than a confused jumble. The other related to more recent speculation about subterranean fire that the naturalist thought folded observation into vague natural philosophical constructs. What then was the mechanism of ignition if there was no perpetual and interconnected fire within the earth? It resided, Borelli argued, very near the surface. Reports that Etna’s crater was vertiginously deep were to be dismissed right off the bat simply on the basis of the 1669 lava: “If I am not incorrect, these things demonstrate that the liquefied and incandescent rock not only does not originate near the surface of the sea—or in a place even deeper—but rather generates itself, ignites, and liquefies on the flanks of the mountain, a little way below the crust or surface.”97 How could the thick and viscous mass possibly rise to the surface and spill out from an impossibly deep crater well? The physics and mechanics of the flow did not appear to permit that.98 More than any of the previous Vesuvius tracts, Borelli’s work on Etna deliberately impugned Aristotelian exegetist natural philosophy in a way not visible immediately after 1631. The Historia et meteorologia’s strategy was to present the old model of hot exhalations as only having absorbed rich and detailed historiae of many eruptions into a vague and poorly defined model of ignition. In short, all that had been done, argued Borelli, was to fold empiricism into a tired old model. On this matter, the difference between Giulio Cesare Recupito’s De Vesuviano incendio nuntius in 1632 and the later Historia et meteorologia do become more clearly apparent. As I argued previously, Recupito’s empiricism did not equate with a rejection of Aristotle, not least because the Jesuits were the latter’s committed exegetes. The notion that hot exhalations—pneuma—generated within the earth’s bosom were responsible for earthquakes and, secondarily, for eruptions was persistent in the previous body of Vesuvian tracts. The other major strand of volcanological thinking regarded the properties of sulfur and other mineral and metallic substances underground as crucial to explaining ignition. Evident in the 1631 sources is the fact that the two lines of thinking had in some fashion fused, with Aristotelian ideas standing in for the general system,

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and the chemical perspective addressing the particulars of the eruption. Thus, what works previous to Borelli’s had done was to simultaneously entertain an established system of nature and a rich new body of observations. Borelli discounted the view that earthquakes and eruptions were related to the earth’s hot exhalations as archaic and generalized thinking, just as he thought that Kircher’s central fire was equally preposterous.99 Tackling these two fronts of what he deemed was the existing obscurity of the subject, Borelli nonetheless established that he was responding to a debate about volcanoes that was already understood to be on obviously scientific grounds. Here, then, how to stack the Historia et meteorologia next to previous accounts of Vesuvius depends much on the historian’s reading. I am inclined to emphasize two things. First, I read Borelli in terms of the considerable engagement with volcanoes present in Italian humanism and natural history at least since the Renaissance, not in an isolated key. Second, I interpret the histories of particular eruptions—Vesuvius’s in 1631 and Etna’s in 1669—as forming strands in a nonlinear development of thinking about volcanoes that were only gradually coming together in the second half of the seventeenth century. Regarding Borelli’s dismissal of many previous accounts of volcanism, it is vital to note that none of his contemporaries would have understood him as singlehandedly orienting the debate about volcanoes toward natural causes. Borelli would not have ignored, for example, Pietro Castelli’s work. The latter’s death in Messina in 1662 prompted Borelli to write the city senate asking that his friend, the anatomist Marcello Malpighi, be appointed as his successor.100 Borelli’s own previous engagement with the topic of earthquakes, eruptions, and subterranean heat is another clue about how to position the Historia et meteorologia. When the secretary of the Royal Society, Henry Oldenburg, wrote Borelli with questions about the eruption in 1669, he was familiar with the latter’s discussion of earthquakes in an earlier work titled the De vis percussionis. There, Borelli had treated seismic phenomena in terms of the mechanics of percussive force and vibrating particles. That work might have suggested to Oldenburg that Borelli would have something important to say about the eruption and the flow of the lava, both of which could be interpreted in terms of the motion of small particles and their force. Oldenburg’s interest and Borelli’s response suggest that volcanism and the question of subterranean heat fit within natural philosophical concerns at rather different dimensions of scale: the physical properties of fire, at one end, and the earth’s geogony, structure, and history on the other.101 Among the voices in circulation, Borelli rejected any notion—as advanced differently by Kircher and Descartes—that the earth possessed central fire. The traditional Aristotelian explanation had

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emphasize­d the role of the sun in generating heat. As one historian has noted, the idea of solar influence had “almost imperceptibly” fused with ideas that emerged from the kind of chemical model of subterranean heat that began to take shape in works like Agricola’s in the Renaissance.102 When framed by this swirl of circulating ideas, the substance of Borelli’s new meteorology becomes more discernible. “It is therefore extremely evident that heat is excited in subterranean places,” Borelli declared. Less evident, he followed up, was the origin of that heat. The traditional attribution to the sun was patently ridiculous, he quipped. The view of snow-capped Etna was enough to dispel that notion. He continued as follows: “Therefore, in order that we might have some understanding of subterranean heat, it is necessary that we investigate primarily the origin of sulfurous and bituminous bodies and determine whether they generate ex novo, or whether they exist always within the earth, or whether they migrate from one place to another.”103 The statement directly addressed the “chemists” (chymici) who asserted that sulfur could neither be generated nor corrupted. “Beyond that,” Borelli continued, regarding these writers, “they hold that the fire or the ignited sulfur never extinguishes itself nor is ever completely destroyed, but rather dissolves and dissipates in the air, only to fall again anew and be remixed with other solid and mixed bodies.” Etna’s recurring eruptions suggested to Borelli, instead, that sulfur was possibly not a prima elementa but, rather, concreta, or mixture.104 Whether sulfur was an element or a mixture—he related his uncertainty—its abundance, along with the presence of bitumen, salt, and niter, guaranteed that Etna would continue to erupt for a considerable time. To explain the explosiveness of these eruptions, Borelli returned to the gunpowder analogy employed by the authors of Vesuvius tracts in 1631 but adapted it to late seventeenth-century corpuscular theory. The mechanics of the eruption, its flame, and its concussive force were identical to the violence of loosely compacted gunpowder. Particles of air surrounded the combustible mixture. When “all the minute particles of powder ignite together and nearly at the same time,” the combustibles exploded in a great flash of flame.105 Borelli also saw in Etna the signs of a gradual diminishing. He made the volcano’s extinction the closing subject of the Historia et meteorologia, having to that point adhered to the general thematic structure of previous volcano tracts: history, causes, and what lay in store. One of the closing chapters began with the following reflection. Borelli wrote, “I have just said how sulfurous and salnitrous materials fermented in the cavities of Etna can generate flames and eruptions. Now I might add some information regarding the extinction of its fires and the fashion in which they might resume.”106 That reflection set up the

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predictable rejection of the belief that Etna burned continuously, as ancient authors and no small number of modern commentators had continued to declare with facile arguments. Returning to a number of the authors he had previously examined—Fazello, Filotelo Omodei, and Carrera, for example—Borelli noted their general distraction when it came to observing the end of eruptions. All these authors, he quipped, actually related the start of eruptions as a break with a previous dormancy, so why the obdurate view that Etna always burned? Bo­ relli came to the same conclusion observers of the 1631 eruption had: eruptions burned themselves out or else something like collapse stilled the flame. Did volcanoes burn themselves out entirely? For Borelli, Etna’s periodicity marked a slow decrescendo; the historical record showed fits and starts leading inevitably to a gradual extinction of the flame. There was no orogenesis—the regeneration of the mountain—either. Through erosion by wind and rain, and through the transport and movement of rock during eruption, the great cone would wear down to a great squat nub of itself. It would then resemble the Campi Flegrei. At some point further yet, smoke or flame would cease to rise from the remains of the once great cone.107 Etna’s end, thus imagined, evoked a deep narrative, one containing ideas that may have run much further back in time than Borelli’s mechanistic natural philosophy alone. Atomism, for example, is discernible in more than one respect. Beyond the Epicurean derivation of the idea that matter was composed of indivisible particles—an anti-Aristotelian tack influential not only in the circle of the Accademia del Cimento but in late seventeenth-century natural philosophy in general—one can also intuit something of a broader engagement with the question of nature’s teleology.108 In the original Hellenistic context, the Epicurean tradition had rejected Stoic views that attributed evidence of intelligence and final cause in nature’s assemblage. Epicureanism was “antiteleological” in this respect and, also, impugned the Platonic view of nature. In the latter, too, nature was eternal and divine; the cosmos would never decay. The Epicurean notion of nature’s senescence had something of a parallel in the Christian Edenic narrative, in which nature had diminished after the Fall.109 These philosophical and theological undercurrents are difficult to single out in Borelli’s closing lines, but they cannot be ignored, especially considering Atomism’s strong influence in Neapolitan philosophical circles.110 A waning Etna gave cause for at least one kind of optimism: if the volcano could be understood, its flows might even be diverted—as Borelli suggested—and it would in time extinguish itself. Framed thus, nature’s reactivity to the human­ order receded from view. There was no causality tying human history and the volcano­’s eruptions together. In Borelli’s tract, the disastrous

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toll the 1669 eruption had thus a clear interpretation: it could be assigned to nature’s mechanism. Borelli’s work ultimately elucidates both continuities and ruptures in thinking about volcanoes. Writing about Vesuvius and Etna had not yet merged into a single strand called volcanology by the late 1660s. From the perspective of Italy’s volcanic landscapes and the responses they generated, however, the Historia et meteorologia engaged a previous tradition that already had, by the late 1660s, considerable precedents. Borelli’s prominence in other respects has led to emphasizing the novelty of his conception of volcanism as contrary both to the “Aristotelian-scholastic” science of Vesuvius in 1631 and to the deeply rooted belief in nature’s reactivity to the human order—what writers in that century imagined as God’s war against the impious (bellum Dei adversus impios).111 That trope reflects Borelli’s undeniable importance, as well as the perception that his own intellectual development involved a maturing physico-mathematical, mechanistic, and atomistic view of nature in line with the revolutionary directions of late seventeenth-century science.112 A valid adjustment, however, is to also read the Historia et meteorologia specifically in light of the historical and natural historical traditions in evidence at least since the Renaissance. From that perspective, Borelli’s study of Etna shows that the patterns of inquiry evident for Vesuvius were vital and significant in seventeenth-century science. The study and appreciation of both volcanoes was rooted in native humanistic traditions but moved, as is to be expected, toward the broader reconfiguration of natural knowledge underway in the latter parts of the century. Etna’s parallels with Vesuvius make pertinent a closing comment about context and place. The cultural channels that flowed from Florence, to Rome, to Naples, and even to Messina meant that the likes of Borelli—and Castelli before him—led lives of itinerant science. They were engaged in varied pursuits and often their work reflected where they worked, as was the case when they studied the flora and fauna of the environments in which they found themselves. Pietro Castelli arrived in Messina in 1634, where he continued the anatomical, botanical, and medical studies his Roman printer Giacomo Mascardi had described two years previously in an appendix to the Incendio del Monte Vesuvio. In Sicily, he worked on his study of insects with Agostino Scilla, lost and never published; he published his dissection of the African civet; and he established Messina’s botanical garden in 1635. That was the same year Borelli came to the Sicilian city to teach mathematics. The scientific culture to which both Castelli and Borelli belonged included a range of naturalistic pursuits loosely but vitally aggregated to the high work

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of experimenting and theorizing. Thus, Borelli’s work on physics, astronomy, and anatomy was not detached from fundamental concourse with natural environments. One sees a broad spectrum of curiosity, sensibility, and responsiveness to what might have been encountered hiking up a volcano’s sides or, more mundanely, by walking through the fish market. Natural history was inextricably on a continuum of experience that reached the deepest human sensibilities toward the natural world. Naturalists looked at and described many things, and in places like Naples or Messina they did not have far to go to find variety. Examples of how the production of scientific knowledge was located in place abound. Writing to Borelli, the fellow anatomist Marcello Malpighi once described the remarkable appearance of a swordfish eye to him, delighting the latter with the detail he had been able to reveal by slicing into the saucer-wide orbs.113 Borelli was at the time working on a mechanistic explanation of animal anatomy and motion, which finally appeared posthumously in two phases in 1680 and 1681 as the De motu animalium.114 The deep and swiftly flowing channel separating Messina from the tip of Calabria was then, as still today, patrolled by the pelagic fish. Swordfish are deep-diving hunters with enormous eyes superheated by a network of fine blood vessels, but they must rise to the surface to warm after hunting at depth in the water column. Harpooners slid up to the fish in narrow high-mast boats as they basked unaware. It is not a stretch to imagine Malpighi encountering the fish after it had been hauled into market and displayed, as one still sees in Mediterranean markets today. Swordfish eyes were another instance of naturalists interpreting what the environment around them presented for study. Common and everyday encounters may have been significant first impulses to study. If the variety and significant activity of volcanic landscapes drew naturalists into close relationships with their local environment, the philosophical questions they were preoccupied with extended well beyond natural history description. As might be expected, this meant traveling in ideas to places quite remote from the original locus or subject of encounter. The nature of fire, subterranean heat, the structure of the earth, earthquakes, and orogenesis were enormously compelling questions. By the later seventeenth century there existed a considerable, varied, and increasingly sophisticated body of works that treated Vesuvius and Etna as distinct subjects of natural inquiry, with ramifications beyond the distinct subject of a given eruption.115 To trace the science further, I turn to the milieu of late seventeenth-century Naples, where certain tensions prevailed, and where Vesuvius was becoming a natural place of cosmopolitan interest. More than ever previously, local attachment and foreign curiosity were in conversation.

chapter 6

Watching and Philosophizing: From Controversy to Cosmopolitanism

“When I contemplate the great machine of this world,” wrote the dramatist Domenico Andrea de Milo, “and the thusly arranged dispositions of Divine Omnipotence, there is no doubt that my understanding is confounded, in as much as I come to learn of the follies of those ape-dumb Philosophers, who would that disordered chance is the artisan of all.” De Milo was writing to the Pisan Latinist and poet, Maria Selvaggia Borghini, to whom he had promised an account of “our most celebrated Vesuvius.” The letter was printed in Naples in 1697, publicizing one side of this exchange between an erudite local and a curious outsider.1 Design, order, and purpose: these ideas had deep roots in Western ideas of nature. “In considering so many regions, and provinces, and in them the order, and the providence of nature,” de Milo pronounced, “how step by step she bathed them with the sea, irrigated them with rivers, arranging with fine order stretch by stretch woods, forests, valleys, and plains, one cannot but laud the making hand of God.”2 The arrangement between city and nature could not be accidental. Nature existed to sustain human existence. Disordered chance could not govern such an arrangement. How, then, to explain the volcano’s dangerous proximity to Naples? De Milo endowed the mountain with an ancient and grim purpose. Neapolitans had periodically borne the reminder that Vesuvius was reactive to their affairs­: Surely, however, I think that in opening so many and so diverse openings from which fire exhales, that He did not operate randomly, as such things were nec-

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essary for the preservation of the Universe; and even if, sometimes He might make use of them as ministers for punishing the faults of men.3

Seventeenth-century writers were consummately skilled in the arts of oblique parlance, however, so de Milo’s homily about divine castigation was not without a veiled meaning. Describing Vesuvius became the occasion to say that the philosophical speculations of Neapolitan novatores—the self-styled moderns who saw a nature of atoms and mechanisms—were troubling innovations.­ The scientific and philosophical milieu of the late seventeenth-century possibly made philosophizing the volcano a more dangerous thing than it had been three or four decades previously. De Milo did not explicitly identify the “ape-dumb” philosophers he intended, but one can guess their identities with fair certainty. Hostility toward Lucretius’s De rerum natura was not unusual, for example. The Roman philosopher’s poem on the nature of things had been formally banned in 1518, but it was frequently read and glossed well into the seventeenth century—its popularity signaling persistent libertine impulses even among Roman clergy.4 The atomism of Democritus and Epicurus, and more recent iterations of atomism expounded by the French philosopher Pierre Gassendi, were also implicated. There was a crackdown in Naples in the late 1680s and the 1690s against both atomist and Cartesian thought. While de Milo’s comments were no more than an oblique reference, one can detect the tense philosophical climate. Neapolitan novatores strenuously insisted in those very same years that they were not professing contrary to faith and orthodoxy. Their defense referred especially to a synthesis between the propositions of Epicureanism and Christianity.5 The tones of philosophical and theological controversy were like a sottofondo. Hints were probably as far as de Milo could go in acknowledging these issues. Ultimately, he avowed a pro forma adherence to the Aristotelianism of the Jesuits and left it at that. A lack of formal training in natural philosophy would have meant that pronouncing on such things compounded ignorance and arrogance. Especially in the version of the letter to Borghini printed by Antonio Bulifon in 1697, a stiff distance from the new modern philosophies seemed wise. Such caution was not necessary in the case of natural history. Closeness to the volcano afforded Neapolitans obvious prestige when it came to watching its eruptions, and describing was less risky than theorizing. De Milo wrote: “But I do not wish to extend myself further in speaking of such Mountains, when my intention in this letter is to reason about our most celebrated Vesuvius, which has given substance to the most learned and erudite pens of past centuries.”6

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Antiquarian erudition and natural history confirmed local authority without the controversy of philosophical questions. By this point in the seventeenth century, observers of Vesuvius could work off of a growing record of description. De Milo was eager to convey his up-to-date observations; that appears certain. The mountain “rises on two elevated peaks, of which one presently appears sharp, the other, one sees with its mouth open, truncated, and scorched by fire.” He also took care to note the peculiar formation of a new little cone inside the shattered ring of the main crater.7 News of such changes conformed to the conventions of this literary and scientific correspondence. The empiricism and erudition of Neapolitan observers of Vesuvius was to be expected by the late seventeenth century, even when the winds of controversy blew in the city. In line with established traditions of humanistic description, de Milo explained to Borghini how Antonio Sanfelice (1515–70) had lauded the grape varieties grown on the volcano in his Campania notis illustrata. Sanfelice’s late sixteenth-century treatise related an image of a fertile Vesuvius, but it also included a description of how Pompeii and Herculaneum had been destroyed.8 The Neapolitan underscored the mountain’s violence as instructive and ever on the mind of those who lived in its shadow. “So even if this Mountain is delightful and pleasant to behold, so has it been observed to be equally terrible and scary various times.” He further explained that that there were a variety of natural causes that could have occasioned the volcano’s eruptions, although he did not feel qualified to commit to any single explanation. Maybe fire overflowed the crater, or subterranean spirits and heat had been compressed into violence, or perhaps some flame had ignited the minerals present within the deep folds of the earth—these were explanations comfortably reconcilable with religious and Aristotelian orthodoxy. Furthermore, all the eruptions seen on repeated occasions by historical observers spoke to the precarious survival of city, body, and soul. “And may Heaven will it, that it be the last, as we might hope in the highest pity Our Lord, and from the intercession of our Protectors.”9 Watching Vesuvius confirmed one’s faith. The profile of a volcano watcher becomes increasingly discernible. As de Milo explained it, a state of mind capable of credible witnessing was framed by prerequisites, such as a fundamental appetite for empiricism and calm and unafraid posture toward natural phenomena as scary as an eruption. For the curious so minded, the peculiar and even the terrible sight of an eruptive cloud concentrated and focused the mind. Admiration might replace fear and thus bolster recognition of  God’s greatness, as the contemporary astronomer Johannes Hevelius wrote about comets.10 By the later 1600s, learned observ-

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ers of nature throughout Europe frequently expressed an open distaste for expressions of fear and excitement that greeted the appearance of comets or the occurrence of earthquakes and eruptions. For this elite, distinguished primarily by sensibility and vocation rather than by formal training, phenomena that disrupted the habitual tranquility of nature were to be welcomed with calm curiosity. These Europeans were self-identifying, consumptive of scientific knowledge, and largely able to briefly suspend national, linguistic, or even confessional boundaries.11 Volcano watchers were cosmopolitan. Broader reference sheds some light on de Milo’s example, especially on the matter of religious and scientific attitudes. On September 8, 1693 the residents of London felt an earthquake; some fifty miles away in Sussex, the inhabitants panicked at the trembling ground. “An Earthquake is the great inconvenience of nature: and whereas all other evils admit some remedy to alleviate them, nothing remains to this, but it happens more seldom,” wrote the author of a pamphlet printed in London shortly after the tremors. The pamphlet urged constraint and admiration of God’s design: “The best use therefore we can make of these Prodigies and unusual Accidents, is to contemplate the Infinite Wisdom and Power of God, in the contrivance of the Earth which we inhabit.”12 In many respects, the underlying instruction to Londoners in the same time period was not entirely dissimilar to de Milo’s. Natural disaster underscored God’s intentions, though Protestant writers stressed an acceptance of providence and denied the possibility of saintly intercession. What was reinforced in both confessional contexts, however, was a wish to “decouple wonder and fear” in the view of natural phenomena, especially unusual and destructive ones.13 A long-standing instruction persisted within these altered sensibilities: to claim perspicacity into God’s designs was an error that theologians had guarded against for centuries. As a result of a pattern of broader cultural changes, the 1680s and 1690s were vital decades in fashioning the image of Vesuvius. In many instances, observers were eminently more qualified than de Milo to venture onto philosophical ground. But even they faced limits that were empirical, theoretical, and, not to be ignored, also imposed by the demands of orthodoxy and authority. If eruptions gave occasion to write about nature, at least in Naples caution could not be abandoned.

p h i l o s o p h y a n d o b s e r va t i o n Writing to Antonio Magliabechi from Naples on June 2, 1688, Giuseppe Valletta expressed relief that he and his family had survived a devastating earthquake­

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that had killed tens of thousands. Outside the city itself, Valletta wrote, refugees milled anxiously, sleeping in the open air. He wearily observed that the throng looked like an encampment on the eve of battle.14 The surrounding ruin was a grim reminder of the disasters that often struck Naples, begetting another anxious reflection. Would Vesuvius now erupt as it had to devastating effect in 1631 and, more recently, in 1660 and 1682? Valletta was not alone in considering the subject. Readers in Naples would soon come across Gaspare Paragallo’s Ragionamento intorno alla cagione de’ tremouti (1688), published by Giacomo Raillard, the city’s leading printer of scientific works. Paragallo’s first book was later twinned with a treatise on Vesuvius titled L’ Istoria naturale del Monte Vesuvio (1705). That second book’s preface instructed its audience that “it is enough that you read it to know that this work is a twin to the one on the Earthquake, because regarding that eruption of Vesuvius that was so terrible in 1694, and its causes, it philosophizes in similar manner.”15 A historical, natural, and philosophical examination was evidently expected. Valletta told Magliabechi that he had begun to draft a philosophical discourse. His letter specifically solicited Magliabechi’s opinion regarding what authorities besides Aristotle, Pliny, and Pierre Gassendi had examined the topic così naturalmente, come storicamente—naturally and historically.16 Earth science in the late seventeenth century was still clustered into two loosely distinct groupings that had been converging since the second half of the 1500s and the early 1600s. One body of writings purported to be empirical and practical, reflecting the work of herbalists, alchemists, miners, and pyrotechnical experts who had written about the underground.17 The other was theoretical knowledge that fell within the fold of traditional natural philosophy. For earthquakes, eruptions, and related “meteorological” phenomena, the Meteorology was the standard gloss.18 Clearly, the tracts and chronicles on Vesuvian eruptions after the 1630s had marked an instance of synthesis between the strands of practical and empirical knowledge of the earth and the exegetics of traditional Aristotelian natural philosophy. When Valletta thought about writing on the subject in the late 1680s, however, radically different natural philosophical systems competed with the traditions of Aristotle enshrined by the Jesuit ratio studiorum. Cartesian philosophers, for example, could explain volcanism in terms of atomistic and corpuscular theories that had been at various points condemned by the Jesuits.19 Aristotle or Gassendi? A careful seventeenth-century reader—which the prodigious bibliophile Magliabechi undoubtedly was—likely would not have ignored the provocation of that pairing. The Aristotelianism of the Jesuits and

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the Epicurean atomism of Gassendi pointed to powerful rifts in understanding the fabric of nature. How might this contrast have swayed Valletta’s perceptions of how to write about Vesuvius? Explaining volcanic eruptions and understanding why heat and instability persisted beneath the earth inevitably touched on the properties of matter, and that was an intensely contested subject. Indeed, the margin for open speculation was growing restricted by 1688. Borelli had attempted a fusion of new empiricism and natural philosophy, as shown previously, shortly after the 1669 eruption of that mountain.20 That work combined histories of eruptivity with an ensuing philosophical exploration of “ignition” and the nature of volcanic fire. Borelli was strongly influenced by the atomistic concept of heat articulated in previous works like Galileo’s Saggiatore (1623), but he had written in Messina in a different cultural climate than the one Valletta inhabited. It seems reasonable to suggest that Valletta at least had a more cautious approach in mind. Powerful strands of the new science and philosophy that were challenging the traditional Aristotelian system of nature had found eager reception in Naples since the early seventeenth century, although the perception among those who most welcomed this influx appears to have been one of feeling a step behind. The Neapolitan jurist and historian Francesco D’Andrea—himself a leading intellectual figure in the city—noted with relief that local circles finally had been introduced to Descartes after considerable delay in 1650. Something of a polemic about Neapolitan slowness in this respect prefaced Tommaso Cornelio’s Discorso dell’eclissi, since the editor Camillo Cavallo noted in the works opening that “only in Naples does it appear so strange that there is a man who, like Galileo, Descartes, Gassendi, Erveo, Gilbert, and many, many more, wishes to enrich the world with new speculations.”21 A glance at the late seventeenth-century milieu reveals a complex picture. A collision with local ecclesiastical authorities had probably been inevitable, with trouble brewing already in the 1670s. In 1671, for example, the Roman Inquisition began to urge action against the novatores in Naples who were accused of spreading radical atheist philosophies—despite their best arguments to the contrary. The Jesuits were in the thick of the resulting conflict. Their involvement in the repression of Neapolitan natural science in the 1680s and 1690s might explain something of the disregard with which the early Jesuit and clerical observations of  Vesuvius—like Recupito’s—were treated subsequently. As it turned out, the repression pitted the Jesuits against the circles of new philosophy closely tied to Giuseppe Valletta, Francesco D’Andrea, and the Accademia degli Investiganti. 22 A radically different understanding of matter, substance, and accident

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underpinne­d these philosophical innovations, meaning that battle lines between the Aristotelians and the philosophical novatores in Naples had been drawn powerfully. Contrasts centered on such questions as the properties of heat, certainly of relevance to explaining volcanism.23 In fact, Valletta strenuously defended Gassendian atomism during the “trial of the atheists” that began with Jesuit accusations in 1688. The ensuing restrictive climate was exacerbated by the political pressures generated in Naples during the succession crisis that embroiled the short reign of the Spanish king Charles II; such circumstances may have conspired to produce a cultural turn away from scientific empiricism and toward civil history. For science, at least for the philosophical and experimental traditions of the preceding decades, that turn appears to have been a negative one. The defense of orthodoxy in Rome and Naples in the late seventeenth century thus contrasted with a greater openness before the late 1680s to the philosophies of Descartes and Pierre Gassendi. Surely, if one considers Valletta’s letter to Magliabechi, there was no mistaking Aristotle’s natural philosophy for Gassendi’s.24 The so-called trial of the atheists lasted for nearly a decade, between 1688 and 1697. In April of that year, six years after his arrest, a young member of the Accademia degli Investiganti abjured his atomism. Giacinto De Cristoforo had been arrested along with another young Neapolitan, Basilio Gianelli, in 1691. The charges made by the Inquisition fell under the broad rubric of atheism. They included the denial of miracles, denial of heaven and hell, defining Christ an impostor, and a refusal of papal authority.25 The trial was undoubtedly a blow to the rich scientific culture that had existed in preceding de­ cades. The leading figures of that period—Tommaso Cornelio, Leonardo di Capua, Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, Lucantonio Porzio—had never expressed a single coherent alternative to Aristotelian natural philosophy. Rather, they had appeared to keep the different strands of Galilean empiricism, Cartesian mechanism, and Epicurean and Gassendian atomism in productive tension. Vitality and a strong experimental tradition distinguished Neapolitan science before 1688, but both features appear to have been curtailed after this long trial that embroiled the members of the Investiganti. Although leading members like Francesco D’Andrea and Valletta had argued vigorously for reconciling Gassendian atomism with Christian orthodoxy, for example, the conclusion of the trial pointed to a tightening of ecclesiastical restrictions on Neapolitan science. All of this, then, is to elucidate something of the complexity behind Valletta’s apparently passing reference to Aristotle and Gassendi in the same breath. Philosophizing about earthquakes and eruptions touched on questions—the

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nature of fire and that the elements or, possibly, the concourse of atoms—of enormous philosophical importance. Battles over the libertas philosophandi do not appear to have curtailed the appreciation of Vesuvius, however. Observing and exploring the volcano was an act local curiosi felt unequivocally signaled acumen and interest in natural knowledge. Watching the mountain highlighted their stature and posture. The French bookseller and printer Antonio Bulifon is a good example of urban pride and interest in this type of observational acumen. Bulifon came to Naples as a young man in 1670 and lived and worked in the city for much of  his remaining life, becoming greatly influential in shaping the business of travel and historical accounts in the city. The longtime resident published others’ volcano descriptions, but he was an established authority himself. His first climb was in 1670, not long after arriving in Naples. He recalled noting on that occasion how the mountain’s second peak appeared to have powerfully collapsed as result of the eruptions that had begun forty years previously. Rising out of this jumbled and ragged plain there was a little monticello scarcely the height of two men. Bulifon returned during a minor eruption fifteen years later to a landscape that had once again changed. The minor eruption did not eject the clasts far; he watched them rise vertically and then come showering down into the troughs and folds of terrain. Bulifon recalled that he had been able to read and study at night under the mountain’s glow. Bulifon narrated his experiences of a subsequent climb during the eruption of December 9, 1689, to the French Benedictine historian Jean Mabillon. Mabillon had been greeted in Naples with considerable fanfare when he visited the city during a longer visit to Italy between 1685 and 1686. This reception owed to the historian’s De re diplomatica (1681), a work of considerable importance for the paleographical and archival methods it introduced to the study of ecclesiastical history.26 Bulifon played a leading role as host when Mabillon came to Naples. The latter intended to gather writings for his library in the Benedictine convent of Saint Maur, but he was also apparently interested in the city’s surrounding natural and historical sites. Very much in line with the chorographical and literary conceit imagined in Giulio Cesare Capaccio’s Forastiero (1632), Bulifon played out the role of local guide. Neapolitan humanists and antiquarians had been rehearsing something of this form of exchange between local erudition and outside interest since at least the mid-sixteenth century. Imaginary conceit rippled out ahead of  reality. The dialogue form of  Capac­ cio’s work half a century previously had cemented an important innovation in this respect, transforming the local guide genre into a lengthy dialogue between­

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the indigenous voice and the forastiero in which a variety of moral, historical, political, and even natural topics might be sustained.27 Bulifon was an adopted Neapolitan, but there is nothing to suggest that he did not see himself as a voice of urban erudition. The natural mechanisms of volcanism were, we can see, the frequent subject of dialogue and correspondence. A cosmopolitan audience expected local expertise.

va l l e t ta ’ s l e t t e r t o t h e r o ya l s o c i e t y Valletta’s hinted-at plans in 1688 never materialized in any significant form, but the Neapolitan’s authority on earthquakes and volcanism was evident twentyfour years later, in 1712, when he wrote to the Royal Society. Five years previous, in 1707, Vesuvius had erupted explosively, punctuating a phase of weaker effusive eruptions that had lasted since 1682. These fits and starts had been a cycle since the first powerful eruption of the modern period in 1631. The rhythm persisted, on and off, until 1944. In 1631, 1660, 1682, and 1707, a staccato of bursts had occurred right up to Valletta’s day, marked in-between by lower degrees of activity.28 The recipient of Valletta’s letter on Vesuvius was the Earl of Shaftesbury, secretary of the Royal Society. Drafted in Latin lingua franca of the Republic of Letters, the missive renewed the sporadic contact between Neapolitan high culture and scientific circles in England. Valletta could reasonably hope that Isaac Newton would entertain some interest in the topic, and that seems to have been a prospect he entertained. Sanguine in this expectation, which he openly voiced in the letter, Valletta hoped that sending a “clear and complete little narration”—claram plenamque narratiunculam—would be of service to the higher ends of natural philosophy, which was to determine the cause of such things—causas talium rerum.29 Description of volcanic eruptions by correspondence had literary prece­ dents that neither Valletta nor his English audience ignored. Pliny the Younger’s famous two letters to Tacitus were a template that could be fashioned to meet the demands of the new empiricism of the seventeenth century. Neapolitan authors had been the first to imitate Pliny when the eruption of 1631 ushered in Vesuvius’s modern eruptive age. Giovanni Battista Manso had written in this fashion, evoking gestures at once humanistic, empirical, and consciously emulative of the Roman author. By Valletta’s day, historiae of eruptions had become a substantial printed volcano literature. The list of authors was significant: Pietro Asterio, Giulio Cesare Braccini, Scipione Falcone and Gianbernardino Giuliani, and Giulio Cesare Recupito in 1631, Athanasius

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Kircher in 1660, and Giovanni Borelli for Etna in 1669. All had either directly witnessed eruptions or relied on trusted witnesses, prefacing philosophical discourse with the record of things seen. Valletta’s report to the Royal Society did likewise. “So that I might bring to light that which we will have observed at that time,” he explained. To his esteemed English audience, Valletta posed the problem of reporting as one of fashioning quotidian experience into an observation of significance— the singular instance of facts required by scientific precision. “The eruptions of this mountain occur indeed so frequently, so daily, as to be nearly innumerable, nor does one month, let us not say a year, pass in which it does rage by some tremor, or by some minor or major explosion,” he wrote.30 With that sort of frequency, how to convey a precise and singular description that would be of any use? Shaftesbury had asked about the most recent eruption, but Valletta replied that a more powerful one five years earlier in 1707 was better suited to the interests of the Royal Society. He chose to relate that volcanic episode. The eruption started in late July of that year. The warning signs were terrifically familiar, as they had appeared before the huge 1631 eruption. Ever since, the pattern had been similar: earthquakes and deep thunderous booms signaled the impending crack. Not long after, the eruptive column burst upward into the air. Valletta related that a succession of eruptive phases ensued, each distinguishable by the mountain’s unusual activity and by the different sorts of materials ejected and extruded. The marked attention to visual, auditory, and olfactory dimensions of the phenomenon signaled their scientific significance. Valletta expected that his Royal Society audience would decipher and interpret what he could relate about the eruption’s appearance in light of natural philosophical understanding about the properties of matter and the new laws of physics—the kind of  atomistic and mechanistic thinking that was just in those years being impugned in Naples. Fundamentally, too, such correspondence conformed to the expectations of scientific witnessing that had been established since the flowering of Renaissance natural history in the sixteenth century, when naturalists throughout Europe exchanged objects and information. One might thus imagine a report on nature’s extraordinary activity would be both delightful and useful to the philosophizing society in London. In Valletta’s letter on Vesuvius, the 1707 eruption’s sequence was a vitally important dimension. The opening round had been a barrage of booms followed by the expulsion of matter that Valletta explained looked like ash similar in composition to finely crushed rock. Giovanni Battista Manso had described a nearly identical scene in 1631 when he watched that eruption—which was

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considerably­ more powerful than the one in 1707—rip out the western flank of Vesuvius. Valletta recorded that the ferocious pattering of pumice stones came in quick succession. “After this,” he wrote Shaftesbury, “a river of liquid bitumen, which they call glaream, began to vomit out of one burning hole, and others.” The torrent flowed placidly and thickly, like pitch. On close scrutiny, the closest parallel Valletta could find for Shaftesbury was to the appearance of liquid glass extruded from a furnace. Slowly, the matter cooled to stone. Notably, the upper stratum of the stilled flows was composed of spongy and porous rocks, while the lower was extremely compacted, solid, and near vitreous. It also appears that Valletta saw the effects of a phreatic steam-driven explosion produced when water flashed to vapor as it came into contact with rising magma. That last phenomenon was related to the Royal Society as especially unusual and not observed during previous eruptions. It was the letter’s central reported scientific fact. Valletta’s description of  Vesuvius’s natural activity ended dramatically. During the last phases of the eruption, dark thunderstorm-like clouds descended down the volcano’s flanks. On approach, however, Valletta discerned that they were not laden with water vapor but, rather, with a fine and dense ash that rained down in sheets as if it possessed the properties of that element. 31 There was a final dimension, however, that the letter to the Royal Society could not fail to include. The eruption was not just a natural spectacle but an urban one as well. “The magistracy and high clergy of the city summoned the people’s prayers and bore the sacred relics of San Gennaro to the Capuan gate that faces the mountain,” Valletta wrote, evoking a scene similar to the one that had been chronicled by writers in 1631. That procession had been enveloped in crepuscular gloom during the day—inter densissimas dies tenebras, Valletta described—but signs of an easing appeared during the night when, to the north, first one and then another star began to twinkle in the clearing sky. 32 With haunting resonance, observers seventy-six years earlier had marked the waning of that earlier eruption in identical fashion.33 There were common sensibilities, surely, in that parallel between the de­ cades. The atmospheric and celestial drama of the eruption must also be noted, for example, in the marked attention to the phenomenon as a great aerial spectacle where both the forces of nature and the greater drama of God’s will played out. Perhaps there was something essential in Valletta’s observations. Eruptions have subterranean origins, but their most visible features manifest vertically, against the backdrop of the sky. Divino beneficio, dawn broke not as a bright clear day but instead one that Valletta described as cast in a diffused and diaphanous light. During the two

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weeks that followed, the long trail of returning refugees wound its way back to abandoned towns and hamlets. The Royal Society correspondent closed his letter with the city’s commemorative gesture, which now marked a familiar gratitude toward San Gennaro. Neapolitans, he wrote, recorded that most recent protection in a commemorative medal. It was marked on one face by the depiction of the saint as the “liberator of the city and the founder of quietude.” The other face represented the mountain emptied of ash and silenced of flame and Naples unharmed.34 What did Valletta’s description of this urban commemoration convey to the Royal Society? The Republic of Letters, it was hoped, largely transcended national, linguistic, or even confessional boundaries in matters of science.35 A credible observer of nature, Valletta surely satisfied Shaftesbury’s request to have an eyewitness account of Vesuvius erupting. One can only assume that it was taken seriously. His description in 1712 of the 1707 eruption also might reveal something else as well, however—namely, how native observation enhanced the science of volcanism but also generated the picturesque terms with which foreign observers subsequently endowed Naples, its inhabitants, and its landscapes. Vesuvius watchers at the end of the 1600s and the beginning of the 1700s were contributing to the development of volcanology, but their culture of sensibility and representation was in a fashion absorbed and reified by French and English observers. Ultimately, while the kind of scientific attention given to Vesuvius in late seventeenth-century Naples tended to fade from later views of city and nature, the picturesque imagery took on the appearance of being essential to the local character: as if the relationship between city and volcano was a given. That relationship was instead a historical creation. The practices, histories, and science that resulted from watching Vesuvius in the decades between the end of the 1600s and the beginning of the 1700s actually existed in conjunction with the volcano’s eruptivity. Counterfactuals must be selected carefully, for they should in some way highlight and propose relevant contingencies. For instance, what if  Vesuvius had not erupted, something which is, geologically, an entirely realistic possibility? What if it had only erupted in 1631 and, then, remained silent through the twentieth century? There was no essential affinity between Vesuvius and Naples but, rather, one that was created in the 1600s by how volcano watchers interpreted the frequent recurrence of eruptivity. The connection was historic and contingent. At the end of the seventeenth-century, deep grooves in understanding had taken shape. One insight that stems directly from posing that counterfactual is the following: Vesuvius shaped the rhythm of observation and stimulated practices

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that might otherwise not have become significant. To cite one salient example, volcano watchers in Naples sustained a dialog between historical narratives and their own regular and recurring experience with the activity of Vesuvius. Theirs was hardly an inert and pedantic exercise. Quite to the contrary, it was a method powerfully intuitive of the volcano’s relationship to the history of the city and, also, a way of doing science. Histories of eruptivity recorded the mountain’s dynamic capacity for change, which in turn was the most significant empirical evidence of what took place inside the mountain.36

e x p e rt s o n l o cat i o n Gaspare Paragallo must have been measurably relived when Giacomo Raillard began to print his treatise on the mountain, Dell’istoria naturale del Monte Vesuvio (1705). The work had been preceded by the success of his previous book on the 1688 earthquake and appears to have been eagerly expected. Paragallo attributed the delay to lengthy absences that took him from his natural investigations, especially when he was sent to serve as avvocato fiscale in Bari. Friends, the printer Raillard explained, had finally encouraged and assisted the work’s completion, in great expectation of its worth and promise.37 The imprimatur for the book was granted after review in the fall of 1705. One of the readers was Domenico Benedetto Laudati, the abbot of the Benedictine monastery of Saints Severino and Sossio, the powerful monastic complex that would eventually house Naples’s modern state archive. Laudati reported that the work was erudite, that it revealed close observation of nature, and that it professed nothing contrary to faith and dogma. The author, the censor confirmed, had elucidated secrets of nature whose causes were ultimately not accessible to full human understanding. There were limits to that inquiry, the imprimatur seemed to warn.38 Paragallo’s work gives a picture of what local practices looked like at the turn of the eighteenth century, at which point Neapolitan had observed a number of major eruptions and scores of minor ones. In mid-April of 1694, for example, streams of lava were seen emanating from the volcano, following an initial eruptive burst. The viceroy briefly contemplated digging a large trench to redirect that flow, as the inhabitants of Catania had done when threatened by Etna. Ultimately, that initiative was abandoned. Two days into the eruption, Paragallo and a companion, Bartolomeo Grisconio, made an initial effort to get near the lava. They reached the flow and found it a deep “hair-raising” red: obviously it was still hot. At this point they had scarcely begun to ascend the mountain’s rising pitch, but the dangerous flows ultimately drove them back.

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Paragallo mulled over a second approach. He tried again a few days later with the nobleman Domenico Giovanni Battista de Glianos. Signs of the 1631 eruption were visible as they skirted the cleft of the ancient crater wall—Somma rising to the left—and then scrambled to the summit “with the greatest effort in the World.” The vantage point allowed Paragallo to see the origin of the lava flow that had thwarted him days previously. He could see it spill over remains of an earlier formation and follow newly formed channels down the mountain.39 Fresh scars were forming on top of old ones. Paragallo assured his readers that it was all horrible and exciting. He made references to all the senses to convey the flashes of color, the crash of rock falls, and the wafting of deadly smoke he had experienced in his daring approach. In the second, or philosophical, part of the work he would draw on these observations to make the case that eruptions contained substances that had not been previously reported and, therefore, had not been fully understood. Thick description transmitted scientific precision through an expanding glossary of terms, such as glarea, ghiaia, fiamelle. The development of volcanological nomenclatures was especially evident in the book’s description of  lava. What that lava looked like, how it behaved, and how it transformed occupied a good part of Paragallo’s attention, not least because large flows were less readily observed on Vesuvius than they had been on Etna. In his 1694 excursion, Paragallo saw that, as the lava flowed, upper levels visibly cooled to rock and were borne along with its current in great chunks that finally hardened into a solid stratum. The climbing party tried to break that cooled flow with a large bar, but the bar recoiled as if  it had struck marble.40 Empiricism posed a problem of elegance and presentation that Paragallo visibly labored to overcome. This, too, is a vital clue into the nature of the work, as it reveals that humanism was still vital to the conveyance of natural inquiry. According to the writer Carlo Susanna, who graced the book’s preface with his own literary reputation, the book had grown out the morass of Paragallo’s empirical observations. In short, it was not enough to be able to be an observer and to jot down jumbles of notes, as Paragallo had done over the years. A historia of Vesuvius’s eruptions required the arts of history itself. Here the assumptions of readers also seem to be rather openly displayed: as Susanna described it, Paragallo had observed, he had philosophized on the basis of what he recorded, and then, over years of work, he had achieved the elegance of narrative and the historical erudition required to write properly about the volcano.41 The first book of the treatise examined literary and historical sources and spliced these narratives onto Paragallo’s observations of the 1694 eruption.

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Echoes of the chorographical literature that had had wide appeal in the Neapolitan urban market ever since the second half of the sixteenth century clearly informed the opening passages—this is to say that long-standing tropes of describing sacred, ancient, and natural treasures in loco were vital to sustaining the aspiration that the Istoria naturale be treated as an elegant and persuasive work of literary merit as well as scientific. Paragallo’s long study of the volcano seems to have led him to develop a vital set of appreciations about its physical relationship to history. One salient example pertained to the burial of ancient cities that had once existed beneath the mountain. In the plain surrounding Pompeii—he suspected that the city was there, below ground—there were scattered clues to past presences and obliterations. Cumuli rose in the terrain, possibly from the accumulation of previous eruptions, and here and there lay “miserable vestiges of some city.” Paragallo had learned that there were houses, mosaics, and walls visibly buried by the mountain.42 The suspicion that there were buried cities was a significant intuition that linked together important features of historical and natural appreciation. First, the actively changing landscape of the volcano stimulated curiosity about the buried cities of Vesuvius. Volcanism exposed the mountain’s capacity for dynamic upheaval. That upheaval, regularly observed in the latter part of the seventeenth century, was a living linkage to the continuum of historical experience. Framed by an appreciation of dynamism, upheaval, and the staccato of new bursts, the narrative of past eruptions was not just a recondite exercise that rehashed worn humanist tropes. It was a way to discern what took place in one of the most wondrous spectacles of nature. There were new spectacles. The eruption that took center stage in the work was the one of 1694, “from which we found reason to weave the varied tapestry of this tale.” As Paragallo described it, Neapolitans sensed the imminence of a new eruption on the night of April 6. The rise of day renewed an ancient sight, yet again: the great cloud looming over the volcano, “like the figure of some huge and tall pine.” That was a sight to be expected, but another feature of the eruption struck Paragallo. Lava was flowing down the sides of the mountain. The great stream of “liquefied rocks” inexorably advanced through villas and hamlets. By this point in the seventeenth century, the local inhabitants had inevitably learned that safety lay on the road west, toward Naples. They flocked to the Maddalena Bridge over where the Sebeto River emptied into the sea. According to Paragallo, the viceroy was able to make some provision for their sustenance and survival.43 Scenes played out similar to those of decades earlier. Paragallo likened the lava flow to the one that had threatened Catania in 1669. Borelli had explained lava in the Historia et meteorologia; the Neapoli-

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tan had clearly consulted that work.44 In a desperate attempt to stave off its reaching nearby hamlets, a great diversion ditch was dug with the intention of channeling the flow along a less damaging route to the sea. The effort proved ineffective, however, collapsing despite the many men thrown at the work. 45 The lava advanced inexorably. Something of the significance of the Istoria naturale lay, in fact, in the claim to have studied a phenomenon not commonly observed during other historic eruptions of Vesuvius: large lava flows. The examination of these natural features concluded the first book of the treatise, which was the part most immediately dedicated to history and narration. Here Paragallo argued that the absence of historical accounts of long streams of lava did not prove that the volcano was not capable of generating them, as Etna was so frequently observed to do.46 In other words, if history was a guide, it did not need to blind or dissuade observers from the value of their own experience. A transitional part of the tract moved from watching the eruption to the philosophizing of the second book, where Paragallo directed some of his attention to explaining the relationship between the authority of historical accounts and the direction of the new philosophy—specifically, Borelli, Descartes, Kircher, and Gassendi, all of whom the Istoria’s readers were led to believe Paragallo had studied carefully. A few instances of Paragallo’s philosophical turn in the second part of the work are especially revealing. One relates to the persistent but unresolved idea that the world’s volcanoes were connected by deep subterranean channels. Scipione Falcone had entertained the idea, as shown previously, in 1631.47 A number of later seventeenth-century authors like Kircher believed in a deep central fire, as well, but it is crucial to note that the idea gathered no consensus from Borelli and others. Paragallo, himself skeptical, attributed one voice in favor of what might be termed a deep system to another source: Gassendi’s biography of the French abbot and naturalist Nicolas Pereisc.48 In this 1641 work, Gassendi reported that Pereisc had visited the Della Porta brothers, Giovanni Vincenzo and the renowned Giovanni Battista, in Naples in 1601. At the end of this naturalist’s and antiquarian’s visit to the city, he reflected on the death of Pliny the Elder from atop Mount Vesuvius. Pereisc studied the 1631 eruption, as Gassendi subsequently recalled in his life of the naturalist. The biographer agreed with Pereisc’s view that eruptions that had occurred in Ethiopia in the same year as Vesuvius’s were evidence of the existence of deep subterranean conduits connected to a core of fire.49 As the reference to Gassendi makes evident, the Istoria naturale reflected the influence of a number of sources that were not necessarily in agreement. Rather, Paragallo was confronted with a patchwork of philosophical views.

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Pereisc and Gassendi, for example, both contributed to Kircher’s notion of a global system of subterranean fire conduits—which Paragallo then claimed to reject. Nicolas Steno, too, while not in agreement with Kircher’s theory regarding the organic origin of mountains, was obviously conversant with the Jesuit’s ideas, and he also praised Gassendi’s theory.50 Paragallo’s intention, this would suggest, was to commit to no particular system. Gassendi and Borelli, especially, framed the contrasting opinions of modern authorities set before readers. While Gassendi imagined a sort of deep-system volcanism, Borelli had argued from his observation of Etna in 1669 that volcanic chambers were not very deep at all. Paragallo confirmed that the latter’s experiences were more consonant with his own, as well as with those of others, like Francesco Balzano.51 Balzano claimed to have gauged the depth of the crater by calculating the length of time it took to hear the impact of a stone dropped within it; he heard a gurgling plop almost immediately, surmising that this evidenced how close eruptive activity was to the surface.52 The test was crude, and Paragallo admitted as much. In truth, he recognized a more significant problem. Reading natural histories written by others could lead to further error, since the transmission of ideas over time was also likely to accrue mistakes. Water, for example, was always puzzling when its presence in various forms was seen during eruptions. One frequent conjecture in 1631 had been that the volcano was in some fashion connected to the Mediterranean Sea. Giovanni Battista Mascolo explained the “evisceration” of Vesuvius had acted like a giant siphon, drawing seawater up through the volcano’s link to the sea. Mascolo thought that these channels extended by “occulted passages,” possibly to Etna and farther. Quite a striking array of evidence was adduced to support the idea that seawater ran through Vesuvius. Perhaps the strangest evidence to these observers was the fact that fish, mollusks, and shellfish were found scattered around the base of Vesuvius just after the 1631 eruption. 53 Mascolo had led others astray, Paragallo explained in a warning about the use of history. How he got to that conclusion is the interesting thing, as it evidences the historical and scientific notions that observers in the period actively championed. In 1631, mostly lahar had sped down the flanks of Vesuvius. Lava had been less present, and no source clearly recorded its presence. Paragallo’s predecessors seventy years previously could not clearly specify the difference between flowing mud and extruded magma. By watching Vesuvius erupt in 1694—when he came very close to lava flows as he tried to reach the summit—Paragallo deduced that the current flows were not like those observed in other historical episodes. Such flows were lava, as seen on Etna, but were not clearly described in the historical record for Vesuvius. It is revealing, then,

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that he stressed the double-sidedness of what he could glean from Mascolo’s previous treatise. On the one hand, there was no reason to doubt the scalding watery lahar reported by his predecessor; other sources confirmed it, though not Mascolo’s speculation about seawater. On the other hand, in 1694 the volcano had acted differently. Numerous other voices confirmed the contrast. Herein lay the value and limits of earlier voci and istorie. They required careful chronicling and inclusion as part of natural history. They also drew on the naturalist’s skepticism and capacity to correct on the basis of experience. Contrasts like these, even errors, could be nonetheless elucidating. The volcano did not always erupt in the same fashion, for example. That notion was a stimulus both to examine past voices and to fervently log and record the mountain’s ongoing activity. Such double-sided attention demonstrated a sharp intuition. Histories could be correct or rife with error, but they were vital to science. Carefully reading earlier accounts made the dynamism of Vesuvius intelligible in ways that just watching could not. It confirms that historical methods were a powerful heuristic for understanding nature.54 What about philosophy and the causes of volcanism Paragallo purported to explain? As travelers were wont to pause “in the fresh shade of some thick wood, listening to the song of the larks,” he acknowledged that his readers likely wished to rest midway through the Istoria naturale,  just before a metaphorical push to the summit. It was in the second book, in fact, that Paragallo addressed a philosophical explanation for why the volcano erupted. As the metaphor implied, the pitch steepened at this point. The veteran watcher would serve as guide. Paragallo’s suggestion that he was a guide struck an important chord. Travel­ ers in this period were supposed to journey with the intention of encountering places of moral, literary, artistic, historical, and scientific significance. Volcano explorers were expected to have acquired the literary, historical, and scientific background necessary to capture significant detail. As one of its intentions, the Istoria naturale defined the historical references, observations, and theoretical possibilities. To be sure, for many, a virtual encounter was all that was possible. Far more scholars and naturalists were likely to read about Vesuvius than ever had the fortune of seeing it. In the early 1700s, however, it was also increasingly likely that someone besides a Neapolitan would have the chance to explore the mountain and, if lucky, watch an eruption. The capacity to observe and appreciate nature, to really discern its qualities, was not generated through experience alone. One had to be able to attach significance. Isaac Disraeli confirmed the long resonance of this idea in the nineteenth century when he wrote about traveling that “a mind well-informed cannot travel without discovering that

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there are objects constantly presenting themselves, which suggest [emphasis in the original] literary, historical and moral facts.”55 Such sensibilities were hardly foreign to Paragallo’s audience in the beginning of the eighteenth century. As a matter of fact, the book was on the Republic of Letters’ reading list. In 1712, for example, the Journal de Trevoux offered a review under the category of “physicists” and “mathematicians,” alongside titles on mathematics at the Academie des Sciences in Paris, on astronomical instruments, and on physics and mathematics in China.56 Published in Trevoux under the patronage of the Duc de Maine, the journal was edited by Jesuits. So, while it tracked literature from both Catholic and Protestant countries, its editors were careful not to stray from established orthodoxy.57 It seems that Paragallo had navigated those shoals well. Periodicals like this one kept an international readership informed and abreast of the current literature. As he launched into the philosophical portions of the tract, Paragallo set forth an array of previous attempts to explain the ignition of volcanoes, echoing the Jesuit dictum of not showing prejudice toward one system or the other. The ideas of Aristotle, Agricola, Paracelsus, Girolamo Cardano, and Ferrante Imperato were all examined but were deemed wanting for the limits of their empiricism—they had simply not seen, Paragallo explained, that sulfur and bitumen were not the only substances ignited during eruptions. His long record of Vesuvius observations demonstrated this assertion. Domenico Bottone’s Pyrologia, the work of a seventeenth-century Sicilian doctor, and Borelli’s Historia were referenced for their explanations of Etna’s eruptions as well.58 So was Descartes, and that was especially important. Paragallo stressed that the French philosopher had never witnessed an eruption. Descartes may have been “incomparable” as a philosopher, but he was not a volcano watcher.59 For sure, Cartesian theory exerted a strong traction on thinking about the earth by the close of the seventeenth century. There was no exception to that in Naples. The Cartesian exegete and teacher Gregorio Caloprese (1654–1715) is a good example. Caloprese was remembered by the eighteenth-century dramatist and poet Pietro Metastasio (1698–1792) as having been extraordinarily passionate in his teaching of the new French school. According to one of  Metastasio’s anecdotes, Caloprese would drive him to complete bafflement and awe by using wax models to demonstrate the theory of vortices or, in other instances, by arguing that the dog before them was nothing but a machine. Noticing his pupils’ difficulties, Caloprese would then supposedly reaffirm the ego cogito ergo sum dictum and leave his audience stunned.60 Predictably, volcanoes were a subject of interest in these performances, as is evident in a letter to the son of the Duke of Laurenzana in 1696. The letter was subsequently

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published by Bulifon in one of his many collections. On this occasion, Caloprese wrote about the frequent earthquakes and eruptions of the Campi Flegrei. The letter was a virtuoso performance of his Cartesian reasoning more than anything else, but it also revealed the influence of two aspects of Descartes’s natural philosophy relevant to explaining volcanism: the notion of a residual central heat within the earth and the motion of particles.61 As Paragallo pointed out, Descartes’s ideas about volcanoes were theoretical and hardly like his own volcano watching. In the Cartesian theory of the earth, volcanoes vented the heat of an original geogony. Earth was a cooled, lumped-together, and layered former star that had originally swirled in the vortex of a primordial solar system. Its molten core was a vestige of that creation.62 While this was in many respects a radical rethinking of the long-standing attribution of subterranean heat to the combustion of sulfur, bitumen, saltpeter, and other chemical substances, Cartesian geogony did not persuade many volcano observers. So the Istoria naturale had this distinction as well. Writers who wrote about the eruptions they actually witnessed tended to be ecumenical when it came to natural philosophical systems. Multiple appropriations were more typical than unusual. Two general possibilities were thought to exist: on the one hand, a deep vestigial inner heat might have given life to volcanoes; on the other, eruptions could be attributed to sulfur-rich exothermic reactions near the surface. The theory of chemical or in-origin alchemical ignition had a long life in the volca­ nology of  the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which spoke of spiritus nitro-aerus, or oxygen, as vital to volcanic combustion. Were volcanoes ignited by exothermic reactions of chemical substances near the surface? Were they the vents of a deeper fiery core? There was indeed something of a quandary here between what might be termed “burning mountains and cooling stars.”63 For Borelli it was clearly the former. Ecumenical thinking was something Paragallo sought to make evident nonetheless. “I would need far too much time if I wished to separate the wheat from the chaff regarding Philosopher’s opinions of our mountain.”64 Maybe even more than Borelli’s volcanology of Etna de­ cades previously, the Istoria naturale was attempting a kind of synthesis of all the possibilities. Paragallo turned to metaphor. It was like being a man in the dark on a tough and winding trail, searching for the way. One had to avoid pitfalls as well. This was how he qualified his mention of Lucretius—better at least to know and understand such philosophical conjectures, he explained—but the analogy applied to the book’s entire endeavor. As when climbing the mountain itself, the naturalist had to search for clues in the odd and unusual.

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Paragallo turned to the observations of Tommaso Cornelio, a great exponent of the Neapolitan school of experimental science earlier in the century. As the latter reported, bituminous naphta was sometimes seen forming an aurous sheen in inlets and coves on the shores below Vesuvius. Cornelio claimed that he and multiple witnesses had come across numerous springs,  fonticulos, gurgling petroleum along the flanks of the volcano. Once again, it was the notice of the peculiar and unexpected that drew attention—Cornelio had stumbled on to something unusual that led him to suspect the presence of occult channels filled with a combustible mixture.65 However peculiar these speculations may appear to modern geology, they were hardly strange by contemporary thinking. Paragallo seems to have read Robert Boyle eagerly, for example, on a variety of subjects related to the generation of mineral substances and to chemical reactions. Relevant extracts pertained to the fermentation and heat thought to occur in mines, to the efflorescence of saltpeter on calcareous surfaces, and to nitrous exhalations.66 It is most likely that Paragallo was drawing from one or more of Boyle’s published Latin treatises, of which there were a number.67 Boyle’s work diaries contain passing references to Vesuvius and Etna, particularly in the guise of the many snippets he included in a book full of his own experiment notes, travelers’ reports, and citations.68 The generation of chemical reactions underground was similar to what occurred in his experiments: since “the earth harbours different kinds of these liquors, and many of them may be copiously impregnated with one sort of mineral or other” the “hollow receptacles of the earth” acted much like “stopped glasses.” “Tis’ well-known,” he also wrote, “that about Mount Vesuvius, the exhalations are of so saline and sulphureous a nature, that they adhere to the orifices of its vents, like the flowers of sulphur.”69 Boyle’s knowledge of “crystallizations” and “exhalations” drew from correspondence with observers as well as from his experiments. “A Neapolitan nobleman acquainted me,” he wrote on the ubiquity of sulfur in volcanic landscapes. The unnamed nobleman related to Boyle that he customarily rode his horse over stretches of ground that appeared to crackle and burn beneath his animal’s hooves. The curious naturalist had collected clods of the earth: at night, he claimed to see its effluvia rise into the air.70 This incendiary mixture ignited volcanoes. Paragallo restated that long experience suggested to him that eruptions were near-surface chemical ignitions—like Borelli imagined was the case with Etna. The question of depth remained unresolved, so he shied away from committing to Kircher’s or Descartes’s theories of a deepcore model of volcanism. However, excursions on the mountain compounded the evidence that the volcano burned with sulfur, bitumen, alum, and various

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pyrites. The latter, especially, he claimed to have collected and studied more closely than any other naturalist before him. The Republic of Letters received Paragallo’s observations as “discoveries” of no small note. Case in point was the review in the Journal de Trevoux. The editors of the French journal reminded its readers that volcanoes were as yet a daunting scientific subject. The journal found the science in the book to be “ingenious” but also “not likely to be adopted by all philosophers.” “In good faith,” the reviewers went on to note, Paragallo had not claimed certitude in a matter so tangled. But he was “an ocular witness” to the 1694 eruption and deserved credibility. Vitally, the review noted that Paragallo had taken on an important challenge: “Not content to describe in just a historical fashion, he researched the causes, and few writers have done so with such accuracy and care.” For all that, the attribution of volcanism to burning pyrites raised questions in the eyes of the review, especially when it came to the actual ignition.71 “The whole world knows about Vesuvius,” the journal also remarked. De­ cades later, Edmund Burke’s Annual Register for the Year 1771 also noted that “the floods and earthquakes with which Italy is often afflicted, has induced the learned of this country to study the operations of nature, and to publish several very curious treatises upon this subject.” That list of naturalists included Paragallo but also Borelli and even the seventeenth-century Jesuit Recupito.72 At the close of the seventeenth century many things had worked to elevate the mountain’s prominence further: the interest of naturalists on location and recurring eruptions, as well as the greater diffusion and dissemination of natural histories and, increasingly so in the mid-eighteenth century, of pictures as well. Naturalists, reputed experts in Naples, were in dialogue with their colleagues elsewhere. Valletta’s correspondence with the Royal Society and Boyle’s query of a Neapolitan gentleman underscore the kinds of communications and practices that were exemplified in Paragallo’s work somewhat later. The idea that the whole world would come to know Vesuvius, and through it Naples, blossomed in the eighteenth century.

chapter 7

Formed by Explosion: Geology in the Neapolitan Picturesque

Six men in a crater. The first, the closest to the burst, captures the most dramatic pose among the little band of explorers. Shielding his head with his left arm, he races for cover and evokes the scene recorded by Pliny the Younger centuries earlier. Romans had tied pillows to their heads as protection from the falling ash. The man sprints away from the very lip of the eruption. Does he regret having drawn so close? The five others appear more placid, even nonchalant. One has his back turned, arms wrapped behind his back in idleness. Another placidly gestures at something, while a third sits, fatigued. The final two are the most interesting. The seated one appears to draw or take notes, his attention divided between the eruption and a seeming conversation with the final standing figure. That man, half turned toward his interlocutor, and not fully facing the eruption, appears to be in the act of telling. The natural scene around them is dramatic and dynamic. On the outer edge the vestiges of the old crater ends the steep pitch to the mountain’s summit. Within, a short drop to a scarred plain, and on that the rising shape of a new cone. That is the new Vesuvius rising in the bosom of the old. Lava, presumably cooled, is at the men’s feet. The entire scene evidences dynamism. Is the mountain consuming itself, or does it have an endless supply to this extrusion? The answer appears veiled, but the men contemplate it. The stylized scene (fig. 7.1) captures a party of volcano explorers circa 1750. More than a century had passed since the 1631 eruption. The mountain now erupted frequently, but less dangerously too. While such proximity seems truly unimaginable, the depiction does convey the climbers’ intentions wonderfully. The exertion of the steep scramble, the watching and sketching and recording,

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F I G U R E 7 . 1 . “View of Mount Vesuvius created in the year 1754.” Giuseppe Mecatti, Osservazioni che si son fatte nel Vesuvio (Naples, 1754). Courtesy of Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Roma; unauthorized reproductions of this image are prohibited.

even the occasional dodge of some fiery lava bomb are the heart of the scene. People and their activities in the landscape figure centrally. “D. Giuseppe Aguir created and drew this,” notes the Latin caption. Aguir, one learns, was there. July 17, 1754, to be precise: the two men leading the party were the artist himself and Giuseppe Maria Mecatti. The artist, Aguir, was a Spanish officer. Mecatti was an honorary chaplain to the Bourbon army and a Florentine by birth. The others were local men, only one of whom was identified by name. He was Agostino Formisano, a youth from the nearby hamlet of Resina. In the preceding weeks, Mecatti had been told by Bernardo Tanucci—chief minister to Charles of Bourbon—that changes were afoot up in the crater. Two monticelli had merged into a larger cone. Tanucci had noted the outgrowth on a

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recent climb. Mecatti had little difficulty in convincing the young Spaniard to join him. Don Aguir was a bodyguard to the king and a talented sketcher to boot. The small party of men plus three donkeys left Santa Maria di Putigliano— “from where one leaves for Vesuvius”—under uncertain skies. They soon faced a heavy downpour that soaked them through and through, despite the heavy mantle Mecatti and Aguir shared for protection. At points pausing, and eventually abandoning their animals, they took numerous hours to work their way to the crater lip. Mecatti admitted cursing his “ignorant Cicerones” early in the ascent; now he sent a man ahead, down over the edge into the “platform” at the base of the crater. The men steamed in their wet clothes, enveloped by the volcano’s heat. Looking down, they watched the sun break through the clouds. They could see the city.1 A fresh stream of lava snaked in the crater’s interior. An old flow identified in 1752 had solidified near the new one. While Mecatti and Aguir debated climbing up the internal cone, Agostino Formisano dashed forward and was almost killed: “There was a thud with a burst of twenty-five or thirty rocks.”2 Presumably, this was the moment the Spanish officer captured in his drawing. Seen on this scale, the ever-closer convergence of human curiosity and the phenomenon appeared magnified. Aguir’s was, of course, only one type of depiction, but it was exemplary of the effects of volcanism that were working on the culture of observation. Vesuvius remained, in local parlance, il Gigante, the brooding destroyer. However, in the mid-eighteenth century a four-year bout of lava flows constantly changed the shape and appearance of the crater. The observations of these effects up close subtly adjusted perception yet again. The collaboration between text and image in Mecatti’s Osservazioni che si son fatte nel Vesuvio (1754) highlights one significant difference from previous accounts. The clergyman’s narrative and the Spanish officer’s sketch worked in a new and tighter conjunction of image and word. The ekphrastic descriptions of seventeenth-century naturalists had recorded the myriad effects observed in an eruption, to be sure, but the implied transference had been from words to pictures. By the mid-1700s, however, pictures were able to convey more precise scientific meaning. Observers might have sketched and noted simultaneously. Pictures and words accompanied each other in books.

seeing things in rock There was no essential primacy to pictures. They were not inherently better at explaining volcanism than a written account. Could a drawing of lava really

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portray its properties better than Paragallo’s written observations? Pictures, just like words, could not always be trusted. The record of European naturalists was full of erroneous depictions, as when they had struggled to show the appearance of New World fauna accurately.3 Hevelius’s fantastic lunar volcanoes in the 1650s show the errors visual depictions of geological phenomena could create. But pictures were compelling, too, and the generation of volcano watchers after Paragallo increasingly employed them in close collaboration with text. What that method shows is how the new approachability of Vesuvius produced representation—and how that representation furthered curiosity and understanding—in a loop between nature and culture. By early afternoon on the day of their climb, Mecatti and Aguir returned to Santa Maria a Pugliano, at the base of the volcano and very near to the recently begun Bourbon digs of Herculaneum. They dined as the guests of the Marquis of Istatia, recalling their adventure to him. With Mecatti’s encouragement, Aguir resolved to finish his sketch and have it published, so that “this stunning phenomenon that we were the first to see might be impressed better in the minds of men.”4 They had gone up to see the crater on the king’s minister’s suggestion. Tanucci had told Mecatti that the two pyroclastic cones within had turned to one. That news had catalyzed the entire effort. Back down from the crater, the two men confirmed the novel change. Their fresh image of Vesuvius and its phenomenon would stick in people’s minds, they imagined. And then, up they would go again in search of further changes to report. Mecatti noted that there were many ways in which one might “discourse” about Vesuvius. “The history of Vesuvius that I finished compiling at the end of last year was received by great applause by the Republic of Letters,” he opened, referencing his previously published Racconto Storico-Filosofico (1752).5 “Everyone seemed happy with my method I employed of keeping an exact Diary of what the Lava did,” he continued. This volcano log then sustained “philosophical observations.” Ultimately, the structure of Mecatti’s second book reflected its method: four “discourses,” one “digression,” and various observations and “papers”—these were Aguir’s sketches. Erudite, philosophical, historical, and a report on the most recent eruption were the four categories of discourse listed by Mecatti. The digression was on the recent discoveries of Herculaneum and Pompeii. Mecatti promised he would continue with yearly reports on Vesuvius, drawing either from his own observations or from reliable witnesses. This would put the life of the crater in “public light” for the “public good.”6 The changes in the crater of Vesuvius between 1750 and 1755 acquired a life in images. Engravings in Giovanni Maria Della Torre’s Storia e fenomeni del

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F I G U R E 7 . 2 . Giovanni Maria Della Torre, Storie e fenomeni del Vesuvio (Naples, 1755). This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Vesuvio (1755) portrayed the mountain’s appearance in a very similar fashion to Mecatti’s book (fig. 7.2).7 One of these depictions captures the interior of the crater with two prominent features, labeled alternately as a voragine and a sprofondamento—a subtle distinction that seemed to want to convey that the former was the volcano’s main bellow, while the latter was a collapsed hollow in the crater floor. Set alongside this, a second depiction shows the crater’s subsequently altered state. This time there is only one single montagnuola, and much of the crater appears to be filling in. A burst of pyroclasts comes out the new cone. But for the absence of men in the crater, it looks like Aguir’s portrayal. The year must have been 1754. Further alterations appear in a following engraving dating from February 1755 (fig. 7.3). This time the crater is nearly brimming with new accretion. Labels mark that its floor had risen “100 feet” and that the interior cone had grown as well.

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Pictures captured the exciting dynamism of the years between 1751 and 1755, working in conjunction with the narratives of volcano explorers. In this particular instance, the collaboration was between Della Torre, a clergyman who was, among other things, pioneering the use of the microscope, and the Neapolitan artist Giuseppe Aloja. Aloja also drew the antiquities of Herculaneum with considerable skill and beauty.8 It must have been a good pairing, since Della Torre himself seems to have cared about the visual representation of his science—his later book, with drawings from the microscope, showed that.9 The clergyman had been born in Rome in 1713 but ended up spending many years in Naples, where he died in 1782. According to a nineteenth-century bi­ o­grapher, Della Torre chafed under the responsibility of curating Charles of Bourbon’s library and antiquities collection, presumably since this distracted him from his strictly scientific pursuits.10 It was likely, in contrast, that Della

F I G U R E 7 . 3 . Interior floor of Vesuvius, February 23, 1755. Giovanni Maria Della Torre, Storie e fenomeni del Vesuvio (Naples, 1755). This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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Torre greatly benefited from his position with the Bourbons, both in terms of reputation and the opportunity to direct the work of artists. His likeness was painted by the renowned portraitist Angelica Kauffman, for example; an engraved copy of that portrait appears in the microscope book.11 More importantly, the collaboration with Aloja—who sketched both antiquities and volcanism beautifully—reflected Della Torre’s involvement with Bourbon archaeology. Changes on the mountain became an occasion to climb, and so the years between 1751 and 1755 were ones of intense exploration, ultimately leading to the publication of the volcano book. Della Torre explained in the preface of the Storia e fenomeni that the royal digs that had begun at Herculaneum in 1738 had opened “a field for dilettantes to illustrate the very many principal points of ancient history, but also with this observation to see the effects generated by the first eruption of Vesuvius, and being able to see the lava that came out up close, new and extremely important materials have been added to natural history.” Recalling the roughly four years that had preceded publication of the book, Della Torre described having spent them with “free reign” to explore.12 Historical and scientific appreciation closely trailed each other, as they had previously, but now at a different rhythm. The dynamism of the mountain made its powers of destruction and regeneration—burial and uplift—newly visible. The crater, especially, located an explorer’s ability to philosophize before the natural machine. Della Torre explained his method for looking within: The method I have followed in making all the observations on Vesuvius has been to go there each time as if it were the first, and to note on paper that which I was observing without having first seen my preceding observations—and then, upon returning, to make any necessary calculations and then set my notes aside with no further glance. My trips to Vesuvius are much more numerous than those I have noted in this History; to write it, I gathered all the sheets of notes together for comparison, and from these I chose those observations which I found most often in agreement. For this reason, I am inclined to flatter myself that I have by this method not strayed far from the truth; at least I am persuaded that I have made my observations without the preconceptions of any particular system.”13

Paragallo had explained his philosophizing about the volcano half a century previously in like manner, in keeping with the Jesuit tradition of entertaining multiple philosophical systems. The order’s unwillingness to commit to any

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single explanatory philosophy had been both a strength and weakness, in that it sometimes ran up against the necessity of adhering to doctrinal commitments. Only in 1751 were Jesuits released of the responsibility of defending Aristotle, but Vesuvius writers had long entertained other philosophical systems.14 For Della Torre, then, avoiding the “preconceptions of any particular system” conveyed an important methodological soundness. Natural history required a kind of open and unencumbered observation, well before one could theorize on causes. Della Torre, especially, emphasized the new capacity of pictures to project knowledge. “It would have been desirable that the Ancients had spoken less about Vesuvius, and instead left us with different portraits from back then.” He explained that visual representations of the mountain’s previous state would have “avoided us the labor of tracking down its ancient form in a wild wood of useless words, exaggerations, expressions said in emphasis and long from truth, and of rhetorical and poetic terms that make the true ancient state of this Mountain an extremely difficult thing to extract from their books.”15 Maybe the unearthing of Roman cities had made the power of ancient art especially clear to Della Torre. Conversely, the texts revered by humanists had become problematic. The notion that ancient pictures of Vesuvius would have been more useful than the thicket of past voices was a challenge to the humanists’ traditional reliance on texts. Aloja’s rendering of a cooled flow in one of the tables that appeared in Della Torre’s book conveys the intended power of images, and maybe some of their novelty (fig. 7.4). The picture is traversed diagonally by a tumescent, folded, and corrugated lava flow that spills from the upper right corner and appears to drop—or to have flowed—to the lower left. Aloja removed any background. Only the lava fills his depiction. On the lower right a compass rose orients the viewer to the location on the mountain and to the flows direction with respect to Naples. It is as if a detail of Vesuvius has been extracted and displayed as artifact, but not without the markers for a proper reattachment. Looking more closely, greater levels of precision are evident. Aloja showed the lava’s direction of flow, its morphology, and its elements of composition. “Calcined stones,” shown in lighter color, accrete visibly around the arch of a lava cave that rises in the middle of the picture. In nature, calcination is a pro­ cess whereby a heat below melting point drives off volatiles from a solid. A good historical example is the production of quicklime through heating limestone. The sassi calcinati in Aloja’s picture were from Della Torre’s volca­ nological vocabulary, which included other terms such as fumi, lapilli, lave, spume, and piriti. Each of these denoted the different materials either ejected or extruded by the volcano.16 A theory of volcanic ignition was figured here:

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F I G U R E 7 . 4 . Grotto in the form of a round temple formed by lava. Giovanni Maria Della Torre, Storie e fenomeni del Vesuvio (Naples, 1755). This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

calcined stones showed the fermentation and combustion processes volcanic materials were thought to undergo as they were chemically ignited. There was architecture, too, in the rock. The most arresting part of Aloja’s lava flow depiction is the arch that rises in its middle, identified as “a Great Cave of Ottaviano Lava in the Form of a Round Temple.” Della Torre described hunting with mixed luck for similar features in the volcanic landscape. “Often, it is no longer easy to discern them,” he wrote of the vaults and chambers that had been created by earlier flows but then either worn down by erosion or covered anew.17 On May 22, 1755, four months after two new flows had snaked toward the town of Ottaviano, Della Torre went up with a Spanish colonel to take a fresh look. The officer discovered the grottone drawn by Aloja. Della Torre wrote that “exploring the various openings made in the lava channel, and the considerable mounds of calcined stones, a vitrified matter, he [the officer] dared to enter into the last opening where, having seen a vast

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cave similar to the round temple that ended in a cupola, he suggested I have a drawing made, which I had engraved.”18 Natural historians had always trained themselves to see things in rock. For sixteenth-century natural historians like Ferrante Imperato, petrified forms that looked like a living equivalent showed nature’s playfulness. They were constitutions of matter on the graduated great chain of being—inanimate reflections of a living form in a universe of infinite correspondences. Humanists had also probed the bedrock of the past for other reasons. In sixteenth-century Rome, for example, they had dropped down into the buried vaults of the ancient city to be dazzled by the grotteschi painted on long-concealed walls and ceilings. Especially in the absence of any background in the picture, which Aloja deliberately excluded, the lava formation looks like architecture. Down below the mountain, at Herculaneum and Pompeii, walls, doorways, courtyards, and vaults once encased in volcanic clasts were coming to light. Up on the mountain, conversely, a living landscape was in constant reconstitution, creating shapes that could even resemble the temples of the ancient world. If Aloja’s intention was to show how nature sculpted forms through constant upheaval and transformation, as it appears, then it is also reasonable to think that the picture signaled his awareness of the cities being unearthed below. For his part, Della Torre promised his readers that he would “describe the present state of Vesuvius, both interior and exterior, as far as I was able to penetrate, not without danger.”19 One could not understand the present without understanding, in contrast, the volcano’s previous formation. Intelligible penetration required a fundamental geological heuristic applicable to unearthing the human past as well. That tool was stratigraphy, the notion that layers superimposed mark a sequence in time. “Vesuvius is a mountain composed of many different material strata,” he explained. Elsewhere, he went further: Here the internal natural strata making up the mountain are marvelously discernible, disposed according to a natural order, as they are in all other mountains. Some are of reddish earth slightly charred, others of natural dark stones, other brightly white and densely compacted, others yet are strata of breccias, lapilli, and sand.20

One could see down, into the past, sifting layers, taking out objects, retelling a story. “It’s not, as some have thought, a mountain created bit by bit . . . but it is as ancient as the world, and thus created by God like all other natural mountains.” Della Torre had observed a similar layering on other mountains: “There is no doubt that the present Mount Vesuvius is a mountain just like the

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others.”21 The volcano was a changing, ever-fermenting and igniting mountain, but a mountain nonetheless, standing since the beginning of the world. There, Della Torre hit impasse. Again, as had others before, he ran into doubts generated by the limits of observation. Previously, Borelli had considered the generation and corruption of mountains after Etna’s 1669 eruption, concluding that the Sicilian volcano underwent a constant process of redistribution of its mass when it erupted. Rather than consume itself, Etna changed shape, gradually spilling itself out into a shorter and wider form. Borelli also argued that such changes happened to volcanoes with long histories of ignition, like Vesuvius. The relative lack of elevation of the latter, and even Etna when compared to some other volcanoes in the world, evidenced the ongoing redistribution of an extant matter.22 Della Torre could record the historic changes on the mountain, but the deep origin of eruptions still puzzled him. He openly rejected Kircher’s notion of a vestigial primordial heat harbored within the earth. “It’s good for explaining Volcanoes, and Fossils in an ideal world, and an imaginary one. We can only admit that reason that we actually find in the World, as it was fashioned out of God’s Omnipotence,” he asserted. In truth, Della Torre’s was a precise distinction. While he understood the appeal of a “central fire” in explaining volcanoes, that idea seemed more imaginary than supported by what could be seen. The long list of substances encountered on the volcano fit a pattern of evidence: there was a “potential fire” but no “actual fire” as would have existed if Vesuvius were connected to a central burning core.23 Speculation about deep channels trailing to a central core remained exactly that, a guess. It was as if all the remarkable richness of his observations, and all of the capacity of Ajola to portray its visual form, worked against the deeper intuition that volcanoes were inextricably tied to the inner economy of the earth. The question Scipione Falcone had raised in 1632 still hung in suspension, un­ resolved or blocked, even, by how much naturalists thought they knew about the volcano’s substances. In that way, Ajola’s picture counted doubly. It also encoded visually, through those lighter-hued calcined rocks of the grottone, the theory that volcanic combustibles slowly fermented and occasionally ignited. Why, Della Torre asked rhetorically, had Strabo seen no sight of flame a decade before the great classical eruption? Later writers agreed: “Starting with Agricola, nothing at all do we read of this central fire.”24 Vesuvius is a stratovolcano built up through a composite layering of lavas and clasts. Della Torre discerned the strata in its structure, and he also understood that he could read the volcano’s activity from it. His book exemplified a long tradition of practices dating from at least the 1630s, but it also showed

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F I G U R E 7 . 5 . View of Vesuvius from Naples. Giovanni Maria Della Torre, Storie e fenomeni del Vesuvio (Naples, 1755). This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

how appreciation had grown refined. By erupting so frequently, and with less terrible violence, Vesuvius influenced the pace and significance of its own representation. “Table” 1 in Della Torre’s book shows a glimpse of this beautiful convergence of appreciation and volcanism itself: a prospect of the volcano facing almost due east, looking out as if one were approaching it from Naples (fig. 7.5). The Maddalena Bridge lies on the lower left. The bridge served historically as a conveyance away from and to the mountain. Thousands fled across it during the 1631 eruptions, but in the 1760s the bridge also opened the way up the mountain. The volcano is shown active, and even the newly forming inner cone—the one Mecatti’s intrepid band had approached—is visible. Numbered marks dot the mountain, identifying features of natural historical significance. Even from this distance—the imaginary viewer is a few miles away—patterns of activity become discernible. The pictorial

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F I G U R E 7 . 6 . The Atrio del Cavallo, a landscape of fire and smoke. Giovanni Maria Della Torre, Storie e fenomeni del Vesuvio (Naples, 1755). This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

representation Della Torre and Aloja devised drew even closer as one leafed through the book. His “table” 5 brings the viewer into the Atrio del Cavallo, a landscape of fire and smoke (fig. 7.6). The ancient Somma caldera encircles part of the scene. Vesuvius rises before the viewer almost to the upper extremity of the picture. Flows and fumaroles appear everywhere; the scene is crowded and busy. The march of the lava on various occasions is clearly visible. It is an impressively alive image that also reflects an intention of scale. The viewer drew closer to Vesuvius with each image: first by seeing the mountain from Naples, then by entering its inner valley, then by coming right against the lava itself, and finally by entering the crater. If the picture of Vesuvius was shaped directly by the practices of natural historians, those practices in turn shaped broader attitudes about southern Italy and the Mediterranean—with new voices now added to the chorus in the eighteenth century. These developments can be observed though two re-

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lated examples. One pertains to the question of mountain formation, which was a topic of great interest for geology by the second half of the 1700s. The other comes from a voyage to the volcanic Aeolian Islands off the coast of Sicily. Naturalists from northern Europe thought they could intuit the processes of orogenesis from the volcanoes there. Their geological writings, however, also entailed describing the inhabitants and the fierce climates in which they lived.

orogenesis By the mid-eighteenth century, naturalists increasingly adduced their geological observations to the question of how mountains had come into being. In the Veneto region, naturalists like Giovanni Arduino and Alberto Fortis began to examine basalt formations in the foothills of the Alps, seeing in these remains of ancient volcanism evidence of orogenesis. Throughout Europe’s mountainous chains, like the Alps, Appenines, and the volcanoes of the Italian South, naturalists sought similar signs of generation and erosion.25 In 1740, contrary to the doubts later expressed by Della Torre, the Venetian naturalist Antonio Lazzaro Moro advanced the idea that mountain generation occurred because of the earth’s internal heat.26 In seeking to explain the long-puzzling presence of fossilized marine creatures in the high elevations of mountains, Moro elaborated a classification of mountains by two types, primary and secondary. Primary mountains had been uplifted by underwater volcanism in one even formation—as volcanic isles like the Aeolians were said to have been—and thus carried a formerly marine strata to their summits. Secondary mountains were different in quality and essentially secondary in sequence, since all mountains were created by volcanism. These secondary mountains were thought to be layered in strata, because they were the result of volcanism in subsequent periods. The visible state of Vesuvius and Etna exemplified the latter type. So did the “birth of Monte Nuovo,” which Moro recalled two centuries after Simone Porzio’s account of that Campi Flegrei eruption.27 Deducing orogenesis from inert basalt formations was one thing, but seeing the uplift first hand was a dramatic and picturesque glimpse of the earth’s inner economy. On May 8, 1717, Edward Berkeley “stood upon the brink” and watched redhot stones rocket up from the crater of Vesuvius, “sometimes more than a thousand, but never less than 300 feet higher than my head.” “Imagine,” he added, “a vast torrent of liquid fire rolling from the top down the side of the mountain, and with irresistible fury bearing down and consuming vines, olives, fig-trees, houses, and in a word, every thing that stood in its way.” Berkeley was a Grand

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Tourist in the early age of travel to Italy. The peninsula appeared to be the garden of Europe and was the delight of travelers, if also home to a people much diminished from their ancient stock: “inured to slavery, harassed with tyrannies and impositions of their priests.” English children would have learned of Mr. Berkeley’s exploration in a popular children’s collection of world history and geography that appended Vesuvius and Etna to the seven ancient wonders of the world.28 The great attraction of a volcano was that one could watch the mechanics of the volcano’s own making and unmaking. Such a sight was becoming increasingly apparent to European travelers. William Hamilton was largely responsible for the broad diffusion of Vesuvian imagery among the English. By the 1770s, his reports from Vesuvius and Etna were delighting audiences that Neapolitan scholars and naturalists had never reached. Having considerable experience with both volcanoes, Hamilton happily entertained their comparison. Etna was greater in scale by far, but “as to the nature and quality of the lavas, they are much the same,” he stated. “In short,” he also explained, “I found, with respect to the matter erupted, nothing on Mount Etna that Vesuvius does not produce, and there is certainly a much greater variety in the erupted matter and lavas of the latter than of the former.” To put it succinctly, each mountain had its own exceptional qualities. Hamilton found amber on Etna, for instance, but Vesuvius was full of other unique effects and minerals. Pyrites, crystallizations, and vitrifications that he had not encountered elsewhere littered the slopes. In all instances there were the unmistakable signs of how mountains were made.29 To Hamilton the form revealed the processes within: Whenever I shall meet with a mountain, in any part of the world, whose form is regularly conical, with a hollow crater on its top, and one side broken, I shall decide such a mountain’s having been formed by an eruption; as both on Etna and Vesuvius the mountains formed by explosion are without exception according to this description.30

Italian volcanoes were archetypes on which Hamilton theorized the global nature of volcanism. There are other volcanic places in the Mediterranean world, but southern Italy and the stretches of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Channel of Sicily are especially active. The cluster of volcanoes formed by the converging African and Eurasian plates sits in the middle of the Mediterranean like a backward letter L. Along here, the two plates grind together. The African plate is pushed downward, melting into powerfully volatile magmas. There is along here an inexorable subduction.

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Volcanism in the Mediterranean revealed to Hamilton the possibility of discerning particular cultural and historical interactions. On one occasion, he met a clergyman from Catania “actually employed in writing its natural history; but, I fear, will not be able to compass so great and useful an undertaking for want of proper encouragement.” Such guides, whom he rightly suspected labored in anonymity, took Hamilton to see the ravaged places and the ruins of past flows.31 In parallel to activities that included the 1781 unearthing of what he thought was archaeological evidence of an ancient phallic cult in the town of Isernia, volcano watching recorded the religious and popular traditions of the area as well.32 Geology, antiquarianism, and early archaeology but also ethnography and anthropology were interlaced. It was widely known that the inhabitants of volcanic places had been the subject of ancient geographies. Pliny’s Natural History described the mystery of Stromboli in the Aeolians, where “the local inhabitants are said to be able to predict from its smoke how the winds are likely to blow.” These volcano dwellers sensed the mountain and lived to its rhythms.33 Similar descriptions existed in the Renaissance. In the dialogue between father and son in Pietro Bembo’s fifteenth-century Aetna, the father asks “if there are any who have the mountain in their care.” The younger man replies that “there are, so people say, and they dwell in this very place.” Ancient poets and the humanists after them stylized a portrait of the shepherds and peasants living on volcanoes like Etna or Vesuvius. Bembo’s quoted Hesiod’s Theogony: Vast earth is burning, in the raging heat It melts: as once white lead in beaten strips Is liquefied within the hollow furnace By fire and craftsman’s art; and iron, so hard Built-up within the depths of native rock, Once it has glowed, now tamed by Vulcan’s hand Cracks on the ground.34

Neapolitans developed their own versions of these tropes in the seventeenth century, through which the native rock—as Bembo termed it—became a metonym for character and nationality. Giovanni Battista Mascolo’s De incendio Vesuvii was printed in 1633, about a year after the Jesuit order’s other principal treatise on the eruption—Recupito’s considered previously—also appeared in Naples.35 Both books marked the order’s power to shape the communal memory of the disaster; likewise, they asserted the Jesuit’s theological and philosophical primacy in those years.

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Mascolo’s “topography” of Vesuvius described the “measurement, beauty, and character of the place” in a way that strongly identified the relationship between natural environments and human civilization—it is a good example of baroque perception of the phenomenon of environment and culture.36 The Jesuit explained that Neapolitans knew that Vesuvius harbored a true sedition in its bosom and that this knowledge shaped their relationship to it. Seditio viget, Mascolo warned. The volcano’s eruptions, which could be explained naturally through the usual mixture of sulfur, bitumen, saltpeter, and the like, were like Spartacus’s brigand army poised to sally forth. Eruptions exercised the power of rebellion and self-immolation: “Born beneath mountains, they destroy these and bury them.”37 To live in the presence of that was to live with the reminder of ever-constant destruction. What did this unstable physical environment mean for local culture? This was not exactly how Mascolo phrased the question; it is, rather, a historian’s query. The Jesuit had his own reasons for making the argument about Neapolitans’ close affinities to Vesuvius. Reassurance that the mountain would heal and that eruptions had natural causes, reassurance that order would return, and reassurance that there was meaning in having been spared seem to have been his primary intent. Yet, writing about “him,” Vesuvius, was also a way of writing about “us,” Naples. For Mascolo, the volcano had a powerful effect on the city. Why had a city “so close to Vesuvius, subtracted itself from so many destructions,” he asked. It was because of the “stirring of souls, of piety, of God’s religion” that it evoked in local people. Mascolo explicitly explained that urban cults had an “apotropaic,” as he put it, relationship to their destructive neighbor.38 Lessons came from history. Pompeii and Herculaneum had been buried, but Naples had not.39 It was as if—so the treatise closed—the ferocious stench of burning sulfur, the trembling ground, and the roars of the mountain compelled the people to intensify their own prayers and upraised voices, outshouting the giant.40 Watchfulness and appreciation also swayed the native character. Mascolo explained that people loved the mountain for its beauty and, thus, mourned its destruction in 1631. Thinking of his own experiences on Vesuvius in 1626, the Jesuit recalled elements of its previous condition. He remembered trees marked with the graffiti of excursionists, as well as the conversations he had with peasants and shepherds who pointed the way along ascending footpaths. As Mascolo wrote a few years later, all that pulchritude had turned to monstrosity. The volcano’s wound scarred Naples, too. The disaster’s tragic consequences were exacerbated by a disfigurement that now had to be borne and seen.41

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When not seen through the lens of native tragedy, Vesuvius was framed by foreigners who were inclined, increasingly, to adduce climatic and environmental theories to their views of southern Italy. “I spent more than a year in Italy, where I saw nothing but the ruins of this ancient Italy, once so famous” wrote one of the fictive Persian travelers in the Lettres Persanes. The deeper one went into the peninsula, the more appearances were accentuated. Montesquieu’s character explained that “there were once, in Sicily, powerful kingdoms and numerous peoples, who have since then disappeared: this island has nothing considerable besides its volcanoes.”42 Archetypal, volcanoes exemplified the South.

s o u t h i n to h e at In 1781, Déodat Dolomieu made a night passage between Milazzo and the Aeolian Islands in a six-oar skiff, hoping to evade the Barbary pirates who sometimes lurked just off the Sicilian coast. Writing to the Academie des Sciences, he described the islands as mysterious, volcanic, and uncharted. These isolated dots of land of a nearly unknown Mediterranean had risen from ancient eruptions, Dolomieu reasoned. “But the violent eruptions that made them, either together or successively,” he wrote, “are surely anterior to the themes of history, since no historian has said anything of their origin.” Like Vesuvius and Etna, the Frenchman noted, the Aeolian volcanoes were of enormous interest to “Physicists and Naturalists.” In case more incentive was needed, he stressed that the archipelago’s volcanoes had not been written over by the English, as had Vesuvius and Etna. There were the islands’ inhabitants, as well, a strange and superstitious lot eking out lives beneath the glow of erupting cones. 43 Around eight in the morning on July 13, on a hot and still day, Dolomieu reached the first of the islands and then began a leisurely circumnavigation. Much of Vulcano’s coast was an unapproachable fortress of jagged shoals and cliffs. The Frenchman drew close enough to smell the pleasant scent of the maquis shrubland wafting out over the water. He eventually found a place to come ashore. In the interior, the island revealed itself largely a “primitive crater”—an island still in the making.44 The crater struck him as the “greatest and most important spectacle Nature has yet shown me.” It was, he subsequently recalled, more impressive than Etna’s, vaster if more shallow.45 The island was small enough to force the few scattered people on it to nearly unbearable proximity with volcanism. Just offshore, the much larger population of Lipari watched Vulcano in fear. Dolomieu reported that “the Liparotes,

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on the basis of long experience, and tradition, are most alive with apprehension when Vulcano does not smoke, and its conduits are obstructed.”46 There was always a small human presence, however. The Frenchman learned that the Liparotes collected sulfur on Vulcano, trading it elsewhere. The sulfate minerals were gathered by setting collection sticks into the countless fumaroles. The practice had been banned because it was dangerous for the collectors and because it was thought harmful to crops, but locals stubbornly persisted regardless.47 Dolomieu was a traveler drawn deeper into an exotic land, with marvels at every turn. “Everything, in a word, on this island, holds the spirit and imagination of the naturalist who lands here in suspense,” he remarked.48 The heat, however, was crushing. For the four days he was on Lipari, it pressed on him and left him with a “lassitude I have never suffered.” In spite of how he felt, Dolomieu ventured into the interior of that island, which he had reached on the night of July 13, following his circumnavigation of Vulcano. As he told it, each island had different characteristics. He was under the spell of a pounding sun and hot volcanoes. “It was not but two days of trekking and observation that I had convinced myself that the island is entirely volcanic,” he wrote. Signs of orogenesis were in the exposed strata of rock Dolomieu saw as he walked from the east coast of Lipari across the interior to the higher ground to the west. The terrain looked like the accumulation of lumps built around a once-higher single prominence.49 Eighteenth-century geologists were enamored with the power of catastrophe, in particular with the notion that geological change was the product of paroxysms that had been more frequent in ancient periods. Catastrophism implied that a once-violent Earth had gradually stilled, leaving evidence of its tumultuous past. Dolomieu’s voyage to the Aeolian Islands was decades before Charles Lyell’s uniformity theory in the 1830s established the canon that steady-state geological processes of erosion, deposition, and uplift shaped geomorphologies.50 Instead, the Frenchman saw the vestiges of ancient paroxysm cut into the slopes and rises of the island. In that, he discerned a pattern reminiscent of Moro’s classification of mountains some decades earlier. The Frenchman explained it thus: “One observation that greatly aided me in recognizing the primitive mountain there was the inclination of the strata that the cliffs exposed to me.” What he meant by this is that Lipari was itself an ancient mountain that had risen from the sea—like Moro’s original primary mountains—and then had been degraded and fragmented into its present forms. He deduced this by assuming an original primitive cone—incidentally, exactly the structure volcano watchers now regularly saw replicated in miniature within craters, as little per-

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fectly conical monticelli built up with each new burst of clasts—whose initial scale and central conduit could be tracked along lines of declination. It was a visual puzzle: from a fragment of exposed stratigraphy, Dolomieu followed the lines of strata upward at a steady angle to what would have been the original central crater of a giant primitive cone—the mountain at its beginning. Subsequent paroxysms had wrought the current geomorphology of many broken lumps and subcraters. 51 He saw an ancient mountain concealed in the current form of Lipari, though much degraded. That discernment, however, does not seem to have provoked him to push the question of age very far. There was only vagueness about a deep past in the account: “They were formed, like all others, at the beginning of the world.”52 The native fears of the Liparotes reached back into less remote historical times, in contrast. Dolomieu was confident that he could explain the origin of their anxiety, once he worked through the superstitious confusions he heard. Local voices could be reinterpreted in a scientific key. “Natural history might draw from this superstitious tradition an induction on the successive eruption of this island’s mountains, and of their cessation,” he wrote. On landing, Dolomieu learned that the islanders believed in the protection of Saint Calogero, who was said to have chased devils away to Vulcano, where they now lurked troubling the island from a short distance away. The historical miracles of the saint who chased devils evidenced the volcanism Dolomieu believed had shaped the appearance of Lipari in previous centuries. As for the devils dancing in craters, the risible local superstition was nonetheless a clue for the naturalist: “I would not at all be surprised if the volcanic eruptions were to have in reality held pace with those supposed to be those of the devils.”53 Calogero’s miracles, translated, were the natural process whereby an ancient volcanic island had aged to quiescence. Locals thought eruptions were devils, but a natural historian could use such tall tales—including the chronicle of past miracles—to track a history of eruptivity. Appearances, dress, customs, religion, and modes of commerce drew the attention of traveling naturalists often, for the obvious reason that encountering local people was an inevitable and desired part of exploring. For example, one French seventeenth-century naturalist’s account of the animals and plants of the East Indies, Charles Dellon’s Nouvelle relation d’un voyage fait aux Indes orientales, described the Madagascarians in a language of encounter broadly diffused in European culture since the late fifteenth century. “The inhabitants of this island are almost entirely black, treacherous, unsocial, and greatly cruel,” wrote Dellon.54 Dolomieu constructed a similar exoticism in the

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bosom of the old Mediterranean. He told the Academie des Sciences that the Aeolian Islands were the “most interesting land in the universe, and maybe the least known.”55 Geological itineraries across the islands meant contact with the islanders, whom Dolomieu found to be more numerous than he expected. Lipari’s population—some fourteen thousand, mostly clustered around the port and its lone fortress—made a special impression. He thought the islanders to be southern Europeans of the more vigorous sort: The national character of the Liparotes is very pronounced; they are brave, active, attached to their country, prompt, vindictive, and superstitious. The women are very fertile, and their temperament is so precocious that marriages commonly take place at twelve years of age; the best troop the King of Naples has in his service is his corps of Liparotes.56

The idea that southerners could be bold and impetuous in certain combinations of climate and topography was not uncommon. In the late seventeenth century, the English traveler John Chardin explained that the Persian temperament could be attributed to heat: “The hot Climates enervate the Mind as well as the Body, lay the quickness of the Fancy.”57 If other French writers like Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle had rejected the association of climate and temperament as unfounded—Fontenelle wrote that “differences in climate may be discounted, provided the minds in question are otherwise cultivated”—climate and culture were closely twinned in the eighteenth century.58 Dolomieu seems to have derived his impressions from existing climate theories, with the added fact that he strongly emphasized the function of topography and landscape in shaping the character of the islanders. Each of the inhabited islands, in fact, had something of a unique character. Indeed, Montesquieu’s climatic theories might well have been what the naturalist had in mind as he trekked and voyaged around the islands. In the decades before Dolomieu’s voyage, the Esprit de Lois gave powerful expression to an eighteenth-century vision of how climate and physical geography dictated human physiology and culture. On landing on Vulcano, Dolomieu felt immediately oppressed by the heat, an impression that echoed Montesquieu’s warning about hot weather in contrast to the invigorating brace of the cold. “Hot air” Montesquieu had written, “on the contrary relaxes the extremity of the fibers, and lengthens them; it diminishes their force and resort.” Dolomieu’s languid state was to be expected; he was a northerner adjusting to lo-

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cal conditions. Such a weakening could be marked even in a hardy person as Montesquieu explained: Put a man in a hot and closed place, and he will suffer, for the reasons I mention hitherto, a great loss of heart. If one is to propose a bold action to him in these conditions, I believe that one will find him little disposed; his weakness will put a fear in his soul; he will fear everything, because he will feel that he can do nothing. People in hot countries are timid, like old people are; those of cold climes are brave, like youth.59

The passions of people in hot climates were ever in flux, too, as they were “born and calmed without cease,” he continued. The jagged features of Lipari, however, with its steeply pitched slopes and tortuous terrain might have suggested another dimension to Dolomieu as well, since he had found the Lipari islanders to be industrious, brave, and hardly timid. In their case, something counteracted the languid indolence that tended to grip southern Europeans. Montesquieu also resorted to physical factors in explaining how people behaved, and not just climate, imagining that places of barren and difficult cultivation tended to foster the vigor and energy of inhabitants. Sterility made people industrious, courageous, and ready for war.60 Was this on Dolomieu’s mind as well? During the days he was on Lipari exploring, he learned that the islanders did not have an easy relationship with the landscape around them, even if the eruptions they had feared historically now only occurred on neighboring Vulcano. On the steep and hard-packed slopes of the island, the frequent thunderstorms that signaled the end of the Mediterranean summer could bring devastating flash floods. Lipari’s thick maquis and boscage were the best guarantee against the rains, but the necessity to heavily cultivate the hills had forced the islanders into a predicament. The higher in elevation they cleared the land, the more they compounded the problem of floods. Caught in that struggle, and erupting Vulcano just off their coast, the islanders were a tough and industrious lot.61 A kind of happy indolence, on the contrary, seemed to mark the other principal inhabited Aeolian Island, Salina. Dolomieu sailed to it after Lipari and found that it, too, showed signs of ancient volcanism long quieted. Its primordial shape had been of a mountain rising from the sea. Volcanism subsequent to that had remolded its form. Four villages dotted the coast, amounting to some four thousand islanders. They did not cultivate grain but, rather, relied on small commerce with Sicily and Calabria, exchanging raisins and capers for

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what they needed. “They in general have an easy and happy air about them, and love their island,” Dolomieu explained. Patterns in the rock revealed many things to the French naturalist, about both the geology and the people. According to his observations, most of Salina was made up of loose pyroclasts rather than densely cooled lava flows. For that reason, the island showed very heavy signs of erosion. The hills were “principally composed of ash and fragmented clasts, materials of little consistence and not at all bound to one another.” Dolomieu reflected on the power of water to shape landscape. Everywhere, he saw gullies carved into the ancient mountains by its flows. Erosion wrought its slow work on a once volcanic island. Its eruptions “must have had a great violence” but none of his treks into the interior revealed any presence of current activity. That inertness in turn had its effect on the islanders: “They live in security on this soil, which they know well were once prey to underground fires, but they have on the Liparotes the advantage of not fearing new eruptions, and of being reassured against these events by the example a great number of centuries bear witness.”62 The only eruptions the islanders of Salina saw were Stromboli’s, its nearperfect cone rising approximately twenty modern miles to the northwest. At dusk on July 19, Dolomieu made for that latter island, reaching it in full darkness. He rounded to the northwest shore, where he was able to catch the erupting cone’s glow. Landing in the morning, he selected a guide from the crowd gathered to meet him and followed him with the “ardor that all great operations of nature inspire in me.” Dolomieu found the climb up to the island’s crater summit very steep. As he described it he was thankful that at each step his trailing boot sunk deep into the scree, affording better purchase than he had hoped. 63 Stromboli was unlike other volcanoes—presumably this meant Vesuvius and Etna—in that it gave little advance notice of its regular eruptions. Commonly, eruptions were thought to build in force, manifesting their imminence with ground tremors. Dolomieu wondered if perhaps there were “flammable vapors that are immediately ignited,” but he acknowledged that as only speculation. The climb was the grand finale of his Aeolian tour. By the morning of July 21, he had returned to Milazzo.64 Like some of his seventeenth-century predecessors—Scipione Falcone in the 1630s and Kircher a few decades later—Dolomieu was captivated by the idea that Vesuvius, Etna, and the Aeolian Islands were an interconnected web of fire. It remained a matter of speculation, as previously: “One cannot resolve this problem but with conjectures, and my opinion is in the affirmative.”65 That geological argument was coupled with a sustained commentary about the inhabitants of these volcanic places. Clearly, Dolomieu was attentive to marked

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differences such as those between the islanders on Lipari and Salina, and that would suggest that he underscored both climate and physical geography. Deeper south yet than the Aeolians, sun-scorched and barren Pantelleria was a land of its own. Dolomieu had been through there in 1769, and he found it appropriate to include what he knew of these places in his narrative of volcanic explorations. Pantelleria was so remote that it housed a Bourbon prison. A small garrison of troops held the one town, protecting a few thousand inhabitants from the raids of Barbary pirates. Despite the intense heat, these islanders were busy and active. “They work as much as is possible, in such an ingrate land, where there are but a few valleys suited for cultivation,” Dolomieu recalled. Cotton, vines, and olives were the principal objects of cultivation, so reliance on small trade was vital for survival. One industry was especially peculiar. The islanders harvested lichens that they fermented with urine in order to create a distinctly violet dye. The little commerce that this afforded, as well as the Bourbon prison and garrison, constituted the link with the outside world. They survived and not much more, as the Frenchman explained: “Even if they are not in utter misery, they do not have the Liparotes’ lighthearted appearance; it is true that their home is a thousand times more savage, and they are much more isolated from the rest of the universe.”66 Such maritime passages had taken Dolomieu to the edges of the temperate zone, down into realms of nearly unbearable heat. Montesquieu warned of what could happen: “The heat of the climate can be so excessive, the body will be left without absolutely any force. After that, the weakening will pass to the spirit itself; no curiosity, no noble enterprise, no generous sentiment; all the inclinations will be passive.”67 In October 1781, Dolomieu arrived in Malta, having left that island the preceding May for his sojourn in Sicily. It was well into autumn by that point, but the heat reached a terrifying extreme. The air felt thick and unbreathable even as the ship neared Malta. Not short on hyperbole in recalling his impressions, the Frenchman trembled at the “short space that separates the point at which it would no longer suffice for respiration and for the functions of animal economy. A few more degrees and one could no longer have breathed it.”68 The conditions Dolomieu encountered on Malta were exacerbated by the southeasterly sirocco, a wind long associated with torpor of mind and body. Italians had a litany of adjectives for the wind, like affanoso and furibondo.69 Sixteenth-century doctors commonly warned against it. In 1576, after a bout of plague in Palermo, Giovanni Filippo Ingrassia instructed those recovering from illness to avoid exposure.70 Spiritual and moral associations accompanied medical ones. Cardinal Sforza Pallavicino lectured in the Arte della

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perfezio­n Christiana (1665) that a good Christian ought to reap the crops of life’s field, having tilled and sowed it, ensuring also against that “leaded sirocco of laziness”—“il piomboso scirocco della pigrizia.”71 In the eighteenth-century, French travelers often associated it with conditions in Italy. One described how Romans feared that its appearance in July rendered “people crazy, of which there are many in Rome, and even their hair becomes that way.”72 Dolomieu felt some of that “extreme oppression” coming at him on his arrival to Malta. In such conditions, he explained, indolence became the dominant character trait. Rarefied blood, slow digestion, the incapacity to purge the body’s miasmas, and a whole list of other physiological ailments weakened the hardy northerner. The Maltese, however, seemed to have adapted. Dolomieu was stunned to see them working under extreme conditions, on a barren land and under the fierce sun. For those less hardy to the heat, an array of remedies had to be employed. Ice—transported to Malta from the heights of Etna—was the most vital of these assuagers. “One knows and fears equally the winds of the south, and above all the sirocco (southeast) in Italy; it produces the same effects and the same malaise” the traveler specified, noting also that “one speaks with fright of the sirocco in Naples.” He has seen the effects directly of that Sahara wind on the inhabitants of Palermo, who seemed utterly defeated when it blew into their city. The particularly powerful quality of the wind was to raise the level of perceived heat—heat index as it might be termed today—well beyond what the mercury indicated. In other words, Dolomieu had seen the heat rise higher, and had still felt far better, than when the added wind worked its ill effects on body and mind.73 Views of the sirocco were not entirely consistent, however, even if its qualities were widely adduced to commentary about climate and local character. This was the case for Naples as well. In 1788, Joseph de Lalande’s account of traveling in Italy claimed, instead, that the Neapolitans loved the wind, as they were acclimated to it and preferred it to the cold. That claim sat with a number of others, such as the frequency with which one encountered Italian children running in the streets in complete nakedness, the presence of enormous tarantulas and the popular tarantella folk dances, and the famously fertile fields of Campania.74 Montesquieu had previously explained that the southern temperament could indeed be full of contradictions. These antecedents may explain the fact that Dolomieu found some of the islanders he encountered—the Liparotes and the Maltese especially—to appear active and brave. For Montesquieu, the southerner was generally languid and indolent but could, on occasion, exhibit courage and zeal bordering on ferocity.75 Broadly speaking, the naturalist’s

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perceptions were consistent with these climate theories, though it seems that he paid special attention to the relationship between physical geography and the local character. His was a variation on a theme; those closest to active volcanism showed traditions and behaviors in affinity with the environment. Dolomieu’s commentary on the climatic conditions he experienced on Malta supplemented his tale of geological travels in the Aeolians a few months previously: it was appended to the Voyage aux Iles de Lipari. Both accounts were fashioned as scientific reports, dispatches from an exotic South the naturalist stressed was immensely alluring and in many respects uncharted by French science. The volcanic places, the inhabitants, and the hot climate therein described were fashioned by a northern European gaze on the Mediterranean and southern Italy. The study of the Aeolian volcanoes was not just reflective of an existing attention. Geology was truly constitutive of certain perceptions. More precisely, natural history became inextricable from the imagery that had developed by the 1700s of volcanism and the people living in its presence. It was that science’s vocabulary—narrative and visual—that attached so readily to the portrait of place. New views supplemented ancient tropes when volcano explorers like Dolomieu and Hamilton wrote about southern Italy. The most evocative and alluring parts of the South, as Hamilton remarked about Campania, were lands “formed by explosion.”76 This was the language of eighteenth-century catastrophist theory, yet it was not entirely novel. Neither was Hamilton’s analogy to the human body peculiar to the eighteenth century, ringing much like Vincenzo Alasario’s explanation in 1632 that the eruptions of Vesuvius were analogous to the recurrence of illness in the human body.77 Hamilton wrote: “If it were allowed to make a comparison between the earth and the human body, one might consider a country replete with combustibles occasioning explosions (which is surely the case here) to be a body full of humors.” The Englishman went on to explain that when these terrestrial humors were concentrated in one place they formed a “great tumor out of which they are discharged freely.” Such a thing was Vesuvius, a great obstruction in the earth’s flux of humors. Eighteenth-century geological writers added to the chorus of Neapolitan voices on Vesuvius, sometimes recognizing antecedent native voices: “I will give you a curious description of the state of the crater of Vesuvius, after having been free from eruption 492 years, as related by Braccini, who descended into it not long before the eruption,” Hamilton wrote.78 The new inflection is evident, however. Natural history accentuated a sense that the landscapes, climates, and peoples of the South—les pays du midi—were different from their native northern Europe. Climate theories enshrined by the likes of Montesquieu amplified

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the arguments that resulted from the encounter with volcanoes in Naples and Sicily. The picturesque qualities of the South—exotic, at times languidly suppressed by the heat, at times in ferocious upheaval—were volcanic.

f e r m e n ta t i o n s a n d e f f e r v e s c e n c e s Dolomieu’s evocative image of a volcanic South can tracked in English accounts as well. Again we might look at the Royal Society and Hamilton. In 1794, Charles Blagden, society secretary, wrote to Elisabeth Charlton Montagu, a prolific correspondent in her own right, to announce that he had just received Hamilton’s most recent news from Vesuvius. “Sir William Hamilton’s promised account of the later eruption of Mount Vesuvius is now arrived,” he wrote. That report was accompanied by “fine drawings, which very much elucidate the description.” In tune with his celebrated—but hardly novel—penchant for climbing the volcano, Hamilton had gotten very close to a lava flow. Blagden wrote to Lady Montagu that the sketches that accompanied Hamilton’s report rendered a vivid scene, especially of the eruptive cloud. “The representation of this appearance makes the third drawing; and it is, indeed a very striking spectacle.”79 Hamilton’s Campi Phlegraei (1776) was one of the visual triumphs of eighteenth-century publishing. Illustrated with gouaches by Pietro Fabris, the book made a century and a half of Vesuvius observation into a visual feast for European eyes. Blagden and the Royal Society were clearly accustomed to Hamilton’s illustrated reports. To Lady Montagu, he wrote that “those four drawings are by Gatta, the successor of Fabris, whom Sir W.H. employed for his former works; the fifth is a sketch by the old Father Antonio Piaggi, who has kept a diary of all appearances of Vesuvius for a long series of years.” Father Piaggi, especially, conveyed the image of the local, and somewhat quixotic, expert: “This venerable ecclesiastic remained very near the lava, observing and delineating it, till he was on the point of sharing the same fate as the elder Pliny; it was with great difficulty that the attendants carried him off alive.”80 Hamilton, to be sure, relied on such people to fashion his own expertise. He read accounts and interviewed those who had decades of experience watching the volcano’s eruptions. Giovanni Maria Della Torre, for instance, earned Hamilton’s respect as a “great observer of Vesuvius.”81 Both of these volcano explorers made extensive use of accounts of the volcano published since 1631, and while they were not always in agreement with the conclusions of historic observers, they deemed earlier witnesses credible.82

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Blagden described the “moral curiosities” attendant on the eruption. Nature was not the only spectacle, Lady Montagu would have learned. “Some striking instances are recorded regarding the stupidity of old nuns, whose [convent] at Torre del Greco was surrounded with the lava. They seemed perfectly insensible to the danger; and one of them, who was found warming herself by a mess of it which rose up to the window of her cell, said it was very comfortable!” The nuns reputedly had been persuaded to leave only reluctantly, taking with them biscuits and sweetmeats, but abandoning “a sum of money they had in a convent.” Blagden wrote of this that, “among the moral curiosities, it is certainly one of the greatest.”83 The odd behavior of these Neapolitan nuns, however, was consonant with the image Hamilton had conveyed to the Royal Society on his arrival in Naples some decades earlier. In June of 1766, roughly two years after he first saw Vesuvius, he wrote the then-secretary of the Royal Society, the Earl of Morton, that he had watched lava flow like the Thames into vineyards and cultivated plots: In this manner it advanced to the cultivated parts of the mountain; and I saw it, the same night of the 12th, unmercifully destroy a poor man’s vineyard, and surround his cottage, notwithstanding the opposition of many images of St. Januarius, that were placed upon the cottage, and tied to almost every vine.84

That report to the Royal Society surely confirmed English perceptions of Catholic superstition; they also resonated with the broader Enlightenment contempt for a vulgar religion and knowledge of nature. Somewhat more kindly, Hamilton asserted that “the inhabitants of this great City in general give so little attention to Mount Vesuvius, tho’ in full view of the greatest part of it, that I am well convinced, many of its Eruptions pass totally unnoticed by at least two thirds of them.”85 Ignorant, that is, until an eruption threatened the city. In the Supplement to the Campi Phlegraei (1779) Hamilton described a markedly different scene he witnessed during one of the mountain’s eruptions, contradicting his previous assertions: All publick diversions ceased in an instant, and the Theatres being shut, the doors of the churches were thrown open. Numerous processions were formed in the streets, and women, and children with deshivel’d heads, filled the air with their cries, insisting loudly upon the reliks of St. Januarius being immediately opposed to the fury of the Mountain; in short the populace of this great city

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began to display it’s [sic] usual extravagant misture [sic] of riot, and bigotry, and if some speedy, and well timed precautions had not been taken, Naples wou’d perhaps have been in more danger of suffering from the irregularities of it’s [sic] lowe class of inhabitants, than from the angry Volcano.86

The paroxysms of the Neapolitan populace could be more threatening than those of Vesuvius. The two contrasting representations of local perception— ignorant languor followed by eruptions of superstition—seemed to have acquired a markedly volcanic inflection. These qualities were to be found in the substrata, even: Hamilton’s search for antiquities “natural and historic” on one occasion led him to be apprised of the discovery of whale bones locked between strata of pozzolana, the tough gray-hued volcanic rock used for centuries as hydraulic cement. To him, that discovery attested to the deep instabilities on which the city rested. He wrote that “this observation is not the only one that proves that this famous city, which has undergone so many political revolutions, rests upon a Soil, which long before its foundation, had experienced the greatest revolutions.”87 Neapolitan instability was telluric, atavic, and, here, juxtaposed in its geological and political dimensions. Recording his Vesuvius observations for the Royal Society of London, Hamilton acknowledged the society’s founding seventeenth-century motto about scientific witnessing: nullus in verba. The reports were to be stripped of the poeticism classical, Renaissance, and baroque volcano watchers gave their histories of eruption. With such poeticism, earlier observers had interfered with the accurate conveyance of observation. Hamilton wrote after an eruption in August 1779 that, “as many Poetical descriptions of this eruption will not be wanting, I shall confine mine to simple manner of fact.” He went on to explain that he would write in simple prose “without aiming the least at flowery style.”88 Hamilton’s scientific objectivity, however, had its own flair for the picturesque. On August 8, 1779,  just around midnight, Vesuvius erupted with little warning. It was one of the most powerful eruptions of the eighteenth century, releasing a large eruptive column, streams of lava, and pyroclastic bombs. Ash darkened the day, while the night was lit by spectacular glows and the flash of lighting in the rising column. Visually speaking, it was perhaps the most impressive eruption of the modern period.89 Hamilton must have kept a night vigil, because he was on the molo—the city’s great pier—with a view of the eruption when it occurred. He watched “its fermentations increase greatly”

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and then was “witness to several glorious picturesque effects produced by the reflexion of the deep red fire.” By morning, a summer storm blended “watery clouds with the sulphurious,” heightening the appearance of battling elements. The view at early dawn was “such a scene as no power of art can ever express” and “more beautiful, and sublime, than even the most lively imagination can paint to itself.”90 Of course, Hamilton did try to paint the scene, in his own words and through the hand of his assisting artist Antonio Fabris. The Supplement to the Campi Phlegraei, in which the account of the 1779 eruption appeared, held a number of plates that accompanied the volcano watcher’s description. One in particular seems to capture Hamilton’s view from the pier with special force (fig. 7.7). The plate shows an almost intimate urban view of the volcano just across the water; natural history and the cultural and ethnographic description of Neapolitans appear visibly conjoined. In the foreground, on a small stretch of shore, four Neapolitans manifest gestures of fear and prayer. One kneeling woman holds up what is presumably an image of San Gennaro, as if to ward off the mountain. A second is nearly prostrate. A man and a boy stand, the child appearing to mimic the older man’s outstretched arms. Neapolitan gestures similar to the ones seen in Fabris’s gouache entered the ethnographic canon half a century later. Andrea De Jorio’s 1832 La mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano explained how the raising of arms and spreading of fingers, along with the lifting of the hands to the face signaled horror and entreaty in the Neapolitan.91 Like Della Torre in the eighteenth century, De Jorio was curator for the Bourbon digs at Herculaneum and Pompeii. Archaeology was linked to ethnography in his work, since he believed that the common people of Naples had preserved the gestures of their ancient Greek ancestors.92 This type of volcanic scene, with the Neapolitans in it, had become a customary spectacle for European visitors by the second half of the eighteenth century. Johan Wolfgang von Goethe saw the same spot, though a more quiescent volcano, roughly a decade later. He remarked that “one has only to walk the streets to keep one’s eyes open to see the most inimitable gestures.” On March 18, 1787, Goethe walked around the molo and watched the people around him. He saw a street theater scene in which the comical commedia dell’arte figure Pulcinella quarreled with a monkey. A beautiful girl drew attention from a balcony, and the street was filled with the smell of frying dough.93 He had climbed Vesuvius two weeks earlier in the company of his friend Johann Tischbein. Harnessed to local guides who nearly dragged them to the crater, the two had

F I G U R E 7 . 7 . Intimate urban view from the Molo of the volcano just across the water. Sir William Hamilton, Supplement to the Campi Phlegraei (Naples, 1779). By permission of Special Collections, Honnold/Mudd Library of the Claremont Colleges.

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made the summit. A more eager Goethe had urged a close inspection of the crater, and both of them had been pelted by a shower of lapilli. The German wrote that the experience of Naples completely intoxicated him: the unstable ground below, as he explained it, the smoking mountain, the alluring depth of antiquity, and the spontaneity of local gesture haunted and transformed him.94 In Fabris’s gouache, natural history curiosity in Vesuvius and the observation of Neapolitans occupy the same instance—the two elements are picturesquely conjoined. The eruption, as shown, exhibits all the details reported in Hamilton’s writing: there is lighting flashing in the eruptive column, huge fiery ejecta that he called “volcanick bombs,” and the fierce glow of lava. Even as the eruption wound down, the Englishman set off to observe its effects. He surveyed the damage, heard reports from survivors, and took special care to collect the kinds of scoriae, as he called them, he had watched rocket, incandescent, out of the crater. Some were, literally, like bombs of enormous proportions. He measured one to be “108 english feet, and 17 feet high.”95 Hamilton’s attention moved across scale, too; he took small fragments and looked at their vitrified surfaces with a microscope. Some, he thought, resembled Parmesan cheese.96 Again, the written description had its visual complement. A plate following the one showing the gesturing Neapolitans exhibited a sampling of rock specimens Hamilton had found on the mountain (fig. 7.8). One specimen at the center of Fabris’s picture—the one that roughly resembles an avocado—had this description attached: “After the late eruption the Author found many detached pieces of lava of this shape on Mount Vesuvius, and which he supposes to be drops from the great fountain of liquid fire of Sunday night August 8th 1779.”97 Here, on the level of mineral artifacts, was a small part of that great sublime scene Hamilton had watched from the pier, surrounded by Neapolitans who invoked their patron saint, “well convinced, that to this ceremony alone Naples may attribute its happy escape.” 98 Native observers had instructed European visitors in volcano watching, but now they were figured with a distinct meaning. Neapolitans remained very much in the scene, as they had been in baroque paintings, but they were by Hamilton’s day sited in a picturesque landscape, native actors and figures in a typically southern scene. While the South could be powerfully figured, volcanoes remained at core a mystery. It is vital to note that observers of Vesuvius in the 1700s were hardly more inclined than their baroque predecessors to claim that they fully understood volcanoes. Jean Claude Richard de Saint Non, author of the Voyage pittoresque: ou description des royaumes de Naples et de Sicilie (1781), was not very sanguine in that respect. He warned his readers that:

F I G U R E 7 . 8 . A sampling of rock specimens found by Hamilton on the mountain. Sir William Hamilton Supplement to the Campi Phlegraei. By permission of Special Collections, Honnold/Mudd Library of the Claremont Colleges.

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one should not expect of us that we dare pronounce on a question so difficult to resolve, and upon which, as long as there are Volcanoes and Physicists, sentiments and opinions have been so divided; all that we can do here is to register some of the opinions that have existed up to this point, and let that which seems most reasonable be chosen.”99

Volcanoes afforded a spectacular but also limited view of the earth’s interior. Saint Non did not disregard the bulk of eighteenth-century geology in asserting this limit to inquiry. Much lay concealed within the crater of Vesuvius, both from observation and from natural philosophical understanding. Expressing the picturesque, however, was unhindered by the impasse of contemporary geology. The mountain’s fiery displays, and the response of the surrounding population, for example, seemed to collapse distinction. Saint Non confidently wrote that Neapolitans were “the most brigandish, the most hungry for spectacle, and the most superstitious of all the nations of Europe.” This assertion was footnoted with the following evidence: the government of Naples had its good reasons for seconding the superstition of the urban mob when it implored the assistance of San Gennaro, as it did during calamities “like the eruptions of Vesuvius.” A less superstitious people, the Frenchman explained, would have turned to its government for aid, would have enacted preventative measures—such as might be used to redirect lava flows—and would not have resorted to alternately imploring and cajoling a saint. 100 At the same time, Neapolitan urban theatrics suited the volcanic humors of the southern­ temperament, which was in “perpetual dilation” and “extremely violent.” Simply out of stark governing reason, Saint Non surmised, it was wise to allow such passions to vent, since they were prone to wild effervescence followed by muted indolence—just like Vesuvius.101 When accounts of volcanoes and people converged, as they often did, a pattern of description emerged consonant with Enlightenment notions of climate and civilization. That was the imprint of newer ideas on a centuries’ old process of appreciating the mountain. By the end of the eighteenth century, the convergence of geology, foreign travel description, and ethnography extended as existing traditions of humanism, natural history, and natural philosophy, but this convergence also fashioned a lasting picturesque image of city and nature.

conclusion

Returns to the Past

In the late eighteenth century, Neapolitan reformers often saw the city’s re­ cent past through a lens of disapproval and regret. For many, the end of Aus­ trian rule in 1734 had finally signaled the possibility of a national rebirth.1 The dramatist and man of letters Pietro Napoli Signorelli (1731–1815) exemplified the belief that the establishment of an independent kingdom under Charles of Bourbon marked a moment of renewed spirit and vigor after what looked like decades of calamity and stagnation. Writing in a tract titled Vicende della cultura nelle Due Sicilie (1784), Signorelli argued that his people had languished without a proper nationhood. Rarely, he explained, had Naples encouraged its native genius in the fashion of other Italian cities. He wrote: “Stripped of the honor of loyalty to crown and oppressed by the burdens of viceroyal govern­ ment, we saw them yet elastically push aside foreign obstacle to show the native genius and draw it close to Galileo with Borelli.”2 Sigorelli’s chronicle of Bo­ relli’s years in Rome, Florence, and Messina made note of the latter’s treatise on the 1669 eruption of Etna, explaining that the work found excellent re­ ception in the European Republic of Letters.3 This historical retrospective included some other familiar figures: the naturalist Stelliola who had urged the Lincei to come to Naples, the dramatist Bergazzano who portrayed Vesu­ vius in Neapolitan doggerel lines, the Jesuit Recupito who was an expert on earthquakes and eruptions, the telescope-wielding astronomer Fontana, and the exiled historian Tutini.4 It is not difficult to find Vesuvius, too, in Signorel­ li’s reflections about the city’s past. Much of the seventeenth century had been a fight against obscurity, or so

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it appeared in the Vicende. Signorelli wrote that “nothing was missing back then to turn our nation again into a forest.”5 That statement introduced his depiction of Vesuvius as an actor on the stage of Naples’s past. The 1631 erup­ tion had been enshrined in urban memory as one that the morbi, or illnesses, that had seemed to accompany a national decline.6 Signorelli wrote that “on the night of December 16 1631 a great boom followed by a terrifying shaking heralded a torrent of fire that first burst out of the large tear near the crater, and then ran along seven channels to destroy the underlying lands.”7 Naples had suffered from this natural disaster and other corruptions as well. Dramatically, Signorelli’s history made the volcano suggestive of the wilderness that civiliza­ tion had mastered but into whose barbarism it could, at least metaphorically, degenerate. The forest, or selva, Signorelli explained, had long troubled the Western imagination as a metaphor of perdition. In a contemporary echo, Giambattista Vico had written in the Nuova Scienza a few decades earlier that, “with their ever continuing factions and restless civil wars, these peoples must turn their cities into forests and the forests into human dens, and in this mode, over long centuries of barbarism, rust will blunt the misbegotten sharpness of that malicious wit that has turned them into beasts made even more appalling by the barbarism of reflection than they had been by the first barbarism of the senses.”8 The seventeenth century had marked, for Signorelli, just such a phase of recrudescence. The historian was among those who identified the Spanish centuries with corruption and decline. It is as if Neapolitans had regressed into the forest Vico imagined. Natural calamities like plagues and eruptions had sounded that retreat.9 Signorelli further explained that Naples and Sicily—two historically dis­ tinct kingdoms that had been folded into Spanish Italy—were bound by their common predicament. Vesuvius had continued to erupt as “the mountain re­ mained neither tired nor satisfied with the many flames that had come out of its viscera.”10 Even if Etna had “given a much longer truce to Sicily,” Catania es­ pecially suffered its torments in the spring of 1669. The volcano had declared war on that city. Three of its citizens—Diego Pappalardo, Saverio Musumeci, and Giacinto Platania—in turn intrepidly assaulted the lava flow. With heavy bars and picks they reputedly broke the cooled surface crust allowing the stillmelted rock to pour out in new directions and be redirected.11 Signorelli gave that episode a martial feel, as if the three had sallied out against an enemy. The story accentuated the image of two southern kingdoms besieged by natural calamity.

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It is not difficult to find references to Vesuvius in expressions of  Neapolitan historicism by the end of the 1700s. That historicism underscored eighteenthcentury writers’ intention to define the qualities of a preceding period. One of the many ways they could accomplish this, as Signorelli’s example shows, was by evoking the historical association of city and volcano that had developed so vividly since the 1600s. Underlying that assumption, however, was the funda­ mental intuition that eruptions were like historical events. In epilogue, it is that perception and intuition that I want tie to the broader themes of this book. The 1631 eruption and an ensuing cycle of eruptivity es­ tablished ways of describing the volcano that endured both in the view Nea­ politans had of themselves and in the view of outsiders had of their city. I have looked for the intersection of human history and nature—simply, I have wanted to identify places where elements of Neapolitan culture and the rhythms of Vesuvius were in resonance. The remarkable thing is that eruptions had the power—and surely must continue to have—to heighten awareness of the past, sharpen vision of the present moment, and demand contemplation of the fu­ ture. That conflation of natural and historical qualities, more than anything else, touches on what I hope might be this book’s broader instruction. The sources studied in this book give a discernible contour to a period in the cultural history of Vesuvius. The span of 1631 to 1779 works for the sake of convenience. I have strayed in both directions but maintain that the effort to connect the apparently disparate sensibilities of baroque Naples to those of the later eighteenth century was worthwhile. This was the span of years between distinct but related moments of perception: Manso’s “Plinian” experience of a monstrous eruptive cloud as an encounter with classical antiquity and Hamil­ ton’s volcanological observations reified into a representation of the character of Naples. There were things shared between these two historical moments. There were significant new developments in knowledge, representation, and, too, sensibility. A word Neapolitans used again and again in 1631 was “spaventevole.” In pulses, the volcano seemed intent on destroying the city. If Manso’s recollec­ tion of the dark early hours of December 16 is any indication—and Braccini’s, too—observers in Naples could imagine the heat and shock of the eruption as a revival of the past. Eruptions heightened perception of what had been, what was in the moment, and what would be. When Vesuvius erupted it evoked memories and past images: le voci. It also attuned the senses of observation to the present: il caso. It made doubt and contested interpretation creep into thoughts about the future as well: i prognostici. None of the eruptions that en­ sued matched the first one of the seventeenth century, but the effect was often

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similar. The sequence—1631, 1649, 1660, 1694, 1707, 1737, 1751, 1755, 1767, 1779, to name some of years when eruptions occured—dictated successive returns to the past, a past deepened by each new act of describing. Here we go again, the sources seem to say. Description tells a story. In 1631, observers had grappled powerfully with words to express what they saw in a natural phenomenon that exposed the past, the present, and future in a flash. Vincenzo Bove wrote as if he perceived all three dimensions in the eruptive cloud: On the 24th hour there began to rise from the mountain and from the slopes de­ clining toward the sea a continuous smoke, sometimes white, sometimes black, depending on whether it was fat with earth or ash; it formed in the air such precipitous cliffs and rises that you would have said that the Giants described by Dio, having been seen, were once again building a mountainous stairway to rise into the sky . . . We hoped nonetheless for the best, since the ancient mouth on the Mountain’s summit had been opened, and had therefore re­ leased its furious impetus, add to that the fact that more than one person saw the Most Glorious San Gennaro during the solemn procession of Tuesday, above the Archbishopric’s gate.12

It would seem that witnessing compressed and intensified Bove’s perception of time. An eruption could position the observer’s present moment of see­ ing—“on the 24th hour”—between historical voices in the past—Dio Cassius’s legend—and what was to come in the future—“we hoped nonetheless for the best.” In this way eruptions were at once similar to and distinct from how seventeenth-century observers understood other historical events. Modern historians are, as one writes, “educated to be impatient with any­ thing but interpretation.” In that light, Bove’s words are an “immersion in the details of description” that baffles our current epistemologies.13 That may be especially true when, as in the example above, sacred and naturalistic themes accompanied each other so closely. It is not correct to assume, however, that seventeenth-century observers attuned to description in natural history—as well as in medicine and diagnosis, antiquarianism, historical writing, and the many iterations of the ars historica—felt this way. The recollection of battle makes an instructive parallel. “Let the reader who reads of the siege of Brno imagine a city imperfect in its ring of bulwarks with no presidio sized for a four-month defense” was how a Thirty Years’ War account of the Austrians’ defense of Brno against an invading Swedish army began.14 In the heat of the event, one commander was “reduced with his men to the defense of an open

230  Conclusion

F I G U R E C . 1 . Joseph Wright of  Derby (British, 1734–1797), Vesuvius from Portici. This item is reproduced by permission of  The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

courtyard, he fortunately found an empty cart that he ordered put across the door; behind it he gathered his few troops . . . his shirt was torn by five musket shots and the scabbard of his drawn sword broken in two places . . . this hot experiment lasted from the third to the tenth hour of morning.”15 The narratives that structured understanding persisted in the eighteenth century, but not without alterations of meaning. The eruption Hamilton viewed from the great pier of Naples in 1779 was more spectacular than terrify­ ing. Likewise, the English landscape painter Joseph Wright of Derby brought to life a late eighteenth-century eruption in a view from Portici, on the outskirts of Naples (fig. C.1). Vesuvius appears not so much a mountain as a candle of immeasurable proportions. A huge jet of elemental fire rises into the air, break­ ing through the enveloping smoke. Below, an agricultural landscape of vine­ yards and orchards is cast in reddish light, as if in advance of the heat to come. The volcano is a machine, it seems to say, but a sublime one.

Returns to the Past  231

Seen in this light, the volcano’s periodicity was not intentional. Eruptions conveyed other ideas. “A volcano is not made on purpose to frighten super­ stitious people into fits of devotion, nor to overwhelm devoted cities with destruction,” explained James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth (1788) around the same time. Eighteenth-century Scottish geologist could readily adduce volca­ nism to a mechanism he believed to be entirely discernible. Hutton envisioned a cycle of extrusion and erosion that repeated without end. He explained as follows: A volcano should be considered a spiracle to the subterranean furnace, in order to prevent the unnecessary elevation of land, and fatal effects of earthquakes; and we may rest assured, that they, in general, wisely answer the end of their invention, without being in themselves an end, for which nature had exerted such amazing power and excellent contrivance.16

In places like Naples or Catania, Hutton would seem to have suggested, people lived in anxious superstition, unable to discern the great mechanism. A final scene: the night of August 8, 1779, 148 years after the first great eruption of the modern period. That evening, the Neapolitan economist and reformer Ferdinando Galiani began to write. By morning, he had a little pam­ phlet ready for publication. It began to circulate even as the eruption went on, reputedly lifting the spirits of an anxious city.17 Galiani’s little work crackled with satire and wit, doing what satire does best. It looked ignorance and fear in the face, but it also laughed at the pretensions of human knowledge. Light­ hearted, it cut sharply in two seemingly unexpected ways. It satirized the surge of spavento that swept through the populace—the same gestures Hamilton had Fabris depict in the Campi Phlegraei—but it was no less biting when it came to naturalists’ claims to understand the nature of eruptions. This Most Extremely Frightening Description of the Frightening Fright That Frightened Us All with the Eruption of Vesuvius on the night of August 8th of the Current Year (1779), but That (Thank God) Did Not Last Long instructs the historian to acknowledge that sources sustain ambivalence in the face of the attempt to marshal them too neatly into story. Indeed, Galiani did many things: he at once acknowledged his city’s history of anxiety with the mountain, saw its real force, laughed at its power on the superstitious, and laughed too at the historical and scientific traditions his fellow Neapolitans had cultivated with pride for a century and a half. Galiani opened his little pamphlet by announcing what all Neapolitans knew. Their mountain was different from others. “All the other mountains in

232  Conclusion

the world never say or do anything” he wrote.18 Other mountains were like mute beasts, he continued. With that characterization, however, he offered an­ other. If all the boring mountains of the world who never got in the way of any­ one poking about them—and still naturalists understood nothing—how could one reasonably expect anyone to understand Vesuvius, which blew hot wind in your face any time you got near? Sure, there were theories, Galiani went on. In the mocking and pseudopedantic tone of his assumed pen name—Onofrio Galeota, another Neapolitan author whom Galiani was actually mocking as well—he summarized the theories of volcanic ignition. These he assembled in the pamphlet under the heading “Philosophical Section.” There were sub­ terranean exhalations, as per Aristotle, or the fermentation of substances like sulfur and bitumen, and even more recent theories based on electricity. The entire tradition of exploring the volcano was open to lampooning. “For-thatforsooth , we have always seen the great philosophers, historians, mythologists, and antiquarians go ’round and ’round it top to bottom searching, studying, looking, smelling, and fussing to see the where, the how, the when, and the why, without ever understanding a Hoot,” he quipped mockingly.19 Induc­ ing laughter, Galiani asked his readers to understand why the volcano really garnered so much attention. Vesuvius—this time “she”—was like a signorella who was prettier and livelier than her competitors when they all gathered for conversation and promenade.20 This comedic portrayal was aimed at Neapolitans, whom Galiani satirized by imitating the language of 1631 accounts. Those earlier works had chronicled the meraviglie witnessed by observers in the tradition of natural history obser­ vation; the 1779 pamphlet turned these observations into silly reports that bit at how people behaved. Hordes of painters had run down to the quay to paint, and not one had made a good picture. People ran screaming in the streets, but could not remember why they were screaming, and screamed the loudest in the narrow streets of the popular quarters where no one could see a lick of the mountain. The last and greatest marvel, Galiani noted, was this: “Sometimes there are great eruptions, and few writers; and other times there are little erup­ tions, and many writers.”21 Here, the return to the past that confronted each new observer of Vesuvius’s eruptions became the occasion for laughter. Galiani did not ignore the volcano’s enormous capacity to harm Naples. For the very reason that the 1779 eruption was not as terrible as others had been in the past, he mocked Neapolitans into getting on with their lives and urged them to laugh at the mountain. Galiani pierced right through a century and a half of description when he wrote this in the pamphlet’s coda:

Returns to the Past  233

I put it in the work’s title of this work that this eruption was absolutely terrify­ ing [spaventosissima], but none of that is true. In the towns surrounding the mountain people fled not because of what had happened, but out of fear of what might. In Naples then no one was terrified, neither of the past, nor of the present, nor of the future: and really the thing did not deserve it.22

Galiani offered the city’s culture, its history, and its relationship to the moun­ tain for introspection. Through wit, he acknowledged that anxiety was wound tight with appreciation. The two opposing sentiments each generated con­ structs of meaning and interpretation, a history of appreciation that had to be acknowledged for the humor to work. Vesuvius was the scourge of Naples, its punisher. Vesuvius was an inordinately complex natural machine, a place to investigate. What is a culture’s capacity for self reflection? What does it see of itself ? In the eruption, Galiani seemed to be saying, Neapolitans might discern qualities of their culture. That act of self-reflection might stack up against Hamilton’s comment that Neapolitans scarcely knew the mountain. Galiani’s Enlightenment wit found much at which to laugh: urban processions, wild gesticulations of supersti­ tious people, and even the image of the pedantic know-it-all naturalist observer who thought he had the exact theory for explaining ignition. The editor of a modern reprint of Galiani’s work writes that the “hope and perhaps the teaching that we might draw from this little work is that the future eruption of Vesuvius might be less terrifying than its description.” That, too, is a return to the past. He goes on to write, seemingly in the spirit of Galiani, that if modern volcanologists have reason to laugh at the science of historic observ­ ers, they should also heed history: the silence of  Vesuvius has been misread be­ fore.23 Hundreds of thousands of lives hang in the balance of that perception. One is left to weigh the past in the present and to acknowledge the inescap­ able proximity and inevitability of a new awakening.

Notes

Introduction 1. Ingrid Rowland, Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 20–21. The translation is Rowland’s. 2. Norman Lewis, Naples ’44 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 43. 3. Predrag Matvejevic, Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape (Berkeley: University of  California Press, 1999), 31. 4. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 15. 5. Venice’s myth of the sea is the subject of Elizabeth Crouzet Pavan’s Venice Triumphant: The Horizons of a Myth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). Karl Appuhn’s more recent study of how that republic managed and exploited its forest resources evidences four centuries of Venetian technical and theoretical understanding of the environment. See Karl Appuhn, A Forest on the Sea: Environmental Expertise in Renaissance Venice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). 6. For a climber and scholar’s perspective, see Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003). 7. The essays collected in William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995) present a wide and compelling range of interpretations; see esp. Carolyn Merchant, “Reinventing Eden: Western Culture as a Recovery Narrative,” in Uncommon Ground, ed. Cronon, 132–70. 8. Daniel Wickberg, “What Is the History of Sensibilities? On Cultural Histories Old and New,” American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (October 2007): 661–84. 9. Schama, Landscape and Memory, 15. 10. Camillo Tutini, “Anatomico discorso del Regno di Napoli,” MS II A8, fol. 11, Brancacciana, Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli (hereafter cited as BNN). 11. Thomas V. Cohen and Elizabeth Storr Cohen, Words and Deeds in Renaissance Rome: Trials before the Papal Magistrates (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 3–33. See also Thomas Dandelet, Spanish Rome, 1500–1700 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).

236  Notes to Pages 4–7 12. Kenneth Gouwens, Remembering the Renaissance: Humanist Narratives of the Sack of Rome, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History 85 (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 88–89. 13. See John M. Headley, Tommaso Campanella and the Transformation of the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 260–98. 14. The consideration of different winds and their qualities was commonplace among Roman naturalists, herbalists, and doctors. Pietro Castelli, a highly respected professor at La Sapienza, lauded, e.g., the qualities of the cool and dry tramontana in drying simples he used to cure illness. Pietro Castelli, Discorso della differenza tra gli semplici freschi, et i secchi, con il modo di seccarli: Di Pietro Castelli medico romano, et lettore nello Studio di Roma: Opera vtile tanto alli medici, quanto alli spetiali, che desiderano sapere il vero modo di seccare tutti li medicamenti, e l’effetto delle cose seccate (Rome: Giacomo Mascardi, 1629), 16. 15. This description of Tutini was published in 1675 in the Biblioteca Napoletana, noting that he was “satirico contro la natione Spagnuola, per lo che fù costretto fuggir da Napoli, et andar a Roma, ove morì, tre anni sono, miserabilmente.” See “Camillo Tutini,” Archivio storico per le provincie napoletane, Anno I, Fascicolo I, (Naples: Detken e Rocholl e F. Giannini, 1876), 316. 16. “Divulgatasi questa scempiezza di tal huomo tra Napolitani e Regnicoli, mi fecer premure dovesse rispondere alla petulanza di colui, e per non macare all’obligo devo alla mia patria della qual sono il più [intimo figliuolo].” Camillo Tutini, “La porta di San Giovanni Laterano,” MS II A8, fol. 1, Brancacciana, BNN. 17. Tommaso Astarita, Between Salt Water and Holy Water: A History of Southern Italy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 121–88; Giuseppe Galasso, Alla periferia dell’impero: Il Regno di Napoli nel periodo spagnolo, secoli XVI–XVII, Biblioteca di cultura storica 201 (Turin: G. Einaudi, 1994); Rosario Villari, La rivolta antispagnola a Napoli: Le origini La rivolta antispagnola a Napoli (1585-1647) (Bari: Laterza, 1967). 18. See Gherardo Ortalli, Lupi, genti, culture: uomo e ambiente nel Medioevo, Biblioteca Einaudi 3 (Turin: Einaudi, 1997). Urban attitudes toward the countryside and rural folk are also evident in Gentile Sermini’s tale of “Scopone.” Murtha Baca and Lauro Martines, An Italian Renaissance Sextet: Six Tales in Historical Context, Lorenzo da Ponte Italian Library Series (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 39–68. 19. Stefano Ugo Baldassarri and Arielle Saiber, eds., Images of Quattrocento Florence: Selected Writings in Literature, History, and Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 85. 20. Tutini, “La porta di San Giovanni Laterano,” MS II A8, fol. 1, Brancacciana, BNN. On the economic history of the Kingdom of Naples, see John Marino, Pastoral Economics in the Kingdom of Naples (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). 21. Tutini, “La porta di San Giovanni Laterano,” MS II A8, fols. 4–5, Brancacciana, BNN. 22. “Il Regno di Napoli che è la piu bella parte dell’Italia ansi dell’Europa tutta arrichito di tutte quelle dovitie dall’anemali in poi che la madre Natura . . . [illegible] . . . negli altri Regni, e Popolationi in essa soprabbondano et affluentemente a varie genti ne fa partecipi. È diviso il Regno in dodici Provincie, che sono quasi tanti Regni, e ogn’una di essi ha vari linguaggi, e sono si ricche et abbondante di qualunque cosa non solo de viveri, ma di tutto quello che all’humano bisogno fa necessario che non è credibile, a chi non le vede, sinché vi sono giardini abbondanti di frutti d’ogni sorte, e di agrumi in grandissima copia e per tutto l’anno [illegible], i terreni fertilissimi che fanno vini [illegible] : Sicome gli horti pieni di ogni qualita di verdume saporose e salutifere li monti vestiti di herbe pretiose per li pascoli delle pecure, galline, e capre che fanno

Notes to Pages 7–11  237 il formaggio, ottimo e perfetto, sicome anco de semplici et herbe medicinali, e li boschi che selve abbondanti di cacciagione d’ogni qualità, e di pelo e di piume. Li mari che circondano il Reame ricchi di pescaggione d’ogni sorte di pesci, e di frutti marini. Li fiumi che irrigano il Regno, et i laghi, che [illegible] sono anch’essi non solo copia grande de pesci dalle loro acque dolci mandano.” Tutini, “La porta di San Giovanni Laterano,” MS II A8, fol. 1, Brancacciana, BNN. Compare “Porta di San Giovanni,” MS II F1, Brancacciana, BNN. 23. Tutini, “La porta di San Giovanni Laterano,” MS II A8, fol. 1, Brancacciana, BNN. 24. Enrico Bacco, Il regno di Napoli diviso in dodici Provincie con una breve descrittione delle cose più notabili: I nomi delle città, terre, e castella che vi sono con la nuova numeratione (Naples: Giovanni Giacomo Carlino and Costantino Vitale, 1608). 25. I explore this in greater detail in the first chapter. 26. See Melissa Calaresu, “Looking for Virgil’s Tomb: The End of the Grand Tour and Cosmopolitan Ideal of Europe,” in Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel, ed. Jas´ Elsner, and Joan-Pau Rubiés, (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 138–61. 27. See Jeremy Black, Italy and the Grand Tour (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 46–67. 28. The Neapolitan edition of Pietro Giannone’s Dell’istoria del Regno di Napoli libri XL (Naples: Niccolo Naso, 1723) is only one of a number. The specific reference in text comes from Pietro Giannone and Antonio Morongiou, ed., Istoria Civile del Regno di Napoli, ed. Antonio Morongiou (Milan: Marzorati Editore, 1971), 6:314–15. 29. Ferdinando Galiani, Spaventossissima descrizione dello spaventoso spavento che ci spaventò tutti coll’eruzione del Vesuvio la sera dell’8 agosto 1779, ma che grazie a Dio (Naples, 1779). 30. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 9. 31. Much of this evidence is in his various manuscripts. See, e.g., Tutini, “Prodigiosi portenti del Monte Vesuvio,” MS V F3, fol. 167, Brancacciana, BNN; Tutini, “Anatomico discorso del Regno di Napoli,” MS II A8, fols. 3–43, Brancacciana, BNN. 32. Benedetto Croce, Uomini e cose della vecchia Italia (Bari: Laterza, 1956), 2:9. 33. Pandolfo Collenucio, Compendio dell’historie del Regno di Napoli, composto già da M. Pandolfo Collenucio da Pesaro, e nuovamente alla sincerità della lingua volgare ridotto, e tutto emendato da Girolamo Ruscelli. Con brieve discorso del medesimo sopra l’istesso autore. Et con tavola de’ nomi di tutti i Seggi e delle casate nobili di Napoli, e d’altre terre principali di quell Regno (Venice: Giovanni Maria Bonelli, 1552), 1. 34. Ibid., 2. 35. This is the passage in full: “Dico adunque, che le mutationi de gli stati e la varietà de’ governi, in niuna parte d’Italia piu si veggono a dì nostri, che in quella del bellissimo Regno di Napoli. Onde pare, che fatal sia quella provincia havere non che spesso, ma sempre tirannie, seditioni, perfidie, rebellioni, guerre, rovine di città, rapine, et incendii, e tutte le altre calamità, che dall’avaritia, et ambitione, vere produttrici di tal peste, procedure sogliono. Il che non sole a’ tempi nostri per la presente historia, in piu modi si comprendera, ma ancora a’ tempi antichissimi esserle stato, si proprio, leggiamo che Strabone scrittore, e Geografo Greco, dice, che non per altra cagione i poeti già finsero, ne’ campi flegrei, che sono in Terra di lavoro, già detta Campania, esser state le battaglie, e’ gesti de’ Giganti, se non che quel paese di sua proprietà è disposto a muovere, e suscitar le guerre. Et in un’altro luogo egli [Tito Livio] dice, la perfidia

238  Notes to Pages 11–15 esser propria, e naturale à que’ di Campania. La qual cosa fa ancora, che manco mi maravigli, se rara memoria si truova fatter per croniche, o per annali proprii de gli huomini de quel Regno; pensando che tutto quello, proceduto sia dalle continue mutationi, et essilii, et inquietudine de gli huomini, che non hanno potuto havere otio à componer libri. Et se qualche ricordo n’è stato fatto, facilmente si stima che gl’incendii, et le rapine di varie nationi fatte, le habbiano estinte.” Ibid. 36. William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 151–58. 37. Girolamo Ruscelli, Bieve discorso di Girolamo Ruscelli sopra il precedente compendio dell’historia del Regno di Napoli, in Collenucio, Compendio, 206. 38. Ibid., 206. 39. Ibid., iii. 40. Benedetto Croce, Uomini e cose della vecchia Italia, ser. 1, 3rd ed. (Bari: Laterza, 1956), 69. 41. Ibid., 82. 42. On the formation of stereotypes of the South in general, see John Dikie, Darkest Italy: The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860–1900 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 53–82. 43. See Claudia Petraccone, Napoli dal cinquecento all’ottocento: Problemi di storia demo­ grafica e sociale (Naples: Guida, 1975), 3–25. 44. John Marino, Becoming Neapolitan: Citizen Culture in Baroque Naples (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 27. 45. Jerry H. Bentley, Politics and Culture in Renaissance Naples (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 288. 46. Ibid., 288–89. 47. Ibid., 3. 48. Nelson Moe, The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 37–84. 49. Appuhn, A Forest on the Sea, 290. 50. The atmosphere holds large quantities of carbon, some of it consumed by terrestrial plants during respiration, but far larger reservoirs exist in the earth’s soil and the oceans. By far the greatest volumes of carbon are contained in sedimentary rock and limestone. Plate tectonic movement acts as a great conveyor belt that carries carbon deep into the mantle, from where it is then released again into the atmosphere (as CO2) by volcanoes. Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee, The Life and Death of Planet Earth (New York: Holt, 2002), 49–67. “A volcano is both an opening in the earth’s crust through which hot rock is thrown out, and the hill or mountain formed by the accumulation of ejected material” (Stephen L. Harris, Fire and Ice: The Cascade Volcanoes [Seattle: The Mountaineers, 1976], 25). 51. Simon Winchester, Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 382 52. M. Rosi, C. Principe, and R. Vecci, “The 1631 Vesuvius Eruption: A Reconstruction Based on Historical and Statigraphical Data,” Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research 58 (1993): 151–82. Vesuvius is the most spectacular kind of volcano, a stratovolcano, built up by successive layers of lava flows and erupted pyroclastic material.

Notes to Pages 15–18  239 53. Paul L. Hancock and Brian J. Skinner, eds., The Oxford Companion to the Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 54. Haraldur Sigurdsson, S. Cashdollar, and R. S. J. Sparks, “The Eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79: Reconstruction from Historical and Volcanological Evidence,” American Journal of Archaeology 86 (1982): 39–51. 55. As the topic of places sustaining an idealized history recurs throughout, I will let chapter notes speak to its more specific aspects. Important to read as introduction are Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Charles G. Nauert, Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and, Anthony Goodman and A. MacKay Goodman, eds., The Impact of Humanism on Western Europe (London: Longman, 1990). 56. My intent, therefore, is to consider a body of sources that predated the famed tome by Sir William Hamilton (1730–1803), Campi Phlegraei: Observations on the Volcanoes of the Two Sicilies as They Have Been Communicated to the Royal Society of London (Naples, 1776). Hamilton’s more specific observations on Vesuvius were recorded in Sir William Hamilton, Supplement to the Campi Phlegraei: Being an Account of the Great Eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the Month of August 1779 (Naples, 1779). For volcanology during the Enlightenment see Haraldur Sigurdsson, Melting the Earth: The History of Ideas on Volcanic Eruptions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 124–39; M. C. W. Sleep, “The Geological Work of Sir William Hamilton,” Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association 80 (1969): 353–63; Roy Porter, The Making of Geology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 57. Paula Findlen describes how sciences like botany and zoology benefited from the “wider matrix of collecting.” She writes: “Building upon Pliny’s encyclopedic definition of nature as everything in the world worthy of memory and the narrower view of such writers as Dioscorides and Galen, who defined natural history as the study of objects useful in medicine, collectors brought ordinary and exotic nature into their museums. The alleged remains of  legendary creatures—giants, unicorns, satyrs, basilisks—took their place next to real but puzzling phenomena such as fossils, loadstones, and zoophytes . . . from the imaginary to the exotic, to the ordinary, the museum was designed to represent nature as a continuum.” See Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 3. 58. See Alix Cooper, Inventing the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 3. 59. Clarence Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 80–88. See also, Hippocrates, Works of Hippocrates, trans. W. H. S. Jones, Loeb Classical Library 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), x–xiv. 60. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, x–xi. 61. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds (1972; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), and Memory and the Mediterranean, trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001). 62. Braudel, Memory and the Mediterranean, 3. 63. Braudel always sought the unity of the Mediterranean, as he strived to capture how

240  Notes to Pages 18–22 nature, geography, and climate shaped civilization. The reverse is as perhaps as important, considering what two historians have called the “pronounced local irregularity” of the region, with its “minutely subdivided terrain” that created its natural, cultural, and historical diversity. A more recent, and enormously impressive, study of Mediterranean history is decidedly a commentary on Braudel: Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). Horden and Purcell stress the diversity and particularity of the Mediterranean, whereas Braudel sought its unity. See The Corrupting Sea, 9–49. As Braudel, along with Horden and Purcell, would recognize, however, these are questions of perspective and choices of emphasis, not absolutes. For a more impressionistic and personal account of unity and diversity of the Mediterranean is Matvejevic’s, Mediterranean. 64. If there is any merit in this formulation, it is owed to the probing critiques of an anonymous reviewer. Any error or confusion is mine. 65. Peter Coates, Nature: Western Attitudes since Ancient Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 67. Coates synthesizes and explains a great range of views. I specifically reference his exegesis of arguments made by historians like John Opie. See John Opie, “Renaissance Origins of the Environmental Crisis,” Environmental Review 11 (Spring 1987): 2–17. 66. Coates, Nature, 69. 67. Such travelers wrote beautiful and lavish descriptions of their journeys. One example is Jean Claude Richard de Saint Non, Voyage pittoresque; ou, Description des royaumes de Naples et de Sicile, ed. Sébastien-Roch-Nicolas Chamfort (Paris: Imprimerie de Clousier, 1781). I turn to such sources later in the book. 68. Alwyn Scarth writes as follows in an excellent cultural history of the volcano: “Few commentators, even among intellectuals, extended their search for the causes of the [1631] eruption beyond the established beliefs of the Counter Reformation.” See Vesuvius: A Biography (Prince­ ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 167. My argument, however, rests on a different reading of Neapolitan sources. 69. Marino, Becoming Neapolitan, 17. I do not cover the Aragonese period in this book. Neapolitan humanism in this period is examined in Bentley’s Politics and Culture in Renaissance Naples. 70. Gian Battista Vai and W. G. E. Caldwell, eds., The Origins of Geology in Italy (Boulder, CO: Geological Society of America, 2006), vii. 71. See, e.g., Pascal Richet’s sweeping survey, A Natural History of Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); also fn. 64. 72. Ceraso, L’opre stupende—to my knowledge, only three copies survive in Italy, a pretty typical fate for such accounts. 73. Sigurdsson, Melting the Earth, 100. 74. “Lodovico Lodovici to Galileo Galilei, Macerata, January 2, 1632,” in Galileo Galilei, Le opere di Galileo Galilei, ed. Antonio Garbasso and Giorgio Abetti (Florence: G. Barbèra, 1929), 14:324. 75. Nicoletta Morello, “Nel corpo della Terra: Il geocosmo di Athanasius Kircher,” in Athanasius Kircher: Il museo del mondo, ed. Eugenio Lo Sardo (Rome: De Luca, 2001), 179–96. David Gohau argues, e.g., that Descartes’s Principes de la Philosophie (1644) framed studying the physical creation of the earth in a way that ruptured the closed universe of the ancients and applied the principles of “mechanical” philosophy to the earth. See David Gohau, His-

Notes to Pages 22–26  241 tory of Geology, rev. and trans. Albert V. Carozzi and Marguerite Carozzi (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990) 37–46. David Oldroyd, while recognizing the significance of the mechanical philosophers, argues for the perseverance of older “organic” theories in many approaches to the earth; see David Oldroyd, Thinking about the Earth: A History of Ideas in Geology (London: Athlone, 1996), 43–50. 76. Augusto de Ferrari, “Pietro Castelli,” in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1978), 21:747–50. 77. John Ray apparently saw drafts of Castelli’s work in 1668, though he harbored little hope that it would ever see the light: “Volumen satis spissum et grande cum figuris propria ipsius manu delineatis quod nescio an unquam lucem publicam visurus sit.” Edwin Lankesger, ed., The Correspondence of John Ray: Selections from the Philosophical Letters Published by Dr. Derham (London: Ray Society, 1848), 24. 78. Pietro Castelli, Incendio del Monte Vesuvio di Pietro Castelli Romano lettore nello studio di Roma già di filosofia, et hora di medicina (Rome: Giacomo Mascardi, 1632), 75. 79. Pietro Castelli, Hyaena odorifera Petri Castelli Romano (Messina: Francesco Bianchi, 1638). Castelli’s work is examined in detail in chapter 3. 80. Brian Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 25–86. 81. Ibid., 264. 82. The Biblioteca Marucelliana has made the Mare magnum available digitally: http://www .maru.firenze.sbn.it/MareMagnum/mare_magnum.htm. On Vesuvius, see “Mare magnum,” MS ACB.IX.60, fol. 175r, Biblioteca Marucelliana. 83. John Ramsay McCulloch, A Catalogue of Books, the Property of a Political Economist: With Critical and Bibliographical Notices (London, 1862), 258; the final edition was Louis Moreri, Le grand dictionnaire historique, ou le melange curieux de l’histoire sacree et profane, qui contient en abrege l’histoire fabuleuse des dieux & des heros de l’antiquite paienne, 10 vols. (Paris, 1759). 84. Aaron Sachs, Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism (New York: Viking, 2006), 73, 82; Emily Dickinson and Thomas H. Johnson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Including Variant Readings Critically Compared with All Known Manuscripts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955), no. 1705.

Chapter 1 1. Athanasius Kircher, Mundus subterraneus: In XII Libros digestus : quo Divinum Subterrestris Mundi Opisicium, mira Ergasteriorum Naturæ in eo distributio, verbo pantamorphon Protei Regnum ; Universæ denique Naturæ Majestas & divitiæ summa rerum varietate exponuntur . . . ; Ad Alexandrum VII. Pont. Opt. Max. 1 In XII Libros digestus; Quo Divinum Subterrestris Mundi Opificium, mira Ergasteriorum Naturae in eo distributio (Amsterdam: Janssonius à Waesberge; Weyerstraet, 1678), “Praefatio Caput III. De Montis Vesuvii, reliquarumque Insularum exploratione ab Auctore facta.” 2. Paula Findlen, “Un incontro con Kircher a Roma,” in Athanasius Kircher, ed. Sardo, 39–48, esp. 40. 3. Kircher employed a vast network of correspondents to send him all sorts of information.

242  Notes to Pages 26–28 See, e.g., a letter he received regarding a minor eruption of Vesuvius in 1669, the same year as Etna erupted catastrophically (MS IV B13, Brancacciana, BNN). For Kircher and Vesuvius, see Findlen, Possessing Nature, 184–90; Stephen Jay Gould, The Lying Stones of Marrakech: Penultimate Reflections in Natural History (New York: Harmony Books, 2000), 149–68. 4. On Arcadian landscapes, see Schama, Landscape and Memory, 526–38. 5. Pope Pius et al., Pii Secundi pontificis max. Commentarii rerum memorabilium, quae temporibus suis contigerunt, a R.D. Ioanne Gobellino vicario Bonnen. iamdiu compositi, & a R.P.D. Francisco Band. Picolomineo archiepiscopo Senensi ex vetusto originali recogniti. Et Sanctiss. D.N. Gregorio 13. pont. max. dicati, eiusdem Pij dum cardinalis esset responsio ad Martinum Mayer pro defensione Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae (Rome: Domenico Basa, 1584), 396. 6. For the development of Renaissance natural history in general and on collecting in mountain landscapes, see Ogilvie, The Science of Describing, 117–18. 7. I have taken the phrase “dialectic of laxity and force” from Predrag Matvejevic, although I intend it in a different sense to mean the qualities of a volcanic landscape. Matvejevic was reflecting, instead, on the Mediterranean character: “As for the hypothesis that Mediterranean navigators transported the dialectic of laxity and force, anarchy and tyranny to Latin America, where they expanded to fill the dimensions and nature of the continent, no one has been able to prove it” (Matvejevic, Mediterranean, 35). 8. Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, Storia e meteorologia dell’eruzione dell’Etna del 1669, ed. Nicoletta Morello, Biblioteca della scienza italiana 30 (Florence: Giunti, 2001), 10. 9. Ristoro D’Arezzo, La composizione del mondo, Biblioteca Rara, ed. G. Daelli, vol. 54 (Milan: G. Daelli, 1864), 215. 10. Morello, ed., Storia e meteorologia, 9. It should be noted that two sources frequently cited by 1631 authors—Vanoccio Biringuccio’s De la pirotechnia and Georg Agricola’s De ortu et causis—made skeptical use of alchemy. Biringuccio, e.g., openly refused to enter into a debate about the merits of alchemical theories, though he acknowledged their heuristic merits; see Biringuccio, De la pirotechnia (Venice: V. Rossinello, 1540), 123r–123v. Agricola was more open in his criticism when he identified the predominance of bitumen, rather than sulfur, in the volcanic eruptions of Etna and Monte Nuovo; see Georg Agricola, Georgii Agricolae De ortu & causis subterraneorum: lib. V ; De natura eorum quæ effluunt ex terra lib. IIII ; De natura fossilium lib. X ; De ueteribus & nouis metallis lib. II ; Bermannus, siue De re metallica dialogus. ; Interpretatio germanica uocum rei metallicæ, addito indice fœcundissimo (Basileae: Per Hieronymum Frobenium et Nic. Episcopium, 1546), 35 (hereafter cited as De ortu). 11. Brian Ogilvie draws attention to the fact that Agricola was among Conrad Gessner’s greatly varied lists of correspondents about natural things. See Ogilvie, Science of Describing, 34. Georg Agricola’s best known work was the De re metallica, libri XII (Basel: Hieron Frobenivm and Nicolavm Episcopivm, 1556). 12. Agricola, De ortu, 4. 13. Ibid., 3. 14. “Quia naturas eorum, quae intra terram gignuntur, perquirere decrevi, ab instituta ratione non est alienum, ante contemplari eorundem ortus et causas. Sed cum quae natura in terrae canalibus, atque adeo in quocunque ipsius sinu interiore gremioque gignit, partim sua vi ex terra erumpunt in aerem, ut humor, aer, vapor, ignis” (ibid., 5). 15. Ibid., 158.

Notes to Pages 29–34  243 16. On Monte Nuovo, see ibid., 159; for Etna, see ibid., 36, and 161. Mount Etna, more active in Agricola’s lifetime, is a very different volcano than Vesuvius. The Sicilian volcano is a much larger and more remote, snow-capped colossus prone to effusive type eruptions. Its flows of lava stream down inexorably but give more time for escape than the violently turbulent masses of heat and debris moving at high speed—base surges—that have historically ravaged the flanks and base of  Vesuvius. 17. Giovanni Maria Della Torre believed so based on what he read in the De ortu: “Pare che Agricola sia salito sul Vesuvio per la seconda strada, dove abbiamo notato ancora noi esservi presentemente tre piani.” Giovanni Maria Della Torre, Storia e fenomeni del Vesuvio. Esposti dal P.D. Gio.: Maria Della Torre (Naples: Giuseppe Raimondi, 1755), 33. 18. “Qui in ipsum ascendit, priusquam eius cacumen attingat, per tres campos planos iter ut faciat necesse est. Quibus emensis, et superato colle praecipiti pervenitur ad craterem, qui et amplior et profundior est Puteolano isto novo” (Agricola, De ortu, 159). 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 157. 21. It appears that a work by Padovani on diseases was published much later; Fabrizio Padovani, De morbis (Leiden: Apud Petrum, Hackium, 1662). References to Padovani appear to be rather cryptic. See Richard Eimas, Heirs of Hippocrates: The Development of Medicine in a Catalogue of Historic Books in the Hardin Library for the Health Sciences, the University of Iowa (Iowa City: Published for the University of Iowa Libraries by the University of Iowa Press, 1990), 377. 22. Fabrizio Padovani, Tractatvs dvo; alter de ventis, alter perbrevis de terræ motv: adiecto indice copiosissimo (Bononiæ: Apud Ioannem Baptistam Bellagambam, 1601), 169. 23. Ibid., 144–46. 24. Ibid., 47. 25. Ibid., 163. 26. Ibid., 155. 27. Ibid., 156–61. Padovani cited relatively recent, earlier medieval, and ancient examples of earthquakes. 28. Antonio Nazzaro, Il Vesuvio: Storia eruttiva e teorie vulcanologiche (Naples: Liguori, 1997), 18–32. 29. Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg, Civitates Orbis Terrarum (Cologne, 1572–1618), III C21*, Biblioteca della Società Napoletana di Storia Patria (hereacter cited as BSNSP). 30. Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia, ed. S. E. Banks and J. W. Binns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 3, 15–16. 31. Giovanni Gioviano Pontano and Rodney G. Dennis, Baiae, I Tatti Renaissance Library 22 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). See 1.10.2: “E Roma meus Aelius revisit /dulcem Parthenopen, lares paternos:/o lucem niveam diemque faustum!” 32. “Panormita, de dictis et factis Alphonsi regis,” MS V F36, BNN. 33. Astarita, Between Salt Water and Holy Water, 69–76. 34. Lucia Impelluso, La natura e i suoi simboli: Piante, fiori, e animali (Milan: Electa, 2003), 16–19. 35. Marino, Becoming Neapolitan, 9–10. 36. Ibid., 35–37.

244  Notes to Pages 34–39 37. “Neapolis, Regia maritima urbs, caput totius Campaniae, et illius Regni Metropolis, trianguli forma, laterum inaequalium, ea qua mari alluitur, parte, curuatur in modum dimidiatae lunae. Haec maris vicinitate, portus amplitudine, salubritate aeris, soli ubertate, fontium copia, hortorum amoenitate, rerum denique omnium quas humana vita desiderat, abundantia nulli cedens” (III C21*, BSNSP). Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg, Braun and Hogenberg’s the City Maps of Europe: A Selection of Sixteenth-Century Town Plans, ed. John Goss (1615; repr., London: Studio Editions, 1991), 1–3. 38. Braun and Hogenberg, City Maps of Europe, III C21*, BSNSP. 39. “Medio eius vorago profunda, quam in intima terrae viscera praealte penetrare coniectura est; hinc ignis et flammae prorumpunt” (ibid.). 40. Schama, Lanscape and Memory, 430. 41. Fabio Giordano was another sixteenth-century Neapolitan author who wrote a description of Vesuvius: MS III C12, Brancacciana, BNN, contains a pair of works on the volcano. The second, De Vesuvio Monte auctore Fabio Jordano, appears to be a seventeenth-century copy of an original presumably from the second half of the sixteenth century. There is considerable evidence that Giordano’s writings were absorbed by other writers, including Giulio Cesare Capaccio. See Francesco Cubicciotti, Vita di Giulio Cesare Capaccio con l’esposizione delle sue opere (Campagna: Stab. tip. E. Cubicciotti, 1898), 120. 42.Ambrogio Leone, De agro Nolano denique montibus Vesuvio (Venice: Ioannis Rubri Vercellani, 1500), v. This first edition appears to be extremely rare. One copy is held in the library of the Osservatorio Vesuviano. 43. Ambrogio Leone, De Nola opusculum, distinctum, plenum, clarum, doctum, pulcrum, verum, graue, varium & vtila (Venice: Ioannis Rubri Vercellani, 1514). 44. The copy shown here in figure 1.3, e.g., was collated with a bundle of early reports on the 1631 eruption (SQ XXX B72, 5, BNN.). 45. Jesús Carrillo, “From Mt Ventoux to Mt Masaya: The Rise and Fall of Subjectivity in Early Modern Travel Narrative,” in Voyages and Visions, ed. Elsner, and Rubiés, 57–73, esp. 58. 46. Ibid., 59, 70–71. 47. The decision Cortés made to go to the Indies instead of Naples were recounted by Lopez de Gómara. See Hernán Cortés, John Huxtable Elliott, and Anthony Pagden, Letters from Mexico (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), xlv. 48. Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 106–16. 49. Jennifer D. Selwyin, A Paradise Inhabited by Devils: The Jesuits’ Civilizing Mission in Early Modern Naples, Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 21–53. 50. “Todo lo que he yo visto en aquel pueblo de León, e sin dubda no es comparación en la tierra tremol o temblores la de la cibdad de Puzol (que por ello la vi yo un tiempo cuasi destruida) con lo que hacen en Léon; e soy de opinión que si fuese edificada de piedras, como esta nuestra cibdad o come las de España, que muchas derribarían aquestos temblores de la tierra con muertes de muchos.” Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés and Juan Pérez de Tudela Bueso, Historia general y natural de las Indias, bk. 42, chap. 5, Biblioteca de autores españoles 120 (Madrid: Ediciones Atlas, 1959), 392. 51. Ibid., 343.

Notes to Pages 39–41  245 52. Ibid., 393. 53. Ibid., 394. 54. Ibid., 396. 55. I have explored this topic in a separate essay titled “Natural Marvels and Ancient Ruins: Volcanism and the Recovery of Antiquity in Early Modern Naples,” in Antiquity Recovered: The Legacy of Pompeii and Herculaneum, ed. Victoria C. Gardner Coates and Jon L. Seydl (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2007), 15–35. 56. John Dvorak and Giuseppe Mastrolenzo, The Mechanisms of Recent Vertical Crust Movements in Campi Flegrei Caldera, Italy, Special Paper: Geological Society of America 263 (Boulder, CO: Geological Society of America, 1991). 57. Giulio Cesare Braccini, Dell’incendio fattosi nel Vesuvio a XVI di dicembre MDCXXXI e delle sue cause ed effetti (Naples, 1632), 22. 58. A manuscript copy of the letter from Simone Porzio to the Spanish viceroy, Pedro Toledo, is MS V A46, misc. XIX, BNN; it was published after some time: Simone Porzio, De Conflagratione Agri Puteolani, Simonis Portii Neapolitani Epistola (Florence: Lorenzo Torrentini, 1551). Porzio also authored a treatise on the nature of colors, entitled the De Coloribus (1551). 59. The connections between early modern science and courtly patronage have been amply studied. See Mario Bagioli, Galileo Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 60. During Toledo’s long governance of Naples (1532–53), the Neapolitan baronage and cultural elite largely participated—through incentives and threats—in an alliance between the city and Spain. The viceroy’s patronage, including significant building projects in the city as well as outside it in the Campi Flegrei, sought to associate his governance with the highest virtues of classical antiquity. This is the thesis proposed by Carlos José Hernando Sánchez, in a study titled Castilla y Nápoles en el siglo XVI: El virrey Pedro de Toledo. Linaje, Estado y Cultura (1532–1553) (Salamanca: Junta de Castilla y León, 1994). John Marino (personal communication to author, November 22, 2010) also points out that Toledo’s urban renewal was in no small way centered on bolstering the defense of Naples, from internal and external threats. 61. See Nicola Badaloni, “Fermenti di vita intelletuale a Napoli dal 1500 alla metà del 600,” in Il viceregno spagnolo, vol. 3 of Storia di Napoli (Naples: Società Editrice Storia di Napoli, 1976), 643–89. There was a significant Neapolitan tradition related to reading natural signs as markers of social upheaval and change, often in close conjunction with astrology. This is a very complex topic that touches many of the city’s greatest intellectuals, among them Giovanni Battista Della Porta, and Tommaso Campanella. In the early sixteenth century, Della Porta’s teacher Giovanni Abosio da Bagnolo offered his astrological predictions for Naples’s future in Joannes Abiosus Regni Neapolis ex Balneolo philosopus . . . vaticinans eventus anni MDXIII (Naples, 1523). Bagnolo predicted, e.g., that great cataclysms would occur in 1693 and 1789. On Campanella there is a vast bibliography. A good place to start in English is John M. Headley, Tommaso Campanella and the Transformation of the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). On prophecy in the decades that led up to the Masaniello revolt, see Villari, La rivolta antispagnola a Napoli. 62. “Atqui quid haec portendant nonnulli anxie quaerunt ego vero cum Peripateticis dico, nullam praesentionis istius certam esse causam: tametsi Cicero portendis multum tribuat, multum etiam detrahat” (Porzio, De conflagratione, 5).

246  Notes to Pages 41–43 63. “Haec igitur mihi Mecoenas scribenda duxi; ne Haroli, somniorum interpretes, ac vulgares Astrologi alio trahant, que nature duce proveniunt” (ibid.). 64. Benedetto Di Falco, Descrittione de i luoghi antichi di Napoli e del suo amenissimo distretto (Naples, 1549), 9. 65. Other guides included Pietro di Stefano, Descrittione de i luoghi sacri della città di Napoli (Naples: Raimondo Amato, 1560); Antonio Sanfelice, Campania Antonii Sanfelicii Monachi (Naples: Matthias Cancer, 1562); and Giovanni Tarcagnota, Del sito et lodi della città di Napoli con una breve historia de gli re suoi (Naples: Giovanni Maria Scotto, 1566). 66. Scipione Mazzella, Opusculum de Balneis Puteolanum Baiarum et Pithecusarum (Naples, 1593). 67. Francesca Amirante, Libri per vedere: Le guide storico-artistiche della città di Napoli (Naples: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 1995), 29. The later reprint is the one consulted here. Ferrante Loffredo, Le antichità di Pozzuoli e luoghi convicini del Sig. Ferrante Loffredo Marchese di Trevico, e del Consiglio di Guerra di sua Maestà. Con le descrittioni de Bagni d’Agnano, Pozzuolo, e Tripergole, trascritte dal Vero antichissimo Testo de lo generosissimo Missere Iohanne Villano. Tolte dalle fauci del Tempo dal Signor Pompeo Sarnelli (Naples: Antonio Bulifon, 1675). Bulifon appended L’antichità to his second edition of Giovanni Summonte’s Historia del Regno di Napoli (Naples: Antonio Bulifon, 1675). Summonte’s was a very important work, and his gesture to Loffredo can only be suggestive of L’antichità’s enduring significance. 68. The original edition was Ferrante Loffredo, Le antichità di Pozzuolo et luoghi convicini: Nuovamente raccolte dall’illustriss. sig. Ferrante Lofredo, marchese di Treuico, et del consiglio di guerra di sua maesta (Naples: Andrea Bax, 1572). 69. “Andavo il dì cavalcando per il paese, particolarmente vedendo tutte le cose di consider­ atione, e di meraviglia; tanto naturali, come artificiali, che sono dal capo di Pausillipo, insino a Miseno, e quind a Cuma, lungo il lido, e su per i colli e monti d’intorno: e poi la notte conferendoli con li scritti de gli Autori antichi, che ne parlando, e similmente pigliandone quelli rincontri che migliori si poteano da i Paesani per fama, e per memoria lasciata loro da i Padri, e auoli, accozzando tutte queste cose insieme, se ben ritrovai molte conformità di quel che vedea cavalcando, con i libri, e con la fama; nondimeno ritrovai alcune difformita ancora e differenze, e in parecchie cose mi fecero gran difficiolta il silentio de’ Scrittori, la fama perduta, le reliquie di fabbriche di tutto disfatte, e finalmente il mancamento de tutti gli aiuti, che sogliono guidare la congiettura di simil cose. Pure determinai di vincere, quanto si bastava, con la diligenza tutte quelle incommodità, e rivedere tante volte i luoghi, essaminare si minutamente i paesani, e diligentemente rivolgere e considerare i libri, che non rimanesse industria da fare. Et travagliai di modo che mi pare di esserne parvenuto, se non m’inganno, a tutta quella vera luce, che si potea in tante oscurità” (Loffredo, Le antichità [1675 ed.], 2). 70. “Et come questo paese di sotto è tutto di materia accomodata ad ardere, gia che il suo fuoco vi è tanto acceso, mi persuado, che stara sempre in quest infelicita, e che vi saranno sempre terremoti, i quali non dimeno mancaranno con le essalationi, e in tutti i tempi antichi debbe essere stato il medesimo, e si vedono molti luoghi simili a questo monte, i quali non potevano farsi altrimente, che per essalationi, fra quali la Solfatara, li Struni, Campiglione. Et queste essalationi hanno rovinato tante fabriche magnifiche, che per lo paese si vedono distrutte” (ibid., 15). 71. Scipione Mazzella, Sito et antichità della città di Pozzuolo, e del suo amenissimo distretto, con la Descrittione di tutti i luoghi notabili . . . (Naples: Tarquinio Longo, 1606).

Notes to Pages 43–45  247 72. Giulio Cesare Capaccio, La vera antichità di Pozzuolo descritta da Giulio Cesare Capaccio Secretario dell’inclita città di Napoli: Ove con l’historia di tute le cose del contorno, si narrano la bellezza di Posillipo, l’origine della Città di Pozzuolo, Baia, Miseno, Cuma, Ischia, riti, costumi, magistrati, nobiltà, statue, inscrittioni, fabriche antiche, successi, guerre, e quanto appartiene alle cose naturali di Terme, Bagni, e di tutte le miniere. A modo d’itinerario, acciò tutti possano servirsene (Naples: Giacomo Carlino and Costantino Vitale, 1607), preface. 73. “Ma quando giunse a Pozzuolo, raccogliendo se medesima in se stessa, si determinò farsi conoscere tanto grande, tanto cortese, anzi tanto prodigia, che aprendo largamente il seno di tutti i suoi beni, lasciando ogni altra parte a dietro, l’ornò non solamente di vago, e dilettevol sito; di tranquillo, e copioso mare; di benigno, e allegro Cielo; ma tutta ridente e festevole” (ibid.). 74. Ingrid D. Rowland, The Culture of the High Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 9–20. 75. Sánchez, Castilla y. See also his earlier work: Carlos José Hernando Sánchez, “Poder y cultura en el Renacimiento napolitano: la biblioteca del virrey Pedro de Toledo,” Cuadernos e Historia Moderna 9 (1988): 13–33. 76. “Quivi sotto la rupe, è quella gran Villa di Don Pietro di Toledo, che’l volgo chiama Starza, Villa veramente di Principe, tutta dalla parte del mare cinta di muro. Come degno di lui è il giardino, che fe nel borgo di Pozzuolo, ove le statue sono d’incredibile bellezza, gli agrumi di sapore e di bellezza tutti gli altri sopravanzano, l’acque sono di tanta salubrità, che han costumato alcuni Signori Vicere del Regno farle condurre a Napoli a barrili, e quelle bere come utilissime alla vita humana” (Capaccio, La vera antichità, 145). 77. Ibid. 78. Giulio Cesare Capaccio, Il forastiero (Naples: Giovanni Roncagliolo, 1634). 79. Peter Burke, “Fables of the Bees: A Case-Study in Views of Nature and Society,” in Nature and Society in Historical Context, ed. Mikuláš Teich, Roy Porter, and Bo Gustafsson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 120. 80. Caracciolo was the temporarily elected officer of the seggio Capuano. The nobility was represented by four other seggi: Portanova, Montagna, Nido, and Porto. In addition to these five noble district representatives, there was also the eletto del popolo, an official elected from the merchant, professional, and artisan classes to represent the people. This latter office was often at the center of political turmoil. One such example, exemplary also of the risks run by these officials, was the lynching of Giovanni Vincenzo Starace in 1585. 81. One might liken the transition to a new viceroy to the advent of a new pope in early modern Rome in the way in which the institutional change stimulated a realignment of formal, and informal, relationships of power and patronage. Ingrid Rowland has noted, e.g., how quickly the fortunes of the curial marketplace could change with a new pope; see The Culture of the High Renaissance, 68–108. In the case of Naples in 1620, however, the questions was whether the Duke of Osuna was willing to concede to the new viceroy sent by Madrid, or whether he seriously planned to rebel and establish an independent southern Italian principality. Osuna backed down, but his presumed treason has been the object of debate since the seventeenth century. The most notable modern work on the topic in Michelangelo Schipa’s “La pretesa fellonia del duca di Ossuna,” Archivio Storico per le Provincie Napoletane (hereafter cited as ASPN ) 32 (Naples: Società di Storia Patria, 1999). Schipa took a critical and somewhat skeptical stance with regard to the accusations levied against Osuna, noting that though the duke was

248  Notes to Pages 46–50 on a clear collision course with the local aristocracy, his treason may have been more a matter of perceptions and miscalculated moves than a clearly defined agenda. Schipa also emphasizes a point made above, that, “ogni viceré disponeva d’una somma d’uffici, di onori, di favori da distribuire, le concessioni—ciò è ovvio—gli facevan tanti amici quanti gli procuravan nemici i dinieghi e peggio le rimozioni” (ASPN 36 [1911]: 480). 82. Ibid. 83. Schipa, ASPN 37 (1912): 402. 84. A copy of the letter to the new viceroy can be found in MS III D6, fol. 36, Brancacciana, BNN. 85. “È tale Ill.mo Sig.re il desiderio de tutti quei Popoli di qualsivoglia stato, grado, e conditione di veder la sua faccia, che ben posso assomigliarlo a quello di Peregrini, naviganti, agitati da tempostosi venti di veder il sicuro Porto: e dell’Infermi travagliati d’ardente febbre, che li pronostica la Morte di vedere il Medico, e del Popolo Hebreo d’uscir dalla cruda, e Teranica servitù del empio Faraone: e del S. Mosé di veder la faccia di Dio, dalla quale sperava esser lontano d’ogni male, e certo d’ogni bene” (MS Brancacciani III D6 fol. 36, BNN). 86. Marino, Becoming Neapolitan, 113. 87. Ibid., 113–16. 88. “Imaginsi Vs. Ill.ma un giardino di tenere e verdeggianti piante, arricchito di fiori, e frutti, agitato da rabbiosi venti: percosso da fiere tempeste; e da gran copia di grandini, e di saette che restano senza fiori, frondi, e frutti l’alberi: spezzati i rami e precipitati a terra i tronchi, ne diviene a tale, ch’a pena si vede di quella vestigio: Così se ritrova la Città, e Regno di Napoli, mutato, e cangiato dal sua primo essere” (MS Brancacciani III D6 fol. 36, BNN). 89. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, 1–50. 90. Carolyn Merchant, “Reinventing Eden: Western Culture as Recovery Narrative,” in Uncommon Ground, ed. Cronon, 137. 91. See Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 25–30. 92. Appuhn, A Forest on the Sea, 61. 93. Castelli, Incendio del Monte Vesuvio, 72. 94. Marco Antonio del Brison, Breve Inscrizione del Sagro Monte della Pietà di Napoli (Naples, 1711), 4. The entire paragraph reads: “Che l’Europa sia il Giardino del Mondo, L’Italia giardino dell’Europa, il Regno di Napoli giardino d’Italia, e che la bella e vaga Partenope sia giardino di questo nostro chiamato per Antonomasia il Regno da niuno vien’ignorato, ogn’uno lo confessa; Questa bella Metropoli è circondata da Monticelli fruttiferi con boschi amenissimi, e dilettevoli per le varie caccie: a fronte e bagnata dal mare, partorendoli quei tanti decantati figli Pausillipo, e Mergellino: dall’altro lato è inaffiata dal placido Sebeto, misto (com’è fama) col rivolo del Giordano; ed in questo modo si rende giocondissimo Teatro di vaga spettativa, sicché, si può chiamare questa famosa Citta del Capo Sirena quart’essenza delle delizie del Mondo; e se non fusse, che per la sua rara bellezza, e fruttifera propagine vien resa gelosa appo tutte le Nazioni, si anche per i varii governi de’Ministri, questa Sirena poche volte serena, ma per lo più perturbata, sarebbe al certo la Quinta essenza, qual solo si concede al paradiso Terrestre.” 95. Ibid. 96. I draw from the Italian translation of Bruno’s De immensitate in Anacleto Verrecchia, Giordano Bruno: LA falena dello spirito (Roma: Donzelli, 2002), 10.

Notes to Pages 50–54  249 97. Rowland explains this as well in Bruno, 14–21. 98. Eric Ash, “Introduction: Expertise and the Early Modern State,” Osiris 25, no. 1 (2010): 1–24.

Chapter 2 1. The titles of works on Vesuvius after 1631 suitably matched the drama of the eruption, as was the case with Ceraso’s L’opre stupende. 2. “Lettera del Signor Giov. Battista Manso, Marchese di Villa, in materia del Vesuvio,” Archivio Storico per le Provincie Napoletane, vol. 14, fasc. III, e IV (Naples, 1889), 503–4. 3. Pliny the Younger, Epistularum 6.16. 4. Part of Pliny the Younger’s letter to Tacitus reads: “Nubes (incertum procul intuentibus ex quo monte, Vesuvium fuisse postea cognitum est) oriebatur, cuius similitudinem et formam non alia magis arbor quam pinus expresserit. Nam velut trunco elata in altum quibusdam ramis diffundebatur, crede, quia recenti spiritu evecta, dein senescente eo destitute aut candida interdum, interdum sordida et maculosa, prout terram cineremque sustulerat” (ibid.). 5. “Il mattino del Martedì quello che di notte tempo era paruto un fumo infocato apparve con la nuova luce a guisa di nube sorgente da terra diritto in alto fina alla 7a region dell’aria, e quivi s’allargava per si fatto modo che, come la parte sollevata a dirittura in su rassomigliava un grosso tronco d’un altissimo pino, così l’altra parte superiore dilatata al d’intorno sembrava una smisurata pigna e più vasta d’una grandissima montagna.” See “Lettera del Signor Giov. Battista Manso,” 503–4. 6. Such an unearthing appears in the opening chapter of  Leonard Barkan’s Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 1–17. 7. John Marino drew my attention to this point. There is much debate on Boccaccio’s notably coy use of classical sources such as Thucydides, Lucretius, Apuleius, and Statius. See Timothy Kircher, The Poet’s Wisdom: The Humanists, the Church, and the Formation of Philosophy in the Early Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 47. 8. Giovanni Battista Manso, Compendio della vita di Torquato Tasso scritta da Gio. Battista Manso (Naples: Giovanni Domenico Roncagliolo, 1619). See also Jon R. Snyder, Writing the Scene of Speaking: Theories of Dialogue in the Late Italian Renaissance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 185. 9. Aurelio Musi dedicates a chapter to the Accademia degli Oziosi in the following: L’Italia dei viceré: Integrazione e resistenza nel sistema imperiale spagnolo (Cava de’ Tirreni: Avagliano Editore, 2000), 129–47. 10. J. W. Binns, The Latin Poetry of English Poets (Boston: Routledge, 1974), 76. 11. Milton was greatly impressed by Manso’s sophistication when he met him in 1638, referring to him as a “virum nobilissimum atque gravissimum (ad quem Torquatus Tassus insignis poeta italus de amicitia scripsit).” This reference in John Milton, Pro populo Anglicano defensio secunda (1654) is cited in Estelle Haan, From Academia to Amicitia: Milton’s Latin Writings and the Italian Academies, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 88, pt. 6 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1998), 118. 12.“Giovanni Battista Manso to Galileo Galilei; Naples, March, 18, 1610,” MSS Gal., P.VI,

250  Notes to Pages 54–57 T.VI, cc. 41, Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze. See also “Giovannit Battista Manso to Paolo Beni; Naples, March, 1610,” MSS Gal., P.VI, T.XIV, cc. 84–87, Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze. 13. In chapter 4, I examine one important example of  how “remote” observations of  Vesuvius were used by naturalists elsewhere: Pietro Castelli’s Incendio del Monte Vesuvio. 14. Zakiya Hanafi, The Monster in the Machine: Magic, Medicine, and the Marvelous in the Time of the Scientific Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 34. 15. Harold Samuel Stone, Vico’s Cultural History: The Production and Transmission of Ideas in Naples, 1685–1750 (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 46–71. 16. I elaborate these themes in the chapters that follow. It might be noted that the debate about Cartesian and Aristotelian models rippled out even in the provincial parts of the kingdom, as was the case in Lecce. See Giovanni Francesco Porrata Spinola, Discorso sopra l’origine de’ fuochi gettati dal Monte Vesuvo, ceneri piovute, et altri successi, e pronostico d’effetti maggiori di Gio. Francesco Porrata Spinola Galateo, Medico, filosofo, e astrologo Eccellentissimo al Signor Vincenzo Sirigatti Gentil’huomo Fiorentino (Lecce: Pietro Micheli Borgognone, 1632), 22–35. 17. These numbers for Neapolitan printers come from Silvia Sbordone, Editori e tipografi a Napoli nel 600, Quaderni dell’accademia pontaniana 12 (Naples: Accademia Pontaniana, 1990), 18–65. In the same work, Sbordone writes: “Rilegato nelle più diverse vesti tipografiche e di vario livello scientifico sono le opere prodotte in occasione dell’eruzione del Vesuvio del 1631. Si presentano generalmente in formati in foli o in 8tavo, con grandi tavole incise in rame, ripiegate, o con minuscole illustrazioni, memorie e descrizioni” (10). I pick up the reference to Galileo in chapter 3. 18. Matthew Jones, The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, and the Cultivation of Virtue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 7. 19. “E la nubbe, che con gran spavento d’ogn’uno era mirabilmente cresciuta, si vedeva come pregna di fuoco mandar fuori spesse saette, e lampi con tanto fracasso, che sembrava à chi sentiva, che un grand’esercito vibrasse dentro con il sonar de tamburi, con il correr delle carozze, e sparar delle artiglierie” (Ceraso, L’opre stupende, 9). 20. “Essendomi dunque stato richiesto da molti affetionati, che scrivessi qualche cosa delle ruine, che con ragione temeavano nè potendoglielo totalmente negare, mi son affaticato variar la scrittura, acciò chi non gusta un discorso, d’una scienza, si cibi di quello dell’altra, entrando insieme l’historia” (Francesco Agnello, Trattato scientifico delle cause che concorsero al terremoto e fuoco del Monte Vesuvio vicino Napoli [Naples: Lazaro Scorriggio, 1632], 8). 21. I take the term from Tor Egil Forland’s essay “Acts of God? Miracles and Scientific Explanation,” History and Theory 47 (December2008): 483–94. For proper attribution, Forland’s closing sentence to the essay is as follows “The explanation can hardly be that scientists are schizophrenics but rather that people have a great capacity for what we might call multiple partaking: being part of several plural subjects at the same time, as well as being a private subject, without feeling torn to pieces even when the different subjects oppose each other.” 22. Leandro Alberti, Descrittione di tutta Italia (Venice: Lodovico degli Avanzi, 1568), 180–91. 23. There is evidence that local naturalists and humanists were inclined to view the crater as destination for excursions, meant for the collection of naturalia, sightseeing and a little danger. This from an anonymous manuscript: “Arduus collis his est ascensus difficilis, ita ut ab eo medii ad supremi prerupiis arduisque rupibus [illegible] ab expeditionibus [illegible]superari possit.”

Notes to Pages 57–62  251 These notes on Vesuvius, likely drafted shortly after the 1631 eruption, note that sheep were brought to pasture on the mountain both in summer and in winter, suggesting heavy use by local peasants. See “Vesuvius singulares est mons,” MS VI A 11, Brancacciana, BNN. 24. Other sources confirm the presence of thick boscage and timber well up the mountain. See, e.g., Ceraso, L’opre stupende, 4. 25. Braccini, Dell’incendio, 24–25. 26. “In medio vertices vasta patet vorago rotunda, velut ingentis amphiteatri quaedam cavea, craterem vocant a forma, cuius tamen fundum in intima terrae viscera penetrasse constat.” The overlap of texts here requires some discerning: the reference is in Braccini, Dell’incendio, 25. Braccini cited what must have been the early Latin edition of Franz Schott’s work, alternately attributed to his brother Andreas: Franz Schott, Itinerarium nobiliorum Italiae regionum, vrbium, oppidorum, et locorum; nunc serio auctum, & tabellis chorographicis, & topographicis locupletatum; in quo, tamquam in theatro, nobilis adolescens, etiam domi sedens, praestantissimae regionis delicias spectare cum voluptate poterit. Auctoribus Francisco Schotto Antuerpiensi I.C. et F. Hieronymo ex Capugnano Bonon. Praedicatorio (Vicenza: Francesco Bolzetta, 1601), 611. 27. Braccini, Dell’incendio, 26. Modern volcanologists have relied on Braccini’s account to help reconstruct the appearance of Vesuvius before 1631. See the Antonio Nazzaro, “Some Considerations on the State of Vesuvius in the Middle Ages” Annali di Geofisica 41, no. 4 (October 1998): 555–64. 28. Braccini, Dell’incendio, 27. 29. Ibid., 26. 30. Ceraso, L’opre stupende, 10. 31. Nicolo Maria Oliva, Lettera del Signor Nicolo Maria Oliva scritta all’Illustrissimo Abbate D. Flavio Ruffo. Nella quale la vera e minuta relatione delli Segni, Terremoti, e Incendi del Monte Vessuvio, e comincindo dalli 10 del mese di Decembre 1631 per infino alli 5 di Gennaro (Naples: Lazzaro Scorrigio, 1632), 1. 32. Braccini, Dell’incendio, 28. Pliny the Younger’s account of the phenomena that signaled the eruption is in Epistularum 6.20. 33. Vincenzo Bove, Il Vesuvio Acceso descritto da Vincenzo Bove per l’illustrissimo signore Gio. Battista Valenzuela, Velazquez Primo Regente per la Mesta Cath. nel Conseg. Supremo d’Italia (Naples: Secondino Roncagliolo, 1632), 5. 34. Aurelio Musi dedicates a chapter to the Accademia degli Oziosi in L’Italia dei viceré, 129–47. 35. The shape of a pine tree is reported in a number of sources: Braccini, Dell’incendio, 29–30; Oliva, Lettera, 1; and, “Lettera del Signor Giov. Battista Manso,” 489–555. 36. Once again, it was Braccini who gathered these reports (Dell’incendio, 30). 37. Ibid., 31, 41. 38. Pliny the Younger recorded the eruption in two letters to Tacitus: Epistularum, 6.16 and 6.20. 39. Braccini, Dell’incendio, 31. 40. Nazzaro, Il Vesuvio, 20–32. The most significant eruption before 1631 occurred in 1139; a very minor event occurred in 1500. See Haraldur Sigurdsson, ed., Encyclopedia of Volcanoes (San Diego: Academic Press, 2000). 41. Giulio Cesare Recupito, De Vesuviano incendio nuntius (Naples: Longhi, 1632), 40–45.

252  Notes to Pages 62–65 42. “ Lettera del Signor Giov. Battista Manso,” 503. 43. Vincenzo Bove, Novissima relatione dell’incendio successo nel Monte di Somma a 16 Dicembre 1631 Con un’ avviso di quello è successo nell’istesso dì nella Città di Cattaro, nelle parti d’Albania (Venice, 1632), 1. 44. Art historians have shown how rich the saint’s iconographic history was, evidencing especially the importance of the 1631 eruption. For an introductory survey of Neapolitan paint­ ing in the 1600s, see Raffaello Causa, “La pittura a Napoli da Caravaggio a Luca Giordano,” in Civiltà del Seicento a Napoli, ed. Silvia Cassani (Naples: Electa, 1984), 99–114. Gargiulo’s historical paintings are the subject of two important essays: Wendy Wassyng Roworth, “The Evolution of History Painting: Masaniello’s Revolt and Other Disasters in Seventeenth-Century Naples,” Art Bulletin 75 (1993): 219–34; and, more recently, Christopher R. Marshall, “Causa di Stravaganze: Order and Anarchy in Domenico Gargiulo’s Revolt of Masaniello,” Art Bulletin 80 (1998): 478–521. Marshall argues that it is an error to see the three depictions of eruption, revolt, and plague as a narrative set because archival evidence suggests an earlier completion for the Masaniello painting. Furthermore, he contrasts the negative visions of popular anarchy with the “propriety, unity, and stability displayed by the establishment,” visible in Gargiulo’s other pictures of contemporary events. It appears that a second painting of the eruption, besides the one commissioned by Antonio Piscelli, once existed. It was sent to Spain and subsequently lost. 45. On the tradition of threatening saints, see Robert Hertz, “Saint Besse: A Study of an Alpine Cult,” in Saints and Their Cults: Studies in Religious Sociology, Folklore, and History, ed. Stephen Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 55–100. 46. Nino Leone, La vita quotidiana a Napoli ai tempi di Masaniello (Naples: Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 1994), 244–55. Typical of northern European scorn for the frenzy and emotion surrounding the miracle of liquefaction was one Irishman’s definition of it as a “ludicrous scene.” See Desmond Seward, Naples: A Travellers’ Companion (New York: Atheneum, 1986), 132. 47. D. Cesare d’Engenio Caracciolo, Napoli sacra di D. Cesare d’Engenio Caracciolo, Gentil­ huomo Napolitano: Ove oltre le vere origini, e fundationi di tutte le Chiese, Monasteri, Cappelle, Spedali, e d’altri luoghi sacri della Città di Napoli, e de’suoi Borghi si tratta di tutti i Corpi, e Relique de’ Santi e Beati, che vi si ritrovano, con un brieve compendio delle loro vite, e dell’ opere pie, ch’in detti luoghi sacri si fanno (Naples: Ottavio Beltrano, 1624). 48. D’Engenio Caracciolo, Napoli Sacra, 633. On the eruption of 472 see Nazzaro, Il Vesuvio, 131. 49. The notion that potentially dangerous and subversive readings of the eruption were to a large extent “managed” by cultural and political elites is central to chapter 4. For an introduction to these issues as they pertain to the culture of baroque Naples, see Giancarlo Alfano, ed., Tre catastrofi: Eruzioni, rivolta, e la peste nella poesia del Seicento napoletano (Naples: Cronopio, 2001), 7–31 50. Recupito, Vesuviano incendio nuntius, 38–45. 51. This is essentially what Romeo De Maio argues: “Lo storico puo rilevare che il napoletano del Sei e Settecento derivava dalle pratiche della religione piacere, paura, e meraviglia, anziché—come sarebbe stato nella convenienza religiosa—gioia, tristezza, e riflessione. Ne conseguiva una grande precarietà del sentimento religioso, che si manifestò prevalentemente

Notes to Pages 65–68  253 nell’impazienza a stare al quia quotidiano e nel terrore dell’avvenire. Ne furono conseguenza anche il frequente ricorso alla divinazione e al sortilegio, o alle anime del purgatorio da una parte, e dall’altra la concezione di Dio come vindice implacabile, e dei santi intesi a tenerne la terribile mano saettante. Quando poi accadevano, numerosissime, le calamita cittadine, i predicatori—perfino quelli illuminati della Congregazione delle Apostoliche Missioni—tenevano il popolo nella persuasione che neppure i santi avevano potuto placare l’iraconda divinità. Poi, cessata la calamità, si diceva che il merito andava ai santi ch’erano riusciti a riprendere la terrificante mano.” See Romeo De Maio, Società e vita religiosa a Napoli nell’età moderna (1656–1799) (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1971), 141–42. 52. Braccini’s prose in this passage is difficult to translate: “Ma nel secondo conoscendo per la sudetta, che per Iddio e per placarsi, e che non vuole la ruina, ma la conservatione del suo diletto popolo: qui non vult mortem peccatoris, sed ut vivat, et convertatur ad eum; affaticandosi in promettere per noi emendazione, e in impetrarci spirito di contrizione, e divozione or per amore, ed or per allegrezza senz’altro incentivo si liquefaccia” (Dell’incendio, 33). 53. Ibid. 54. “Lettere del P. Ascanio Capece di Napoli,” ASPN, vol. 14, fasc. III, e IV (Naples, 1889), 495–501. 55. Oliva, Lettera, 3. 56. Ibid. 57. Bove, Novissima relatione dell’incendio, 9. 58. Braccini, Dell’incendio, 38. 59. “Lettere del P. Ascanio Capece,” 497. 60. Concerning the time of the collapse, see Braccini, Dell’incendio, 39. Regarding the lahar: “Per la grande bocca dell’antica voragine, con violenza maggiore, si mise tosto ad uscire; seco insieme traendo, senza le molte grosse , ed infocate pitre, atte a fracassar l’universo tutto, tanta copia d’acqua mischiata di cenere, di rena, e di liquefatto bitume, solfo e allume, che d’essa fattisi in un batter d’occhio, oltre ogni credere umano, cinque ben grossi torrenti, con tanta furia, a veduta etiando di no’ altri che sì lontano stavamo, giù del Monte per altrettante, benché contrarie vie, ondeggianti calarono.” Gianbernadino Giuliani, Trattato del Monte Vesuvio (Naples: Egidio Longo, 1632), 86–97. 61. Nazzaro, Il Vesuvio, 20–32; and Paul L. Hancock and Brian J. Skinner, ed., The Oxford Companion to the Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 1088–92. 62. Antonio Lanelfi, Incendio del Vesuvio del Lanelfi (Naples: Ottavio Beltrano, 1632). 63. Pietro Nesti, Vera relatione dell’horribil caso (Naples: Pietro Nesti, 1631), 4. 64. The saint’s appearance in this moment of climax was narrated by different sources essentially in the same fashion. See Vincenzo Bove, L’incendii del monte Vesuvio (Naples: Egidio Longo, 1632), 9; Braccini, Dell’incendio, 44; Oliva, Lettera, 3. 65. Nesti, 4. 66. Porta Capuana was one of the city’s principal gates and site of a fortress built by Charles V. This was the location of the Vicaria, Naples’s court and tribunal and the city’s principal prison. It was an imposing and feared symbol of authority well into the modern period. 67. “Ero io il più vicino al Cardinale, che m’impose che dovessi andare a riconoscere un luogo ove acconciamente s’havesse potuto ciò fare, il che feci in un alto pogetto, forse un

254  Notes to Pages 62–72 archibugiata lungi dalla Porta, dove giunto il Cardinale fe uscire quel sacro sangue di sotto al baldacchino e alzarlo alquanto a vista della nube e dell’incendio, ma non perciò fecero motivo alcuno. All’hora il Cardinale prese il glorioso sangue dal tabernacolo entro cui l’aveva portato, e tenendolo nelle mani l’alzò verso il fuoco facendo il segno della Santissima Croce. Ecco questa smisurata e altissima nuvola incontinente calò la cima quasi chinando il capo alla santa reliqua in un subito si diede dietro.” “Lettera del Signor Giov. Battista Manso,” 503. 68. There are numerous studies on civic rituals and crisis responses in Italian cities. See two in particular: Richard Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980); and Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981). In Italy, earthquakes were a more frequent form of natural disaster than volcanic eruptions; see Emanuela Guidoboni, “Riti di calamità: terremoti a Ferrara nel 1570–74,” Quaderni Storici 55 (1984): 107–36. 69. Braccini, Dell’incendio, 44. 70. Domenico Gargiulo, Eruption of Vesuvius, oil on canvas, Naples, Carelli Collection (1656–60). 71. Wassyng Roworth, “Evolution of History Painting,” 227–30. 72. Braccini, Dell’incendio, 40–42. 73. Ceraso, L’opre stupende, 16–17. 74. Giambattista Bergazzano, Bacco Arraggiato co vorcano, descurzo ntra de lloro di Gio. Battista Bergazzano Academico Errante (Naples: Vincenzo Bove, 1632), preface. There is a very nice modern edition of the work, to which I owe the detail that Bergazzano may have been a barber: Bacco Arraggiato co vorcano, descurzo ntra de lloro di Gio. Battista Bergazzano Academico Errante, ed. Francesco D’Ascoli (Naples: Adriano Gallina Editore, 1996), 9. 75. The original Neapolitan verse reads: “Co alommà tanto fuoco / Haie strutto miezo munno / Haie cuotto dinto l’acqua de lo Mare / Senza teiano, e trepete lo tunno / senza teielle haie fritto li fragaglie, e le seccie / Ed haie fatto ngratiglia / Lo cefaro, la Spinola,e la Volpa” (Bergazzano, Bacco Arraggiato co’ vorcano, lines 35–42). 76. Bello schuoppo, ch’haie fatto / L’aurole de percoca, e de cerasa / Se ne so ghiute ‘nfummo” (ibid., lines 9–11). 77. A volume in Rome’s Biblioteca Casanatense, e.g., collates thirty-two separate works (vol. Misc. 387.1–387.32). Bound together at an uncertain date in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, it contains relationi of floods, earthquakes, and eruptions running from 1618 to 1693. I have chosen to employ the term used in the sources, although the title of avvisi was often given to similar print works. Sections of what I write below appear in my previous essay, Sean Cocco, “Contesting Vesuvius, Claiming Naples: Disaster in Print and Pen, 1631–1649,” in Defining Community in Early Modern Europe, ed. Michael Halvorson and Karen E. Spierling (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2008), 307–26. 78. Vera relatione del grandissimo terremoto e compassionevole infortunio successo a dì 4. di Settembre 1618 (Viterbo, 1618). 79. Lettera del P.Gio. Gonzalez Ciaparro della Compagnia del Giesù scritta al P. Alonso d’Ovaglie del Manzano della medesima Compagnia (Rome, 1648). 80. For Spanish relaciones, see José Antonio Maravall, The Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran (Minneapolis: University of  Minnesota Press, 1986), 98–99.

Notes to Pages 72–77  255 81. The manuscript notes of Neapolitan historians are strongly suggestive of how natural disasters were recorded as historical events, memorias to be included with other bits of  the past. “Monte Vesuvio ac eius eruptione auctore Horatio de Afelatro Napolitano” was collated into a single volume containing chronicles, hagiographies, epitaphs, conversion stories, and other material relevant to writing the history of the city (MS II A 10, fol. 40, Brancacciana, BNN). 82. A widely circulated account of the miracle was in Braccini’s Dell’incendio. 83. Giovanni Orlandi, Dell’incendio del Monte Somma: Compita relatione; e di quanto è succeduto insino ad hoggi (Naples, 1631), 1. The cover of the work noted that it was being reprinted in Rome by Lodovico Grignani. 84. Nesti, Vera relatione; Giovanni Pietro Pinelli, Relatione dell’incendio successo nel Monte Vesuvio detto di Somma (Venice, 1631); Egidio Longo, Los incendios de la montaña de Soma (Naples, 1632). 85. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 23–64. 86. Ottavia Niccoli, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 3–29. 87. Giocanni Colla Aurigemma, Altra vera, e più piena relatione de’ gran prodigii e spanventosi terremoti novamente accorsi nell’una, e nell’altra Calabria (Bologna, 1638), 1. 88. “Atque adeo, quod Nilo contigit, fluuiisque omnibus, Tiberim quoque imbribus cres­ cere, et exundare, cum ratio suadet, tum ipsi eventi docent: nos enim, qui nunc vitam ducimus, et Tiberis auctus alias maiores, alias minores vidimus, et observavimus.” Marsilio Cagnati, De Tiberis inundatione medica disputatio (Rome, 1599), 6. 89. Ibid., 16. 90. Ibid., 15. 91. Gianbernardino Giuliani, Trattato del Monte Vesuvio e dei suoi Incendi di Gianbernardino Giuliani Segretario del Fideliss.o Popolo Napolitano (Naples: Egidio Longo, 1632), 62. 92. Ibid., 204. 93. Ibid., 212. 94. Ibid., 214. 95. Astarita, Between Salt and Holy Water, 144–45. 96. Giuliani, Trattato del Monte Vesuvio, 115–18. 97. Ibid., 75, 114. 98.The Borgo is described in eighteenth-century sources, where it appears to have been incorporated into an expanding urban growth beyond the city walls. See Niccolò Carletti, Topografia universale della città di Napoli, in Campagna Felice e note enciclopediche storiografe (Naples: Raimondi, 1776), 37. 99. Don Juan de Quiñones, El Monte Vesuvio aora la Montaña de Soma: Dedicado a Don Felipe quarto el grange nuestro Senor, Rey Catolico de las Espanas, Monarca Soberano de las Indias Orientales, y Occidentales. Por el Doctor Don Juan de Quiñones, Alcade de su Casay Corte (Madrid: Juan Gonzalez, 1632), xxixr. 100. Ibid., 40v. 101. “Prima causa est voluntas Dei, sive vidus eius volens in eis agire: sed mediantibus causis secundis hoc agit; ita quod omnes causae secundae comparantur ad terram sicut immaginantum malum commovens membra.” Doctoris Angelici Divi Thomae Aquinatis Sacri Ordinis F. F.

256  Notes to Pages 78–83 Praedicatorum opera omnia Expositiones in Job. In psalmos Davidis. In canticum canticorum. In Isaiam prophetam. 18. (Paris: Vivès, 1876), 309; cited in Corrado Dollo, Filosofia e medicina in Sicilia, Biblioteca di studi filosofici 24 (Catanzaro: Rubbettino, 2004), 297. 102. Ibid., 298.

Chapter 3 1. Giovanni Francesco Porrata Spinola, Discorso sopra l’origine de’ fuochi gettati dal Monte Vesuvio, ceneri piovute, et altri successi, e pronostico d’effetti maggiori di Gio. Francesco Porrata Spinola Galateo, Medico, filosofo, e astrologo Eccellentissimo al Signor Vincenzo Sirigatti Gentil’huomo Fiorentino (Lecce: Pietro Micheli Borgognone, 1632), 1–2. 2. Pierre Deschamps, Dictionnaire de geographie ancienne et moderne . . . suivi de l’imprimerie hors l’Europe (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 1965), 1405. 3. Spinola, Discorso sopra l’origine de’ fuochi, iii–iv. 4. Ibid.. 5. “Qua de re ne horum quidem philosophorum sententia est” (Agricola, De ortu, 29). 6. “Il Galileo Galileis, che trà nobilissimi vostri ingegni Fiorentini riluce qual Sole ha ritrovato, per dir così nuovi mondi onde il P. Clavio disse publicamente, che’l mondo ha bisogno di nova sfera, e per tant’ osservationi di Ticone, et altri, tra l’altre cose notabili ha visto con l’occhiale in Cielo, che nel corpo della luna sono monti, e valli, e alcuni saggi matematici dimostrano contra l’altre opinioni con suoi esempi” (Spinola, Discorso sopra l’origine de fuochi, 32–33). 7. “Dico, che appresso tutti i Filosofi senza controversia et indubitamente li corpi inferiori elementi, et elementati si governano da moti superiori de’ cieli, ma inanzi, ch’io passassi oltre è necessario brevemente sapre che la maggior parte de’ Filosofi, tra quali è il mastro Aristotele, et infinita turba de’ suoi Aristotelici non sanno, che cosa siano Cieli, perlochè disputano indarno della solidità de’ Cieli, e da questa proposizione falsa incorrono in altri gravi errori talche li Cieli, non stanno come spogli di cipolle l’un l’altro, ma si come questa nostra terra stà in mezzo al centro nell’aria, da tutte parti, nè pur cade, così quelli grandi corpi di Pianeti, cioè Luna, Mercurio, Venere, Sole, Marte, Giove, e Saturno, stanno in aria chiamata dal Ticone Cielo liquido, ma con qualche differenza dell’aria nostra, stanno, e ruotano, dico, come tante palle che le sostiene, e gira mostrarò appresso; e quest verità si scorge non per opinioni, ma per dimostrazioni matematiche” (Spinola, Discorso sopra l’origine de’ fuochi, 22). 8. Alexandre Koyré,La révolution astronomique: Copernic, Kepler, Borelli (Paris: Hermann, 1961), 25. 9. Spinola, Discorso sopra l’origine de fuochi, 29. 10. Ibid., 28. 11. Karen Wood, “Making and Circulating Knowledge through William Hamilton’s Campi Phlegraei,” British Journal of the History of Science 39, no. 1 (March 2006): 67–96. 12. William Hamilton, Observations on Mount Vesuvius, Mount Etna, and Other Volcanos: In a Series of Letters, Addressed to the Royal Society, from the Honourable Sir W. Hamilton (London: T. Cadell, 1774), 34. Hamilton dubbed Scipione Falcone “a very good observer” (103). 13. “Vesuvius singulares est mons,” MS VI A 11, Brancacciana, BNN. 14. Hamilton, Observations, 49.

Notes to Pages 84–89  257 15. Pietro Asterio, Discorso Aristotelico intorno al terremoto novamente occorso nella Fedelissima Citta di Napoli alli 16. del mese di Decembre 1631: Nel quale si dimostra la vera causa di questo Terremoto con il secreto per provedere accio e tempi avvenire non caggioni alle rovine (Naples: Francesco Savio, 1632), preface. 16. Ibid., preface. 17. Ibid., 22–23. 18. “Bisogna dunque supporre per verità naturale, che questa è la proprieta di questo monte di essere una gran fornace di fuoco, atta sempre ad ardere, tuttavolta in lei si genera materia combustibile, e fuoco per allumarla, e accenderla” (ibid., 22). 19. I reconstruct this from the date Agnello gives in his dedication and from the date on the license given by his superiors (Trattato scientifico, preface). 20. Ibid., 9 21. Friedrich Furcheim, Bibliografia del Vesuvio: compilata e corredata di note critiche, estratte dai più autorevoli scrittori vesuviani (Naples: F. Furchheim, 1897), 3. 22. Agnello, Trattato scientifico, 10. 23. Ibid., 11. 24. “Ecce per raggion naturale si è provato la causa, non solo delli terremoti, ma anco delli fuochi di Vesuvio esser stata l’esalatione, e spirito rinchiuso violentemente, senza conoscerci bisogno di miracolo alcuno, ne effetto del fuoco infernale. (ibid., 52). 25. Ibid., 53–54. 26. “Non vorrei di ciò dire la mia opinione, ma sentire li molti, et eccellenti Astrologi di questa città, tanto più non stimandosi da tutti (se bene non tutt dell’istesse virtù) il trattar Astrologico” (ibid., 80). 27. “E disposti molti spiriti sotto la terra per virtù del sole; con la fredezza poi della luna, eclissata, patiscono magior contrarietà e così violentati fan tremare la terra” (ibid., 79). 28. Stephen J. Gould, Time’s Arrow—Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 61–83. 29. Findlen, Possessing Nature, 3. 30. For Imperato’s place in the development of earth sciences, see Bruno Accordi, “Ferrante Imperato (Napoli 1550–1625) e il suo contributo alla storia della Geologia,” Geologica Romana 20 (1981): 43–56. 31. Ferrante Imperato, Dell’Historia Naturale . . . Libri XXVIII. nella quale si tratta della diversa conditione di Miniere e pietre. Con alcune historie di piante e animali (Naples: Costantino Vitale, 1599), 255. 32. Ibid., 270. 33. Ibid., 255. 34. Alchemy—defined in the strictest sense as the effort to transmute base metals into gold with the aid of a “philosopher’s stone”—provided a wide foundation of chemical knowledge. Alchemists also contributed to the fundamental image of volcanoes as furnaces, places were substances were heated and transformed. See Sigurdsson, Melting the Earth, 79–83. On early practices related to chemistry, see Paolo Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Rossi writes: “It makes no sense to speak of seventeenth-century astronomy and the chemistry of the

258  Notes to Pages 89–90 same century on the same plane or within one global argument. Astronomy had for some time possessed a highly organized theoretical structure, it made use of sophisticated techniques, and in 1543 it underwent a radical turning point, which was followed, not preceded by an enormous job of acquisition of factual material. Chemistry in the seventeenth century had no organized structure as a science, it possessed no coherent theory of changes and reactions, and it had no definite tradition behind it: craftsmen and artisans had at their disposal a much more ample array of chemical knowledge than the natural philosophers” (viii). 35. The association between alchemy and medicine was a strong one in the period. See Tara E. Nummendal, “Practical Alchemy and Commercial Exchange in the Holy Roman Empire,” in Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science and Art in Early Modern Europe, ed. Paula H. Smith and Paula Findlen (New York: Routledge, 2002), 201–22. 36. David Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 305–45. 37. “Al cui principio per fundamento reale, dico che sotto quel monte tanto nelle viscere superficiali del monte quanto nelle centrali profonde, si vadi aggregando materia, alcune volte disunita, alla quale poi da tempo in tempo s’accendi il fuoco; e quanto più sia la distanza del tempo tanto maggior quantità di materia si vadi aggregando.” Scipione Falcone, Discorso naturale delle cause et effetti causati nell’incendio del Monte Vesevo con relatione del tutto di Scipione Falcone Spetial di Medicina Napolitano (Naples: Ottavio Beltramo, 1632), 4. 38. “Ma prima di passar più oltre, necessario parmi dichiarare, come questo fuoco si fosse acceso a questa materia: perciò dico che può esser stato fuoco sotterraneo, che l’habbi acceso. O pure qualche aspetto di stella fissa, ò stella errante, a modo del specchio di cristallo nel Sole, che accende il fuoco. O pure, per l’Antiparistasi nelli contrarii a guisa delli vapori nell’aere. O pure vapori solforei sotterranei. O pure per concutimento di pietra con pietra, come noi battemo la focara con il ferro. Ma sia, come egli sia stato, io non l’ho veduto” (ibid., 6). Antiperistasis was an Aristotelian concept whereby the intensification of a quality could be occasioned by its being surrounded by an opposite quality, as supposedly occurred with the sudden heating of a warm body when in contact with cold. Presumably, what Falcone meant was the superheating of hot air vapors surrounded by colder ones, in this case imagined to exist because of the volcano’s close proximity to the cool sea. 39. Francisco Suárez and Alfred J. Freddoso, On Efficient Causality: Metaphysical Disputations 17, 18, and 19, Yale Library of Medieval Philosophy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), xiii–xv. 40. “Dico che le materie le quali tengono accesi li monti d’Italia, e forsi tutti li altri, e che da tempo in tempo possono esser accesi (come al presente il Vesuvio) sono grassezze terre, generate sotto il mare” (ibid, 5). 41. Sulfur (S), in its crystal mineral form, is a sublimate of various volcanic gases and was actually very much present on Vesuvius. It has an easily detected odor and is generally yellow, orange, or white in color. 42. Falcone was referring to nitre (KNO3—potassium nitrate), which sometimes appears as an efflorescence in hot and dry regions. 43. Bitumen is today used as a generic name for certain mineral substances composed of hydrocarbons that can be solid, semisolid, or in liquid state, such as petroleum and asphalt. Naphtha is basically petroleum. Falcone, Discorso naturale, 9.

Notes to Pages 90–94  259 44. Ibid., 20. 45. “Vesuvius singulares est mons,” MS VI, A 11, Brancacciana, BNN. 46. “Tavola del numero dell’accensioni della distanza fra l’una, e l’altra accensione; dell’anni dell’accensioni dopo la nascita di N.S. Giesù Christo; dell’Autori, ove le scriveno; e si lasciano le precedenti, come non bene accertate ne i tempi, queste anco si sottoponeno a chi ha più tempo per aggiustar li tempi dell’ historie” (ibid., 3). 47. The tabular diagram was an important tool of visual representation in natural history and closely related to the praxis of collecting. The mass of data gathered by naturalists and medical professionals—mineralogical, zoological, botanical, and medicinal—was often structured and represented by way of the grid. See Claudia Swan, “From Blowfish to Flower Still Life Paintings: Classification and Its Images, circa 1600,” in Merchants and Marvels, ed. Smith and Findlen 109–36. Falcone cited a mix of classical, medieval, and contemporary sources including Dio Cassius, Suetonious, Procopius, Falco Beneventanus, Ambrogio Leone, and Giulio Cesare Capaccio. 48. Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx, 71–73, 113–14. 49. “Napoli paradiso delle delitie, amenità de’ piaceri, spasso delle vaghezze, bellissimo, gentilissimo, giocondissimo, stanze di Cerere fertilissima e di Nettuno abbondantissimo e di Venere cortesissima et piacevolissima, ma non più inanzi di gratia che vi è troppo da dire; ma per sbrigarmene in una parola sappia, che s’io havessi havuto i Lyncei, sarebbe per me stato troppo gusto, in questa vita, la stanza a Napoli.” “Cesi in Rome to Stelluti in Fabriano, July 17, 1604,” cited and translated in ibid., 245. 50. Ibid., 113. 51. “Lettere a Federico Cesi,” fol. 355, Corsiniana, Archivio Linceo 12. 52. Joseph Connors, “Virtuoso Architecture in Cassiano’s Rome,” in Cassiano Dal Pozzo’s Paper Museum, by Jennifer Montagu et al., Quaderni Puteani 3 (Milan: Olivetti, 1992), 2: 23–40. 53. “Lettere a Federico Cesi,” fol. 355, Corsiniana, Archivio Linceo 12. 54. Freedberg, Eye of the Lynx, 113–14. 55. “Dell’arte e della natura; Della natural composizione dell’orbe terrestre, e della posizion de principii elementari in esse orbe; Delli diversi movimenti naturali dell’acqua e della maree; Del fuoco e sua fede, e degli effetti dalla reciprocazione del caldo e del freddo; Delle miniere terrestri, Della struttura animale, Della struttura celeste, Della struttura e parti della vita piantale; Della investigation vulcania, e effeti ammirandi che da essa avvengano” (“Lettere a Federico Cesi,” fol. 355, Corsiniana, Archivio Linceo 12). 56. Ibid. 57. Fol. 82, Corsiniana, Archivio Linceo 12. 58. “Alli giorni passati si sono sentiti in quest nostri paesi della Marca, et anco a Spoleto e Perugia, alcuni rimbombi, come tiri di cannone, per lo spazio di dui giorni, al XVI e XVII del passato: si crede questo possa haver havuto origine in qualche modo dal terremoto successse a Napoli alli XV, o dalle fiamme che usciriono nell’istesso tempo dal Visuvio; e ne staremo aspettand il suo parere, con baciarli in questo mentre humilissimamente et affettuosamente le mani, con pregarli anco felicissimo in l’nuovo anno et innumerabili appressso. aff.mo et obbl.mo ser. re Lodovico Lodovici” Lodovico Lodovici, “Lodovico Lodovici to Galileo Galilei, Macerata, January 2, 1632,” in Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, ed. Garbasso and Abetti, 324.

260  Notes to Pages 95–100 59. I examine another Jesuit treatise, Giovanni Battista Mascolo’s De incendio Vesuvii (1633), in the chapter 7. 60. Recupito, De Vesuviano incendio nuntius, iv. 61. John Walter Hill, Roman Monody, Cantata, and Opera from the Circles around Cardinal Montalto (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 27. 62. My reading here is greatly aided by Giovanni Baffetti’s analysis. See, in particular, chap. 1, “Uno stile di pensiero,” in Giovanni Baffetti, Retorica e scienza: Cultura gesuitica e seicento italiano (Bologna: CLUEB, 1997), 15–71. 63. Recupito, De Vesuviano incendio nuntius, 3–4. 64. Giulio Cesare Recupito, Industrie per fare una buona morte: Operetta del P. Giulio Cesare Recupito della Compagnia di Giesù (Naples: Camillo Cavallo, 1647). 65. Recupito, De Vesuviano incendio nuntius, 4. 66. “Eodem die, quo Mons primum ardere visus, per plerasque Neapolitani regni urbes cinis depluvit, Beneventi, Baroli, Barii, Tarenti, Lupiis: quo nubes cinerea vicesima secunda eiusdem diei hora, pervenerat, octo dierum itinere totidem horis confecto” (ibid., 10). 67. Ibid., 14. 68. “Barolitani verò sedentes ad maris littora, similitudine soni decepti, qui à tormentis aeneis in pilarum iactu reddi solent, arbitrarentur aut navali bello duas inter se classes in alto decernere” (ibid., 16). 69. Here I draw specifically from Anthony Grafton’s essay “The Identities of History in Early Modern Europe: Prelude to a Study of the Artes Historicae,” in Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe, ed. Gianni Pomata and Nancy Siriasi (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 51–52. 70. “Erat Vesuvius, ut modo diximus, biceps, geminis, ac praealtis rupibus in caelum erectus” (Recupito, De Vesuviano incendio nuntius, 76). 71. “Haec, si Octaviani oppidi incolis, qui eo venatum itabant, habenda est fides, paucis ante conflagrationem diebus obstructa est, lateribus inter se coeuntibus” (ibid., 76). 72. “Iamque ex occidentali latere sine ullo culmine apparet, magna etiam sui parte deiectus. Ducentis fere quinquaginta passibus geometricis, si cum alter Montis vertice conferatur, decubuisse Mathematici deprehenderunt. Desaevierat olim flamma in Montis viscera, innoxiis iis, quae prominebat: nunc apex, et collum evanuere, tum eviscerato, nunc decurtato Vesuvio . . . Hic status Montis, dum haec scribo” (Recupito, De Vesuviano incendio nuntius, 77). 73. “Non inficior, multa loca subterraneis ignibus ardere. Sed aio ea, quae sic ardent, loca die, noctuque vicissim fumum, ac flammam exhalare” (ibid., 77–78). 74. “Quod vero scribit Ambrosius Nolanus, confuesse aliquos Augusto mense se in vaporaria conferre ad Vesuvium; id referendum non est ad flammas, quae indidem perpetuo fumum exhalent; sed ad vapores spiritibus calidis immistos, sulphureo infuso halitu” (ibid., 79). 75. “Equidem non negaverim, perennes aliquando ignes arsisse sub Vesuviuo” (ibid, 79– 80). 76. Craig Martin, “Experience of the New World and Aristotelian Revisions of the Earth’s Climates during the Renaissance,” History of Meteorology 3 (2006): 1–16. 77. “Sed quoniam haec spirituum copia multis est insita montibus, a quibus nullum creatur incendium: potior aliqua indaganda est ratio, cur conditi intra Vesuvium spiritus conflagrant, idque non semper, non saepe, sed per longissima intervalla. Tria sunt, quae rara, sed magna

Notes to Pages 100–104  261 Vesuvio incendia pariunt, cavernarum vastitas, soli tenacitas, bituminis et sulphuris copia” (Recupito, De Vesuviano incendio nuntius, 82). 78. “Cum igitur multis ab hinc seculis neque ignis, ut antea, conspiciendum se praebeat per os voraginis; neque inde vicissim per diem fumus, per noctem flamma reciprocent: iure coniici potest, Vesuvii subterraneos ignes per plures, et ingentes excrusiones avolasse. Atque adeo, cum nullum, nisi per intervalla saeculorum, fumi extet indicium; nullum ibidem perpetuo ignem occludi, sed praevio materiae apparatus per intervalla progigni” (ibid., 86). 79. Ibid., 55–57. 80. “Has quoque ut breviter attingam, admoneor, quod quo praestari clarius possit, non accedit, nisi fallor, ingratum; si Montis huius aspectum, situm, figuram, brevi narratione perstricta, quoad eius fieri poterit, oculis, animisq; subiecero” (ibid., 56). 81. Giulio Cesare Recupito, De novo in universa Calabria terraemotu congeminatus nuncius (Naples: Francesco Savio, 1638); the Roman reprint was Giulio Cesare Recupito, De Vesuviano incendio, et de terraemotu Calabriae, nuntis in lucem interim editus (Rome: Manelfo Manelfi, 1644). 82. Ascanio Capece to Antonio Capece in Bibliografia del Vesuvio: Compilata e corredata di note critiche estratte dai più autorevoli autori Vesuviani, comp. Federigo Furchheim (Naples: Emilio Prass, 1897), 160. 83. Vincenzo Alsario della Croce, Vesuvius ardens sive Exercitatio medico-physica ad rigopyreton, idest, Motum et incendium Vesuvii montis in Campania 16. mensis Decembris, anni 1631, bk. 2 (Rome: Guglielmo Facciotti, 1632), 1. 84. Furcheim, Bibliografia del Vesuvios, 35. 85. “Ho fin’hora assai con il cervello cavalcato, è tempo, che mi riposi nel Monte Vesuvio, per cui ho fatto questo viaggio, veduto con la mente tanti paesi, e tanti fuoghi, e ricercate tante miniere, vegliato tante notti, e messo à pericolo per le fatiche la vita, e per la censura di diverse opinioni l’honore” (Castelli, Incendio del Monte Vesuvio, 44). 86. Ibid., 75. 87. Ferrari, “Pietro Castelli,” 21:747–50. 88. Marsilio Cagnati, De tiberis inundatione medica disputatio (Rome, 1599). 89. Alix Cooper, Inventing the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 3. 90. “Volumen satis spissum et grande cum figuris propria ipsius manu delineatis quod nescio an unquam lucem publicam visurus sit” (Lankesger, ed., The Correspondence of John Ray, 24). 91. Enrico Bacco, Il regno di Napoli diviso in dodici Provincie con una breve descrittione delle cose più notabili: I nomi delle città, terre, e castella che vi sono con la nuova numeratione (Naples: Giovanni Giacomo Carlino and Costantino Vitale, 1608). 92. Castelli, Hyaena odorifera, 49. 93. “Anatomes enim me oculatum testem, iudicem equum et expertum Magistrum fecit: in cuius cognitionem neutiquam accessissem, nisi tua benignitate (Eques Illustrissime) huius animals cadavere potitus essem” (ibid., ii). 94. Francisco Hernández, Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus seu Plantarum Animalium Mineralium Mexicanorum Historia ex Francisci Hernández novi orbis Medici Primarii relationibus in ipsa Mexicana urbe conscriptis a Nardo Antonio Reccho Monte Corvinate

262  Notes to Pages 104–105 Cath. Maies. Medico et Neap. Regni Archiatro Generali Jussu Philippi II Hisp. Ind. Etc. Regis Collecta ac in ordinem digesta a Ioannae Terrentio Lynceo constantiense Germano Pho. Ac Medico Notis Illustrata (Rome: Vitale Mascardi, 1651). 95. This was Johann Faber’s edition of Nardo Antonio Recchi’s Latin text of Hernández’s notes on Mexican animals, which was possibly in circulation after 1628. Hyaena odorifera contained one of the illustrations of a New World animal that eventually graced the 1651 Thesaurus. Castelli had seen some iteration of it decades previously, possibly in the shop of father and son printers Giacomo and Vitale Mascardi. 96. There is every reason to believe that Castelli was up to the task set before him in the first weeks of 1632. The long title of his treatise included this selling point: “In which are treated burning places, the differences between fires, their signs, causes, prognostications, and remedies, with a method that is distinct, historical and philosophical” (“Nel quale si tratta di tutti gli Luoghi ardenti, delle Differenze delli Fuoghi; loro Segni; Cagioni; Prognostici; e Rimedii, con Metodo distinto, Historico, e Filosofico”), Incendio del Monte Vesuvio, frontispiece. Pietro Castelli, Petri Castelli Romani nobilis Messanensis philosophi et medici. In celeberrimo Mamertinorum Gymnasio medicinae pratica professori primarii. Anatomici publici chimiae extraordinarii interpretis atque academici horti simplicium proto praefecti, et fundatoris olim in Romano archigymnasio philosophiae primum, tum medicinae, et simplicium lectoris. Hortus Messanensis (Messina: Giovanni Franceschi Bianco, 1640). This assertion was in tune with Castelli’s many hats. A later work on his botanical garden in Messina, Hortus Messanensis (1640), e.g., listed him as having been reader of philosophy, medicine, and simples at La Sapienza before his transfer to Sicily. Though he could not vaunt it in 1631, he would also acquire the appellation of praefectus and fundator (governor and founder) of the horto at Messina. 97. It was an unusual undertaking, for myriad reasons. Not least of these was the fact that there existed few precedents with the exception of the ancients, among whom Pliny the Younger’s letters to the historian Tacitus—occasioned when his famed uncle disappeared into the maw of Vesuvius during in the eruption of the first century—were the most reliable source. 98. Castelli, Incendio del Monte Vesuvio, iii. Castelli also had something to say about the frenzy to publish. “If you find any error or negligence in this work, blame the printer too, who in his rush to make the reasons for Vesuvius’s great fracas known to a bewildered and curious public . . . lifted it from my hands and printed it, without giving me the opportunity to rewrite, tidy, emend, or reread it” (“Ma se in questa Operetta troverassi alcun’errore, e negligenza: venga meco della colpa a parte lo Stampatore, il quale per la fretta di darla al pubblico, attonito, e curioso di saper le cagioni di tanto fracasso del Vesuvio . . . che me l’hà rapita di mano, e posta alla stampa, senza lasciarmela riscrivere, pulire, emendare, o almeno rileggere”), ibid., ii. 99. This opened a salvo characteristic of someone who spent as much time as possible in gardens and fields: “So whose job is it to experiment with medicines? Doctors, who never see them, and when they do they don’t recognize them? Collectors of simples who have them in their hands every day?” (“Sarà dunque l’esperienza quella, che ci mostrarà, quando, e come una cosa si guasta. E à chi toccarà esperimentare li medicamenti à Medici, che non li vedono mai, e vedendoli non li conoscono, o alli Spetiali, che di continuo ogni giorno l’hanno nelle mani?”), Pietro Castelli, Discorso della duratione de medicamenti tanto semplici quanto composti di Pietro Castelli Romano: Opera utile tanto a Medici, quanto a Spetiali per la quale si cognosce il vero modo di giudicare qual si voglia Medicamento o semplice, o composto (Rome: Giacomo Mascardi,

Notes to Pages 105–108  263 1621), 67. After moving to Sicily in the early 1630s, not long after writing the Incendio del Monte Vesuvio, Castelli was in an even better position to satisfy his proclivities. Close to Etna, he journeyed on to the volcano’s slopes to collect plants. With numerous correspondents and support from the authorities in Messina, he was sent objects for examination and tasked with inspecting, e.g., a rotting shipment of grain. Pietro Castelli, Pietro Castelli Romani Nobilis Messanensis Medici, et Philosophi. In celeberrimo mamertinorum Gymnasio medicinae Theoricae Professoris Primarii ac almi eiusdem Urbis Medicorum Collegii Prioris et Decani, olim in Romano Archigymnasio philosophiae primum, deinde Medicinae, et Simplicium Professoris. Relatio de qualitatibus frumenti cuiusdam Messanam delati anno 1637 ad Illustrissimum Senatum Messanensem (Naples: Ottavio Beltramo, 1637). 100. “Et incominciando dall’America del Mondo parte ultimamente trovata, che India Occidentale chiamano evvi in questa un Regno detto la Nuova Spagna, ove nella provincia di Nicaragua hanno osservato i Spagnuoli più di dieci Monti, che come tanti Mongibelli ardono di continuo” (Castelli, Incendio del Monte Vesuvio, 3). 101. Carlo Castellani, Catalogo ragionato delle più rare o più importanti opera geografiche che si conservano nella Biblioteca del Collegio Romano (Rome, 1876), 232. 102. Manuel de Goes, Io¯anne¯s Argyropoulos, and Aristotle, Commentarij Collegij Conimbricensis, Societatis Iesu, in quatuor libros de coelo, Meteorologicos & Parua naturalia, Aristotelis Stagiritae (Cologne: Impensis Lazari Zetzneri, 1603). 103. Castelli, Incendio del Monte Vesuvio, 43. 104. “In Provincia Guatemallam Peruana materia quaedam sulphurea est, quae sine arte pro pulvere pyrio est” (ibid., 43). 105. Pacaya is thirty kilometers from Guatemala City. 106. “Quae causa est etiam murmuram subterraneorum, que succedit terramotus et ignium, tamquam ex Vesuvio, et Aetna violenter egressus” (Castelli, Incendio del Monte Vesuvio, 43). 107. “Perché non essendo io oculato testimonio del caso che racconto, sono sforzato servirmi della testimonianza di persone accorte, e diligenti, e poi con le raggioni, che l’arte e la natura, mi concedono, investigarne le cause” (ibid., 75). 108. Ibid., 76. 109. Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx, 15–65. 110. “Hyaena autem odorata, et Zibethum ferens duplex est, Arabica, et Americana, ambo conveniunt in generatione Zibethi: sed forma aliquantulum different, ni pictor nos fefellerit in Americana. Namque Zibethicum Animal Americanum, quod pictum ostendit Nardus Antonius Recchius hanc habet formam” (Castelli, Hyaena odorifera, 17). 111. Simon Varey, ed., The Mexican Treasury: The Writings of Dr. Francisco Hernández (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 5–6. One copy of Hernández’s natural history is held by the John Carter Brown Library, cataloged as Codex Latin 5. 112. He must have seen some version of Hernández’s notes dedicated to animals—which became Johann Faber’s Animalia Mexicana descriptionibus, possibly published in 1628 and appearing as a section attached to the 1651 Thesaurus. Varey, ed., Mexican Treasury, 16–17. 113. “Sub quo Animalium genere sit reponenda Civetta” (Castelli, Hyaena odorifera, 16). 114. Ibid., 19–21. 115. Ibid., 25. 116. Ibid., 24.

264  Notes to Pages 109–115 117. Ogilvie, The Science of Describing, 224. 118. Erik Neil, “The Hortus Messanensis of Pietro Castelli: Science, Nature, and Landscape Architecture in 17th-Century Messina,” Lexicon, no.1 (2005), 6–19, esp. 7. 119. See ibid., 6–19, especially the analysis of the following works: Tobia Aldini [and Pietro Castelli], Exactissima descriptio rariorum quarundam plantarum, quae continentur Romae in Horto Farnesiano. Rome (Rome: Giacomo Mascardi, 1625); and Pietro Castelli, Hortus Messanensis (Messina: Francesco Bianchi, 1640). 120. “Et se per essere io in questo estremo d’Italia, sono quasi fuori del commercio humano, non dimeno vorrei in qualche parte mostrarmi huomo, et achor vivo: onde il passato Agosto ascesi al Monte Aetna per darlo compagno al mio Vesuvio, ma trovai presente più difficulta in questo, che trovassi assente in quello, et havendo descritto, disegnato, e bon considerato quanto mi è occorso vedere, non ho hauto compita sodisfattione.” I have translated this part of the letter to Dal Pozzo as it appears transcribed in Neil, “The Hortus Messanensis of Pietro Castelli,” app. 1. 121. Ibid. 122. Neil argues—accurately, I think—both that Dal Pozzo was receptive to Castelli’s work and that the Roman doctor was considered an authority on volcanoes. See ibid., 14. 123. For example of the accounts Hamilton consulted, see descriptions such as that by Giovanni Maria Della Torre, Storia e fenomeni del Vesuvio (Naples: G. Raimondi, 1755), 65. 124. Recupito, De Vesuviano incendio nuntius, 79.

Chapter 4 1. “Narratione historica dell’antichità del tribunale del Santo Officio,” MS II D3, fol. 97, Brancacciana, BNN. 2. Ibid. 3. D. Gioseffo Mormile, L’Incendii del Monte Vesuvio e delle straggi e rovine che ha fatto ne’tempi antichi, e moderni infino a 3 Marzo 1632 (Naples, 1632), 27. 4. Wassyng Roworth, “The Evolution of History Painting,” 219–34. 5. Villari, La rivolta antispagnola a Napoli, 3–91; Astarita, Between Salt Water and Holy Water, 86–188. 6. “Monte Vesuvio ac eius eruptione,” MS II A10, fol. 111, Brancacciana, BNN. 7. “Carte miscellanee,” XVI (2442), fols 103–25, Biblioteca Casanatense. 8. MS XVI (2442), fol. 128, Biblioteca Casanatense. 9. Musi, L’Italia dei viceré, 41–42. See also, Giuseppe Galasso, Alla periferia dell’Impero: Il Regno di Napoli nel periodo spagnolo (secoli XVI-XVII) (Turin: Einaudi 1994). 10. Musi, L’Italia dei viceré, 43. See also, Rivero Rodriguez, “La fundación del Consejo de Italia: Corte, grupos de poder y periferia (1536–1559), in Instituciones y elites de poder en la Monarquía Hispana durante el siglo XVI, ed. José Martínez Millán (Madrid: Ediciones de la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 1992), 199–221. For a general survey of Italian aristocrats and military service see Gregory Hanlon, The Twilight of a Military Tradition: Italian Aristocrats and European Conflicts, 1560–1800 (New York: Holmes & Meyer, 1998). 11. For a demographic study of early modern Naples, see Claudia Petraccone, Napoli dal Cinquecento all’Ottocento: Problemi di storia demografica e sociale (Naples: Guida, 1975). 12. Musi, L’Italia dei viceré, 62.

Notes to Pages 116–118  265 13. Ibid., 68. Wealth, power, and the Neapolitan aristocracy have been studied closely both in the urban and rural context. See Gérard Delille, Famille et propriété dans le Royaume de Naples, XVe-XIXe siècle (Rome: École française de Rome, 1985); and Gérard Labrot, Quand l’histoire murmure: Villages et campagnes du royaume de Naples (XVIe-XVIIIe siècle) (Rome: École française de Rome, 1995). 14. John M. Headley, Tommaso Campanella and the Transformation of the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 1–13. See also, Antonio Calabria, The Cost of Empire: The Finances of the Kingdom of Naples in the Time of Spanish Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 130–32. 15. Headley, Tommaso Campanella, 12–13. Compare Tommaso Astarita, The Continuity of Feudal Power: The Caracciolo di Brienza in Spanish Naples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Villari, La rivolta antispagnola a Napoli. 16. Vincenzo Starace was the eletto del popolo, representative of the popular assembly in the city’s government. Rosario Villari makes much of his lynching in his seminal study on the background to the Masaniello revolt: antispagnola a Napoli. See also, Perez Zagorin, Rebels and Rulers, 1500–1660 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 17. Anthony Pagden, Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination: Studies in European and Spanish-American Social and Political Theory, 1513–1830 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 65–68. 18. This historic rupture, during which the rebels articulated an ideology of republicanism and independence from Spain, took shape as the rebels progressed from imagining themselves as Naples’s “most faithful” servants of the Spanish crown, making their grievances heard, to the agents of a new republic on the Venetian model. See Rosario Villari, Per il re o per la patria: La fedeltà nel Seicento (Bari: Laterza, 1994). 19. Pagden, Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination, 67. 20. Strict control on the part of both Spanish and ecclesiastical authorities made Naples’s printing industry one of the most tightly regulated in Italy. This had been the case at least since the 1540s. Decrees and rulings against the city’s printers were carefully collected. They show that many of the latter occasionally flirted with heavy penalties and jail time. This included Costantino Vitale, who printed books by Della Porta, Imperato, and Capaccio; see “Vitae aliquot virorum Neapolis urbus et provinciarum Regni,” MS I Aa 11, Brancacciana, BNN. 21. As was also discussed in the previous chapter, the connections between the eruption of 1631 and the revolt of 1647 became commonplace by the late 1600s. Domenico Gargiulo’s paintings of the eruption, the revolt, and the plague of 1656 can be interpreted, e.g., as representing the city’s calamitous seventeenth-century history. 22. Camillo Tutini, “Prodigiosi portenti del Monte Vesuvio,” MS V F 3, fol. 167, Brancacciana, BNN. 23. A personal communication from John Marino (February 2010) informed me that a manuscript version of Tutini’s important reformist work titled Dell’origine e fundation de’ Seggi di Napoli, del tempo in cui furonono istituiti, e della separation de’ nobili dal popolo (Naples: Ottavio Beltrano, 1644) was circulating in 1630. See also John Marino, “The Zodiac in the Streets: Inscribing ‘Buon Governo’ in Baroque Naples,” in Embodiments of Power: Building Baroque Cities in Austria and Europe, ed. Gary B. Cohen and Franz A.J. Szabo (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007), 203–29.

266  Notes to Pages 118–121 24. Walter Pinto, Racconti di opere e racconti di uomini: La storiografia artistica a Napoli tra periegesi e biografia 1685–1700 (Naples: Paparo Edizioni, 1997), 117–20. 25. Camillo Tutini and Marino Verde, Racconto della sollevatione di Napoli accaduta nell’anno MDCXLVII, ed. Pietro Messina (Rome: Instituto storico italiano per l’età moderna e contemporanea, 1997). 26. Girolamo de Miranda, Una quiete operosa: Forma e pratiche dell’Accademia Napoletana degli Oziosi, 1611–1645 (Napoli: Fridericiana Editrice Universitaria, 2000), 41. On Lemos, see Giuseppe Galasso, “Le riforme del conte di Lemos e le finanze napoletane nella prima metà del Seicento,” in Mezzogiorno medievale e moderno (Turin: Einaudi, 1965). Some historians have stressed the close connection between the early Oziosi literati and the viceroy’s court, suggesting that the society was an important place of contact between Spaniards and Neapolitan elites. See O. H. Green, “The Literary Court of the Conde de Lemos at Naples, 1610–1616,” Hispanic Review 1 (1933): 292–96. 27. Vittorio Ivo Comparato, “Società civile e società letteraria nel primo Seicento: L’accademia degli Oziosi,” Quaderni Storici 23 (1973): 360. 28. Ibid., 369. 29. De Miranda, Una quiete operosa, 43–44. 30. To place the Oziosi in a broader context, see Antonella Ambrosio, L’erudizione storica a Napoli nel seicento:manoscritti d’interesse medievalistico del Fondo Brancacciani della Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, Iter Campanum (Salerno: Carlone, 1996); and Badaloni, “Fermenti di vita intelletuale a Napoli dal 1500 alla metà del 600,” 643–89. 31. De Miranda, Una quiete operosa, 45. 32. Franceso De Pietri, Problemi accademici (Naples: F. Savio, 1642), cited in Musi, L’Italia dei viceré, 134–35. 33. The canonical introduction to civic humanism and the notion of “republican liberty” remains Hans Baron’s, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966). The “Baron thesis” suggests that Florentine civic humanism, with its assertion of Florence’s republican uniqueness, sprang out of the threat posed by despotic Visconti Milan in the 1390s and early 1400s. For these themes in relation to Venice, see William J. Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter Reformation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). For Renaissance Naples, see Bentley, Politics and Culture in Renaissance Naples. 34. These paragraphs are indebted to Thomas Dandelet’s Spanish Rome, 1500–1700 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), esp. chaps. 2 and 3. 35. Ibid., 43. Compare: Florián Morales De Ocampo and Ambrosio Morales De Ocampo, La crónica de España (1541; repr., Alcalá, 1574), 134. 36. Dandelet, Spanish Rome, 57–108. 37. Another important analysis of Naples in the Spanish imperial system remains Galasso’s Alla periferia dell’impero; see, esp., 9–21. See also: Giuseppe Galasso, “Da Napoli gentile a Napoli fedelissima,” Annali dell’Istituto Suor Orsola Benincasa (1996): 47–121. 38. Ambrosio, L’erudizione storica a Napoli, 32–35. Giulio Cesare Capaccio’s early works included Historia Puteolana (Naples: Costantino Vitale, 1604), and La vera antichità.

Notes to Pages 122–125  267 39. Capaccio, Il forastiero. 40. G. A. Summonte, Historia della città e regno di Napoli (Naples: G. G. Carlino and A. Pace, 1601). The Historia would be revised and republished in the decadesthat followed. For a late edition, see Giovanni Summonte, Historia della Città e Regno di Napoli di Giovanni Antonio Summonte Napolitano, 2nd ed. (Naples: Antonio Bulifon, 1675). 41. Francesco Imperato, Discorso politico intorno al Regimento delle Piazze e della Citta di Napoli (1604), 247, cited in Ambrosio, L’erudizione storica a Napoli, 30. 42. Villari, La rivolta antispagnola a Napoli, 107. 43. Villari, Per il re o per la patria, 3–36. 44. Francesco De Pietri, Dell’historia Napoletana (Naples, 1634), 30, cited in Musi, L’Italia dei viceré, 141. Compare Vittorio Ivo Comparato, Uffici e società a Napoli (1600–1647): Aspetti dell’ideologia del magistrato dell’età moderna (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1974). 45. The details of this episode are recounted in the first chapter. 46. “Carte miscellanee,” MS XXVII A5, fols. 403–4, Biblioteca della Società Napoletana di Storia Patria. 47. Aurelio Musi, La rivolta di Masaniello nella scena politica barocca (Naples: Guida, 1989), 122–23. 48. De Miranda, Una quiete operosa, 190–91. 49. Cited in Musi, L’Italia dei viceré, 146. 50. Villari, Per il re o per la patria, 3–18. 51. Tutini’s letter appears in a manuscript version of the Racconto della sollevatione di Napoli (MS Egerton 885, fol. 40, British Library,). See Tutini and Verde, Racconto, xliii. 52. Marino, “The Zodiac in the Streets,” 204. 53. See Tutini, Dell’origine e fundation de’ Seggi di Napoli. 54. Tutini and Verde, Racconto, xl. 55. This thesis is considered in detail in Giuseppe Galasso, “Una ipotesi di blocco storico oligarchico-borghese nella Napoli del ’600: I Seggi di Camillo Tutini fra politica e storiografia,” Rivista Storica Italiana 90 (1978): 507–30. 56. “La Nobiltà Napolitana al presente sta divisa in cinque seggi, o pur cinque Piazze come Capuana, Montagna, Nido, Porto, e Portanova, lasciando a dietro la divisione in 24 piazze conforme i tempi andati ella era distinta; hoggi solo in questi cinque, et è unita e separata e tra di loro non vi è maggioranza ne prerogativa, onde nel Tribunale della Città, ove assiedono gli eletti Nobili che ogniuno d’essi rapresenta un seggio non vi è precedenza, ma il primo che giunge ha il primo luogo, et tiene il Campanello. Questa Nobiltà è molto cospicua per la antichità della sua nobiltà, per lo dominio de Vassalli, per i tituli, per i lustroni, per le parentele de grandi, per gli supremi Magistrati, et per le dignità Ecclesiastiche, onde gareggia con tutte le famiglie nobili dell’Italia e sebbene non è nobiltà libera ma è stata soggetta alle prime Corone dell’europa si gloria bensi d’haver contratta parentela coi propri Re che l’hanno signoreggiata, come in questa breve narratione dimostraremo e benche ne sia stato di essa da molti scrittori parlato, Io dirò qualche cosa delle loro magnificenze quali ho trascurate da dotti autori non osservate da essi, che da publici Archivii, et da buoni Originali l’havemo raccolte, risultandomi poi in altro ragionamento di parlare dell’altri seggi.” This is from an earlier manuscript draft (one of many) of the Della origine e fundation de’ seggi (MS II F1, fol. 13, Brancacciana, BNN).

268  Notes to Pages 126–129 57. Galasso, “Una ipotesi di blocco storico,” 515–25. 58. Giancarlo Alfano, ed., Tre catastrofi: Eruzioni, rivolta, e la peste nella poesia del seicento napoletano (Naples: Cronopio, 2001), 11. 59. Di Falco, Descrittione dei luoghi antichi di Napoli. 60. Capaccio, La vera antichità, 163–69. 61. Gherardo Ortalli, Lupi, genti, culture: Uomo e ambiente nel medioevo (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), 155–88. 62. Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City States in Renaissance Italy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 162–90. 63. Venice and the sea suggest the most illustrative parallel for how intensely Neapolitan culture engaged in a reflection of  Vesuvius and the agricultural landscapes that surrounded it. On the maritime city, see Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, Venice Triumphant: The Horizons of a Myth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). 64. “L’Eruttione del Vesuvio, c’ha mosso tante penne allo scrivere, ha potuto similmente invitar me à quest’opera.” Camillo Tutini, Memorie della vita, miracoli, e culto di San Gianuario Martire vescovo di Benevento e principal protettore della Città di Napoli (Naples, 1633), v. 65. Ibid., 50. 66. The steps taken by the viceroy and the council are recorded in Notamenti, vol. 25, March 29, 1632, Regio Collaterale Consiglio, Archivio di Stato di Napoli. 67. If information was often at the service of the baroque order, censorship was an imperfect art and most words suspect. Conversely, Neapolitan printers were often willing to incur significant risks to publish materials, as was the case with Costantino Vitale and Lazzaro Scorrigio, both of whom were at points jailed for printing without a license. Complex mechanisms factored into print culture, ranging from the author, to the printer, to secular and ecclesiastical authorities. Responses to Vesuvius moved through these various filters, not least of which was the decision to publish. Seventeenth-century views of printing and censorship can be found in MS II B 4–13, Brancacciana, BNN. 68. Part of what follows below appears in a previous essay, “Contesting Vesuvius.” 69. Ambrosio, L’erudizione storica a Napoli nel seicento, 25. 70. Tutini, “Prodigiosi portenti del Monte Vesuvio,” MS Chigiani V.136, fols. 272–79, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (hereafter cited as BAV). 71. G. Lacava, La R. Biblioteca Brancacciana (Naples: Giannini, 1908); Antonio Miola, Catalogo topografico–descrittivo dei manoscritti della R. Biblioteca Brancacciana (Naples: L. Lubrano, 1918). 72. MS 43, fol. 101, Nunziatura Napoli, Archivio di Stato di Venezia, cited in Tutini and Verde, Racconto, xxvi. 73. MS Chigiani N.III.70, fols. 364–78, BAV, cited in Tutini and Verde, Racconto, xxviii. 74. Giuseppe Maiani, Relatione della Rivolutione popolare seguita nella Città et Regno di Napoli, MS Barb. Lat. 5253, fols. 223–28, BAV, cited in Marino and Verde, Racconto, xxviii. 75. “S’è veduto ultimamente nell’orribile e spaventevole incendio accaduto a 16 Decembre del 1631, che dopo sedici anni si sollevò Napoli nel cacciando i Spagnoli . . . havendo i Popolari di quella citta fatti capi, [illegible word] ricevuta ubidienta dal Regno tutto e signoreggiava ogni cosa l’maggiormente, si vende prodigiosa questa nuova evaporatione in quest’anno 1649, poiché in tanto poco tempo dopo 18 anni dalla sopra narrata habbia e cenere e fuoco e tremuoti prodotti

Notes to Pages 129–135  269 il Vesuvio, mentre non capita spesso sogliono accadere delle eruttioni, dovendosi la materia accendibile, che deve poi il monte mandar fuori col progresso di molti secoli generarsi nelle sue viscere. Ma se questi clamori del Monte e se questi scuotimenti della terra a più alto principio demonstransi, vederemo esser segni quasi segna naturali e che la terra col scuotersi favellasse dicendo non poter più soffrire il tiranno Dominio Spagnuolo.” Tutini, “Prodigiosi portenti del Monte Vesuvio,” MS V F3, fol. 167, Brancacciana, BNN. 76. “Carte Miscellanee,” MS IV B15, fol. 414, Brancacciana, BNN. 77. Villari, Per il re o per la patria, 20. 78. Tutini and Verde, Racconto, 1. 79. Tutini, “Anatomico discorso del Regno di Napoli,” MS II A8, Brancacciana, BNN. 80. “Terra clamat—i falsi giuramenti fatti dai spagnoli e la fede violata a Dio et alle genti promettendo e giurando di perdonare a Napoletani li quali forzati di strapazzare tanto questi Barbari, che hanno esanguato, impoverito, e ridotto in miseria Napoli e il Regno insieme.” Tutini, “Prodigiosi portenti del Monte Vesuvio,” MS V F3, fol. 167, Brancacciana, BNN. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid. 83. Ibid. 84. “Terra clamat—contro a Nobili a Popolari di Napoli li quali sono senza giustitia e non s’accorgano della loro rovina col star disuniti, poicché i Spagnoli fromentano dette discordie per tenerli divisi, acció agiatamente possan esterminare la nobiltà e tenere come schiavi i Popolari, pero unione, unione a scacciare dal nostro seno il comune nemico, e se non lasciate l’interessi particolari et abbracciate il bene pubblico sarete da questa inhumana gente peggio degl’Indiani trattati, essendo essi di natura si infame, e quanti piu benefici da noi ricorrono, tanto piu crudeli si rendono contro di noi” (ibid.). 85. Tutini and Verde, Racconto della sollevatione, 170. 86. Tutini, “Prodigiosi portenti del Monte Vesuvio,” MS V F3, fol. 167, Brancacciana, BNN. 87. Ibid. 88. Ibid. 89. Villari, Per il re o per la patria, 19–20. 90. Tutini, “La porta di San Giovani Luteranno,” MS II A8, fol. 3, Brancacciana, BNN. Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, 65. 91. Tutini, “La porta di San Giovani Luteranno,” MS II A8, fol. 3, Brancacciana, BNN. 92. Pietro Giannone, The Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples (London, 1729). See chap. 3. 93. MS V F3, fol. 127, Brancacciana, BNN. 94. Jaques Blondel and James Aronson, Biology and Wildlife of the Mediterranean Region (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 57–82. 95. Tutini, “Anatomico discorso del Regno di Napoli,” MS II A8, fol. 7, Brancacciana, BNN. 96. Ibid. 97. Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, 57–149. 98. The viceroy was the Count of Monterrey, so this was presumably done before 1637. 99. The inscription is transcribed and translated into Italian in Angelandrea Casale and Felice Marciano, Vesuvio 1631. L’eruzione alla luce di nuovi documenti (Naples: Procaccini, 1994), 24–25.

270  Notes to Pages 135–141 100. Giacinto Gimma, Della Fisica sotterranea (Naples, 1730); Giovanni Maria Della Torre, Storia e fenomeni del Vesuvio (Naples, 1768); M. Attumonelli, Della eruzione del Vesuvio accaduta nel mese di Agosto dell’anno 1779 (Naples, 1779); Ascanio Filomarino, Breve descrizione de’ principali incendi del monte Vesuvio e di molte vedute di essi ora per la prima volta ricavate dagli storici contemporanei ed esistenti nel gabinetto del Duca Della Torre (Naples, 1794). 101. Recupito, De Vesuviano incendio nuntius, 77. 102. Volcanologists define this type of volcanic activity as “effusive” rather than “explosive,” as it results when the magma conduit is open. Antonio Nazzaro, Il Vesuvio: Storia eruttiva e teorie vulcanologiche (Naples: Liguori Editore, 2001), 343–47. 103. Here I adopt elements of Eric Ash’s definition of early modern expertise. See “Introduction: Expertise and the Early Modern State,” 4–11.

Chapter 5 1. Falcone, Discorso naturale, 34. 2. Ilaria Cerbai and Claudia Principe, eds., Bibliography of Historic Activity on Italian Volcanoes (Pisa: CNR Istituto di Geocronologia e Geochimica Isotopica, 1996), 9. 3. “Noti a noi sono molti Fuoghi nell’ America, nell’ Africa, nell’ Asia e nell’ Europa. Et incominciando dall’ America del mondo parte ultimamente ritrovata, che India Occidentale chiamano, evvi in questa un Regno detto la nova Spagna, ove nella Provincia di Nicaragua hanno osservato i Spagnuoli più di dieci Monti, che come tanti Mongibelli ardono di continuo gettando a lungo, e spargendo ceneri, e sassi abrugiati, e vedevesi di giorno il fumo, e di notte il fuoco: onde sono chiamati Vulcani” (Castelli, Incendio del Monte Vesuvio, 3). 4. Ibid., 21. 5. The remoteness of these volcanic islands even struck Déodat Delomieu in the later eigh­ teenth centuryVoyage aux iles de Lipari, fait en 1781, ou notice sure les iles Aeoliennes, pour servir a l’histoire des volcans (Paris: Rue et Hotel Serpente, 1783). 6. Giovanni Maria Della Torre, Storia e fenomeni del Vesuviuo esposti dal P.D. Gio: Maria Della Torre Cher. Reg. Somasco Professore di Fisica dell’Accademia Arcivescovale di Napoli, e Corrispondente dell’Accademia Reale di Francia (Naples: presso Giuseppe Raimondi, 1755), 5–9. 7. In later decades, Kircher had an elaborate network of correspondents that kept him informed. When Vesuvius erupted in 1669, correspondence from Naples reporting the event reached him. See, e.g., letters in “Carte Miscellanee,” MS IV B13, Brancacciana, BNN. The reflex to dust off Pliny’s letters at the sight of the eruption is explored in chap. 2. 8. “Die 29 Martii 1632,” Notamenti delle Collaterale, ASN. 9. Kircher, Mundus subterraneus, praefatio. 10. Pietro Bembo, Lyric Poetry: Etna, ed. and trans. Mary P. Chatfield, I Tatti Renaissance Library 18 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 224. 11. “Porticum concessi, ad radices montis situm oppidum; hinc fideli et viarum ignaro comite rustico, opima sane mercede conducto, media nocte montem per difficiles, salebrosas arduasque vias conscendi, cujus craterem cum jam obtinuissem, horrendum dictu, totum igne illuminatum vidi cum intolerabili sulphuris et bituminis ardentis mephiti” (Kircher, Mundus subterraneus, praefatio).

Notes to Pages 141–142  271 12. “Horrendi percipiebantur montis mugitus et fremitus, putor inexplicabilis, fumi subfuscis ignium globis mixti, quos ex undecim diversisi licis, tum fundus, tum latera montis continuo eructabant, identidem me illud eructare cogebant: O Altitudo divitiarum sapientiae et scientiae Dei, quam incomprehensibiles sunt viae tuae!” (ibid.). 13. “Si potentiam tuam tam formidabilis Naturae portendis contra preavaricantis humanis generis malitiam ostendis, quid erit in illo novissimo die, quo Terra ira furoris tui submersa, elementa calore solvetur?” (ibid). 14. I explore this in chap. 4. 15. Braccini, Dell’incendio, 30. 16. Gaspar Schott, Pantometrum Kircherianum, hoc est, instrumentum geometricum novum, à celeberrimo viro P. Athanasio Kirchero ante hac inventum, nunc decem libris, universam paenè practicam geometriam complectentibus explicatum, perspicuisque demonstrationibus illustratum. À Gaspare Schott ( Würzburg: J. Haertz, 1660), xvii. 17. “Pantometrum appellat ipse, eo quod unum omnia metiatur; latitudines scilicet longitudines, altitudines, profunditates, superficies, corpora terrestrial, coelestia, quidquiddenique omnibus omnium fere aliorum instrumentis solemus, praeter innumerabiles alios, quos habet, usus” (ibid., xxiv). 18. His treatise on the instrument, revealingly published in Naples, was one of his first books: Athanasius Kircher, Specula Melitensis encyclica, hoc est syntagma novum instrumentorum physico-mathematicorum (Naples: Secondino Roncagliolo, 1638). 19. Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, Galileo’s Compass (Florence: Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, 2004), http://brunelleschi.imss.fi.it/esplora/compasso/dswmedia/risorse /testi_completi_eng.pdf. 20. Kircher, Mundus subterraneaus, praefatio, caput III. 21. The eruption of 1631 sparked a period of activity that ran until 1944, after which Vesuvius began to cool and entered the dormant period it is in today. The volcanic activity Kircher observed in 1638 is referred to as Strombolian or effusive by modern geologists. The first term is de­ rived from the volcano Stromboli, which experiences minor eruptions on a daily basis, most of which involve the extrusion of ash, pumice, and a little magma at low pressure. These frequent, low-energy eruptions result in the formation of a new cone, much like Kircher observed. In the case of Vesuvius, occasional and more powerful explosive eruptions, like the ones of 1660 and 1696–98, could result in the partial collapse of this buildup and dangerous flows of lava. This is reconstructed in Nazzaro, Il Vesuvio, 20–32; see also Antonio Nazzaro, “Elenco delle principali eruzioni del Vesuvio,” in Il Vesuvio, ed. Nicola di Fusco and Ettore di Caterina (Naples: Electa, 1998), 146–51. 22. In his clever essay on the geologist Charles Lyell (1797–1875) and the development of a “uniformitarian” theory of geology, Stephen Jay Gould notes the irony that the stunning examples of volcanism in the Bay of Naples, which had long suggested, from Pliny to Kircher, the image of catastrophic and sudden geological change, ultimately became the basis of scientific views that led in a different direction: toward a theory that observable processes, operating at characteristically gradual rates, explain geological change without the need to invoke episodic global paroxysms that operate in an early period of planetary history and are then superseded by mature global stability. See Stephen Jay Gould, “Lyell’s Pillars of  Wisdom,” in The Lying Stones of Marrakech (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2000), 151.

272  Notes to Pages 142–146 23. Paula Findlen, ed., Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything (New York: Routledge, 2004), 21. 24. Findlen, Possessing Nature, 190. 25. Portions of the lava flows from Vesuvius’s last eruption in 1944 are still heavily covered by the lichen Stereocaulon vesuvianum, with its distinctive gray hue clearly visible. 26. Di Fusco and di Caterina, eds., Il Vesuvio, 11–12. Botanists estimate that Vesuvius might be home to six hundred plant species. Eighteen are endemic and only found on the volcano. Due to the savage building and encroachment that has ensued in the modern period, especially following the volcano’s dormancy after 1944, plants that would have been present in Kircher’s day have since disappeared, by some estimates as many as three hundred species. See Sandro Pignatti, Flora d’Italia, 3 vols. (Bologna: Edagricole, 1982). For a survey of scientific literature on Vesuvius, see Lucia Civetta, “Storia eruttiva del Somma-Vesuvio,” in Archeologia e Vulcanologia in Campania, ed. Pietro Giovanni Guzzo and Renato Peroni (Naples: Arte Tipografica, 1998), 9–16. 27. Francesco Fontana, Novae coelestium terrestriumque rerum observationes et fortasse hactenus non vulgate: A Francisco Fontana specillis a se inventis et ad summam perfectionis perductis editae (Naples: aput Gaffarum, 1646), 104–6. Regarding the hunch that Fontana may have been referring to a volcano, references to conical shape do appear in seventeenth-century volcanological tracts: “Inter Pelorum, et Pachinum Siciliae promontoria in littore Orientali elevatur immensae magnitudinis Mons, solitarius, conica ferme figura assurgens . . . Postrema, et altissima, Aetnae regio nudo omnino salebrosa, et arenis horrida subsequitur, quae per 6 et 8 et plura milliaria, usque ad supremum cacumen ascendit, et tandem desint in Montem valde acclivem sed discissim ad instar pyramidis, vel coni dissecti plano parallelo basi, qui vulgo vocabatur, Pileus, in cuius summitate aderat vasta vorago, quam Veteres Craterem Aetnaeum appellabant, ex quo frequenter fumi, et aliquando flammae vomuntur.” Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, Historia et meteorologia incendii Aetnaei anni 1669 (Reggio Calabria, 1670), 1–2. 28. The terms are throughout the tract. See especially the observations made of the full moon: Fontana, Novae coelestium terrestriumque rerum observationes, 56. Again, one finds similar terms used in volcanological tracts: “Fontes frequentissimi in Aetnae dorso exurgunt . . .” Borelli, Historia et meteorologia, 4. 29. “Fons, mare, sylva, lacus, mons, horti, balnea, campi, flumina, sunt uno nomine: Parthenope.” Girolamo Angeriano cited in Francesco Lo Parco, Un accademico pontaniano del secolo XVI, precursore dell’Ariosto e del Parini; contributo alla storia dell’Umanesimo e della cultura italiana nel cinquecento (Ariano: Stab. tipograco Appulo-Irpino, 1898), 24. 30. Fontana, Novae coelestium terrestriumque rerum observationes, 7. 31. Ibid., 3. 32. Albert Van Helden, “Galileo, Telescopic Astronomy, and the Copernican System,” in Planetary Astronomy from the Renaissance to the Rise of Astrophysics, ed. René Taton and Curtis Wilson, General History of Astronomy, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 104. 33. Judith Veronica Field and Frank A. J. L. James, Renaissance and Revolution: Humanists, Scholars, Craftsmen, and Natural Philosophers in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 99. 34. Johannes Hevelius, Johannis Hevelii Selenographia Sive, Lunae Descriptio: Atque Accu-

Notes to Pages 147–151  273 rata, Tam Macularum Ejus, Quam Motuum Diversorum Aliarumque Omnium Vicissitudinum, Phasiumque, Telescopii Oper Deprhensarum, Delineatio; In quâ simul caeterorum omnium Planetarum nativa facies, variaeque observationes, praesertim autem Macularum Solarium . . . sub aspectum ponuntur. . . . Addita Est, Lentes Expoliendi Nova Ratio; Ut Et Telescopia Diversa Construendi, Et Experiendi, horumq[ue] adminiculo, varias observationes Coelestes, inprimis quidem Eclipsum, cum Solarium, tum Lunarium, . . . perspicue explicatur (Gedani: Autor, 1647). 35. William Herschel noted the formation his notes, “Letters by Sir William Herschel, addressed to fellow astronomers,” HM 70991–70998, Huntington Library. 36. Peter Bond, Distant Worlds: Milestones in Planetary Exploration (New York: Copernicus Books in association with Praxis Pub, 2007), 102. 37. Galileo Galilei, Sidereus nuncius magna, longeque admiralia spectacula pandens, suspiciendaque proponens vnicuique, praesertim vero philosophis, atque astronomis, quae a Galileo Galileo patritio Florentino . . . nuper a se reperti beneficio sunt obseruata in lunae facie, fixis innumeris, Lacteo Circulo, stellis nebulosis, apprime vero in quatuor planetis circa Iouis stellam disparibus interuallis, atque periodis, celeritate mirabili circumuolutis; . . . atque Medicea sidera nuncupandos decreuit (Venetijs : apud Thomam Baglionum, 1610), 13–14. 38. Hevelius developed this strategy even further in a later work concerned with tracking the moon’s libration: Johannes Hevelius, Epistolae II. Prior, de motu lunae libratorio, in certas tabulas redacto . . . Posterior, de utriusque luminaris defectu anni 1654 (Gedani: Andreae Julii Molleri, 1654); 22–23, and 49–72. 39. Hevelius, Johannis Hevelii Selenographia Sive, 222–23, 226–27, and 228. 40. Ibid., 228. 41. See, e.g., passages from the Sidereus nuncius in ibid., 147. 42. For example, on speculation about extraterrestrial life, see Albert Van Helden’s concluding essay in Galileo Galilei, Sidereus Nuncius; or, The Sidereal Messenger, ed. Albert Van Helden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 87–113. See George Basalla, Civilized Life in the Universe: Scientists on Intelligent Extraterrestrials (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 17–30. 43. The passage began: “Non sequitur ergo, cum nihil videamus, propterea nihil et nihil extare.” Hevelius, Johannis Hevelii Selenographia Sive, 118. 44. Ibid., 118–19. 45. Ibid., 144. 46. Ibid., 137. 47. “Insuper in superficie Lunae, adhuc alius Mons primum in hac phasi ortus, reperitur, scilicet Porphyrites in Mari Eoo, supra insulam Cercinnam; qui aperte confirmat, alios ratione materiae aliis Montibus esse prorsus diversissimos. Et hunc Porphyritem, aut ex terram rubicundam, instar Porphyritis Aegypti (secundum quem, Lunarem denominavimus) aut, quod mihi magis videtur consonum, ex materiam nitrosam, vel sulphuream constare nullus dubito: imo pro persuaso habeo, quod ignem alat parpetuum, atque adeo ex numero sit ignivomorum, quales apud nos sunt M. Aetna, Hecla, Vesuvius, et alii” (ibid., 353). 48. Gaspar Schott and Athanasius Kircher, Ioco-seriorum naturae et artis: sive magiae naturalis centuriae tres. Accessit diatribe de prodigiosis Crucibus (Würzburg, 1666), 305–6. 49. Schott’s history prefaced Kircher’s Diatribe de prodigiosisi Crucibus, and that work was in turn absorbed by Schott’s Ioco-seriorum naturae et artis (see note above).

274  Notes to Pages 151–157 50. Schott and Kircher, Ioco-seriorum, 305. 51. Paula Findlen, “The Last Man Who Knew Everything . . . or Did He? Athanasius Kircher, S.J. (1602–80) and his World,” in The Last Man Who Knew Everything, ed. Findlen, 35. 52. Schott and Kircher, Ioco-seriorum, 313–15. 53. Works on mining, metallurgy, and pyrotechnics were influential in the development of theories about the nature of volcanism. David Oldroyd notes: “So while the chemists of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, up to the time of Lavoisier’s ‘chemical revolution’ when ‘modern’ chemical theory was initiated, wrote copiously on notions of Aristotelian elements, of abstract chemical principles, or on mechanical explanations of chemical phenomena—and made rather little headway in the matter—the practical men carried out their work successfully, apparently unimpeded by the chemical theories of the time” (Thinking about the Earth, 68). 54. Sigurdsson, Melting the Earth, 103. 55. Ibid. 56. Rhoda Rappaport, When Geologists Were Historians, 1665–1750 (Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 1997), 181. The anonymous quote, taken from the Philosphical Transactions, is cited in ibid. The English physicist and naturalist Robert Hooke (1635–1703) was an important member of the Royal Society, but his writings on earthquakes and volcanoes were only published posthumously in 1705. See Robert Hooke, Posthumous Works (London: R. Waller, 1705). 57. Schott and Kircher, Ioco-seriorum, 333–34. 58. Ibid., 331. 59. Ibid., 335–36. See also Stephen Jay Gould on this explanation in “Father Athanasius on the Isthmus of a Middle State: Understanding Kircher’s Paleontology” in The Last Man who Knew Everything, ed. Findlen, 234. 60. Gioseffo Petrucci, Podromo apologetico alli studi Chircheriani opera di Gioseffo Petrucci Romano nella quale con un’apparato di Saggi diversi, si dà prove dell’esquisito Studio ha tenuto il Celebratissimo Padre Atanasio Chircher (Amsterdam: Jansonnio Waesbergj, 1677), 39. 61. Schott and Kircher, Ioco-seriorum, 313–322; 323–340. 62. Athanasius Kircher, Mundus Subterraneus, bk. 1, MS 562, fol. 509, “Vittorio Emanuele II,” Rome, Fondo Gesuitico, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale. One problem with this rendering is that it does not resemble Vesuvius very much, as there is no hint of its double peak (which may just be occluded by the perspective). This could be Etna or simply a generic cone that would have worked well to represent both volcanoes. 63. Kircher, Mundus subterraneus, Caput VI. 64. Nicoletta Morello, “Nel corpo della Terra,” 191. 65. Kircher, Mundus subterraneus, Caput III, 186. 66. Sigurdsson, Melting the Earth, 93. 67. Morello, ed., Storia e meteorologia, 5. 68. Kircher compared eruptions in the 1660s: MS IV B 13, Brancacciana, BNN. 69. Morello, ed., Storia e meteorologia. 5. 70. Alexandre Koyré accorded an interesting, if  lesser place for Borelli in the narrative of  the Scientific Revolution. See his La révolution astronomique, 461–506. 71. Domenico Beroloni Meli, “Mechanics,” in Early Modern Science, ed. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, vol. 3 of The Cambridge History of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

Notes to Pages 157–162  275 versity Press, 2006), 660; Eugenio Garin and Giorgio A. Pinton, History of Italian Philosophy, Value Inquiry Book Series 191 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 636. 72. Luigi Amabile, Fra Tommaso Campanella la sua congiura, i suoi processi e la sua pazzia: Narrazione com molti documenti inediti politici e giudiziarii, con l’intero processo di eresia e 67 poesie di Fra Tommaso finoggi ignorate per Luigi Amabile 1 (Naples: Antonio Morano, 1882), 418. 73. W. E. Knowles Middleton, “The 1669 Eruption of Mount Etna: Francesco d’Arezzo on the Vitreous Nature of Lava,” Archives of Natural History 11, no. 1 (1982): 99. See also Morello, ed., Storia e meteorologia, 26–28, and 48–53. 74. Middleton, “The 1669 Eruption of Mount Etna,” 101. 75. Pietro Castelli’s description of his Neapolitan informant is a good example (Incendio del Monte Vesuvio, 75). 76. Middleton, “The 1669 Eruption of Mount Etna,” 99–102. 77. Quiñones, El Monte Vesuvio, 40v. 78. Giovanni Gentile, Giornale critico della filosofia italiana (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1920), 237, 269–70. 79. Castelli, Incendio del Monte Vesuvio, 77–82. 80. D’Andrea’s letter is partially reprinted in Middleton, “The 1669 Eruption of Mount Etna,” 99–102. 81. Sigurdsson, Melting the Earth, 94–95. 82. Castelli, Incendio del Monte Vesuvio, 82. 83. The reference is in Amabile, Fra Tommaso Campanella, 418. 84. Nicoletta Morello offers a succinct and very helpful explanation of Borelli’s vocabulary (Morello, ed., Storia e meterologia, 55–58). 85. “Inter Pelorum, et Pachinum Siciliae promontoria in littore Orientali elevatur immensae magnitudinis Mons, solitarius, conica ferme figura assurgens, cuius basis ambitus producitur ultra centum milliaria ab urbe Catana per Acim, Naxum, per littus Tauromenitanum, per Tissam, per centum Ripas, Adranum, et Inessam. Altitudo eius acclivis e littore Catanensi usque ad summitatem 30. fere milliaria aequat, sed a littore Tauromenitano 20. milliaria continent. Regionis latitude est grad. 37. cum 40. min. longitudo grad. 38. et 21 min” (Borelli, Historia et meteorologia, 1). 86. Morello, ed., Storia e meteorologia, 32. 87. Borelli, Historia et meteorologia, 12. The early work cited by Borelli was Antonio Filoteo degli Omodei, Antonii Philothei de Homodeis siculi, Aetnae topographia incendiorumque Aetnæorum historia (Venice: Muschius excudebat, 1591). 88. Nicoletta Morello notes these references in Borelli (Morello, ed., Storia e meteorologia, 35). Fazello’s description appeared in Tommaso Fazello, F. Thomae Fazelli . . . : De rebus Siculis decades duae, nunc primum in lucem editae (Panormi, 1558). 89. Borelli, Historia et meteorologia, 1–7. 90. Pietro Carrera, Il Mongibello descritto da Pietro Carrera in tre libri, nel quale oltra diuerse notitie si spiega l’historia degl’incendi, e le cagioni di quelli (Catania: G. Rossi, 1636). 91. “Post semi horam secunda vorago meridionalior aperta est ducentesimo passu a priore remote, ex qua partier fumi ingentes iisdem horridis tonitruis egrediebantur, eratque similiter

276  Notes to Pages 163–167 haec secunda vorago in eadem directione cum praecedenti voragine, et scissura, scilicet sub eodem meridiano” (Borelli, Historia et meteorologia, 17). 92. Ibid., 77–87. 93. “Pertinet quoque ad historicam preparationem exacta descriptio torrentis liquefactorum saxorum per campos decorrentium” (ibid., 27). 94. Ibid., 27–30. 95. Dollo, Filosofia e medicina, 301. 96. “Absoluto historico apparatu, antequam Aetnaeam Meteorologiam aggrediamur, non erit inutile paucis indicare quam oscitanter, ruditer, ac fabulose a maioribus exagitatum sit hoc argumentum” (Borelli, Historia et meteorologia, 47). 97. “Haec, ni fallor, evincunt lapideam illam ignitam, liquefactamque materiam sedem non solum non habere prope superficiem maris, aut locum profundiorem; Sed contra gigni, accendi, liquefierique in ipsis montis lateribus Paulo infra eius crustam, seu superficiem depressi” (ibid., 42). 98. Ibid., 85–87. 99. Dollo, Filosofia e medicina, 294. 100. Victor Robinson, The Story of Medicine (New York: New Home Library, 1943), 298. 101. This is, obviously, a cursory assertion intended nonetheless to emphasize the way in which the phenomena of volcanoes fit within the discourse and concerns of late seventeenthcentury science. One late seventeenth-century work on geogony (theory of the earth) that also addressed the orogeny of mountains and volcanoes was Thomas Burnet’s influential The Theory of the Earth: Containing an Account of the Original of the Earth, and of All the General Changes Which It Hath Already Undergone, or Is to Undergo, Till the Consummation of All Things (London: printed by R. Norton, for Walter Kettilby, at the Bishops-Head in S. Paul’s Church-Yard, 1684). 102. For a brief discussion of Borelli’s earlier work on earthquakes, see Dollo, Filosofia e medicina, 298–300. It should be evident here to the reader that I am engaging with Dollo’s excellent analysis of Sicilian thinking on volcanism in the later 1600s. 103. “Ut igitur calidatis subterraneae aliquam cognitionem habeamus, oportet primo, ut originem corporum sulphureorum, et bituminosorum inquiramus, scilicet videndum an praedicta corpora generentur de novo, an vero in ipsa terra perpetuo existentia detegantur, aut ab uno ad alium loco trasferantur” (Borelli, Historia et meteorologia, 50). 104. “Praetera aiunt nunquam ignem, seu sulphur accensum perire, aut aomnino destrui, licet per auras videatur dispergi, et dissipari, cum denuo decidat, misceaturque cum aliis contretis, et mistis” (Borelli, Historia et meteorologia, 51). See also Dollo, Filosofia e medicina, 303. 105. Borelli, Historia et meteorologia, 58–60. 106. “Dictum iam est quomodo sulphureae, et salnitrales materiae in antris aetnaeis, fermentatae, flammas, et incendia concipere possint, modo aliqua addenda sunt de eorundem ignium estinctione, et quomodo renovari queant” (ibid., 116). 107. Ibid., 116–24. 108. Luciano Boschiero, Experiment and Natural Philosophy in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany: The History of the Accademia Del Cimento (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), 146. 109. Glacken, Traces on a Rhodian Shore, 35–79.

Notes to Pages 167–172  277 110. John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–1760, Ideas in Context 73 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 95–134. 111. Here I am responding in particular to a passage in Dollo, Filosofia e medicina, 299. 112. Boschiero, Experiment and Natural Philosophy in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany, 59–91. 113. Robinson, Story of Medicine, 298. 114. Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, De motu animalium Io. Alphonsi Borelli . . . opus posthumum. Pars prima-[secunda] (Rome: Ex typographia Angeli Bernabo, 1680); Hanafi, The Monster in the Machine, 130–34. 115. For Etna, see Dollo, Filosofia e medicina, 293–330.

Chapter 6 1. “Quando io prendo a contemplare la gran macchina di questo Mondo, e in esso le tante, e sifatte disposizioni della Divina Onnipotenza, non è egli dubbio, che quanto in me si confonde lo intendimento, tanto vengo a conoscere le pazzie, di que’ scimuniti Filosofi, che vollero del tutto artifice il disordinato caso.” The letter was published in Antonio Bulifon’s Lettere memorabili ed istoriche, politiche, ed erudite (Pozzuoli: Presso Antonio Bulifon, 1697), 210. The incorporation of de Milo’s letter into Bulifon’s collection of letters pertinent to the city’s history fit, in fact, a familiar mold. Giulio Cesare Capaccio’s Forastiero from 1632, e.g., had established the exchange between an erudite local and a curious outsider as a familiar trope. Borghini’s literary importance surely enhanced this identifiable frame. 2. “In considerare tante Regioni, e Provincie, e in esse l’ordine, e la providenza della natura, come in passo in passo le bagnò con acque del mare, o irrigolle con fiumane, disponendo con bell’ordine tratto tratto selve, foreste, valli, e pianure, non può non lodarsi la mano archittettrice di Dio” (Bulifon, Lettere memorabili, 211). 3. “Certamente però io stimo, che in aprendo tante e si diverse voragini, dalle quali il fuoco esala non a caso egli operasse, come che necessarie elleno fossero al conservamento dell’Universo: benché talora di esse server si soglia, come di ministre, nel gastigo delle diffalte degli uomini” (ibid.). 4. Pietro Redondi, Galileo eretico (Bari: Laterza, 2009), 116. 5. Most famously, one might cite Giuseppe Valletta’s defense of  Cartesian and atomist philosophies in Naples. See “Al Nosiro Santissimo Padre Innocenzio XII Discorso Filosofico,” MS XV B4, fol. 148v, BNN; see also Giuseppe Valletta, Opere filosofiche (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1975), 412. 6. “Ma oltre io non mi stendo in parlando di cotali Montagne, quando la mia intenzione è in questa lettera ragionar del nostro celebratissimo Vesuvio, che ha dato materia alle più dotte, ed erudite penne de’ secoli tramandati” (Bulifon, Letter memorabili, 214). 7. “S’innalza egli in due elevatissime fronti, delle quali una acuta presentemente si vede, e l’altra, in cui la bocca si mira aperta, mozza, e bruciata dal fuoco” (ibid., 215). 8. Ibid., 216. Antonio Sanfelice’s Campania notis illustrata appeared in different editions for nearly two centuries. It is impossible to know what edition de Milo was citing, but it may have been this one: Antonio Sanfelice, Ant. Sanfelicii Campania: illust.mo ac rever.mo D. Josepho

278  Notes to Pages 172–178 Sanfelicio, Archiep. Consentino in Inf. Germ. Nunc. Apostol. Dedicata (Amstelaedami: typis Ioannis Blaeu, 1656). 9. “E voglia il Cielo, che ultimo debba essere, come speriamo dall somma pieta del nostro Iddio, e dalla intercession de’ nostril Protettori” (Bulifon, Lettere memorabili, 221). 10. Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 336. 11. Ibid., 218. 12. C. H., A Philosophical Discourse of Earthquakes: Occasioned by the Late Earthquake, September the 8th, 1692 (London: Walter Kettilby, 1693), 1. 13. Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 336. 14. Part of the letter is reproduced in Giuseppe Valetta, Opere filosofiche, Accademia Toscana di Science e Lettere, Study 34, ed. Michele Bak (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 1975), 404. 15. Gaspare Paragallo, Istoria naturale del Monte Vesuvio divisata in due libri. Di Gaspare Paragallo Avvocato Napolitano (Naples: Giacomo Raillard, 1705), vii. 16. Valetta, Opere filosofiche, 404. 17. Agricola, De ortu; Vanoccio Biringucci, De la pirotechnia libri x (Veneto: V. Rossinello, 1540); Fabrizio Padovani, Tractatus duo alter de ventis alter perbrevis de terraemotu (Bologna: Giovanni Battista Bellagamba, 1601). 18. Craig Martin, “Experience of the New World and Aristotelian Revisions of the Earth’s Climates during the Renaissance,” History of Meteorology 3 (2006): 1–16. 19. Pietro Redondi, Galileo eretico (Bari: Editori Laterza, 2009), 381–401. 20. Borelli, Historia et meteorologia. 21. “[Ed] in Napoli solo habbia a parer tanto strano, che vi sia un huomo, che ha somiglianza del Galileo, del Chartesio, del Gassendo, dell’Erveo, del Gilberto, e di tanti, e tanti altri, voglia arrichire il Mondo di novella specolationi, o voglia esercitarsi in quelle, che da questi tali sono già state inventate.” Discorso dell’Eclissi ditto nell’Accademia degli Otiosi nel dì 29 di maggio: Dato in luce per l’Accademico detto l’Arrestato (Naples: Per Camillo Cavallo, 1652), 9, cited in Torrini, Tommaso Cornelio, 93. 22. Debates between Cartesian and Aristotelian systems of nature were in evidence well into the eighteenth century: Filocalo Caputo, Dissertazione dell’Estatico intorno all’eruzioni del Vesuvio (Naples, 1752), v. See also: Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 50. 23. Torrini, Tommaso Cornelio, 92–93. 24. Vincenzo Ferrone, Scienza, natura, religione: Mondo newtoniano e cultura italiana nel primo settecento, Storia e diritto 9 (Naples: Jovene Editore, 1982), 457–61. 25. Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 50. 26. Hans Gross, Rome in the Age of Enlightenment: The Post-Tridentine Syndrome and the Ancien Regime, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 264. 27. John Marino, “The Foreigner and the Citizen: A Dialogue on Good Government in Spanish Naples,” in Reason and Its Others: Italy, Spain, and the New World, ed. David R. Castillo and Massimo Lollini (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006), 145–64. 28. Simone Arrighi, Claudia Principe, and Mauro Rosi, “Violent Strombolian and Subplinian Eruptions at Vesuvius during Post-1631 Activity,” Bulletin of Volcanology 63, nos. 2–3 (2001): 126–50.

Notes to Pages 178–188  279 29. Valetta, Opere filosofiche, 405. 30. “Huius enim montis tam frequentes, tam quotidianae contingent eruptiones, ut pene innumerae sint, nec mensis unus, ne dicam annus, praetereat, quo aliquot motu vel modo minori, modo maiori excidio non saviat” (ibid., 405). 31. “Post haec liquidum bituminis flumen, quod glaream vocant, e patulo ore, ut alias, vomere incepit, quod ignitam primo torrentis placidi formam habebat, ea motus lenta celeritate se deorsum moventem, quam in pice liquefacta, aut densioribus aliis observamus” (ibid.). 32. “Magistratus urbis et Antistes indixerant populo subblicationes et ut longo ordine ad Capuanam portam quae montem respicit orantes ferrent Divi Ianuarii urbis Tutelaris Sacra” (ibid., 406). 33. Pietro Nesti, Vera relatione dell’horribil caso (Naples: Pietro Nesti, 1631), 4. 34. Valletta, Opere filosofiche, 406. 35. Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 218. 36. I initially presented these ideas on Valletta at a conference at the Clark Library. Personal communication (February 2010) with John Marino, Tommaso Astarita, Nick Napoli, and Helen Hills especially has helped me sharpen my ideas. My thinking about eruptive cycles and counterfactuals comes out of having absorbed their comments, but any lack of clarity is entirely my own. 37. Paragallo, Istoria naturale, vii–x. 38. Ibid., xxi–xxii. 39. Ibid., 143–44. 40. Ibid., 145. 41. Ibid., xiv. 42. Ibid., 102. 43. Ibid., 139–40. 44. See, e.g.: Borelli, Historia et meteorologia, 77–87. 45. Paragallo, Istoria naturale, 140. 46. Ibid., 159. 47. Falcone, Discorso naturale, 34. 48. Paragallo, Istoria naturale, 172. 49. Pierre Gassendi, Viri illustris Nicolai Claudii Fabricii de Peiresc, senatoris aquisextiensis vita, per Petrum Gassendum (Paris: sumptibus S. Cramoisy, 1641). The work was translated into English by William Rand in 1657. There is a modern edition in which I have identified the specific references in Paragallo’s text: Pierre Gassendi, William Rand, and Richard Gaywood, The Mirrour of True Nobility and Gentility: Being the Life of the Renowned Nicolaus Claudius Fabricius Lord of Pieresk (Haverford, PA: Infinity, 2003), 34 and 213. 50. Vai and Caldwell, eds., The Origins of Geology in Italy, 65. 51. Paragallo, Istoria naturale, 172–77. 52. Ibid., 175. 53. Mascolo, De incendio Vesuvii, 97. 54. Paragallo, Istoria naturale, 180–84. 55. Isaac Disraeli, Curiosities of Literature, consisting of Anecdotes, Characters, Sketches, and Observations Literary, Critical and Historical (London: Edward Moxon, 1843), 457. 56. Mémoires pour l’histoire des sciences et des beaux artes (Trevoux: 1712), 2243, http://books

280  Notes to Pages 188–191 .google.com/books?id=UX4EAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA1243&dq=gaspare+paragallo&lr=&cd= 37#v=onepage&q=gaspare%20paragallo&f=false. 57. Cécile Leung, Etienne Fourmont, 1683–1745: Oriental and Chinese Languages in Eighteenth-Century France (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2002), 107. 58. Paragallo, Istoria naturale, 216–22. 59. Ibid., 226. 60. Garin and Pinton, History of Italian Philosophy, 642. 61. Bulifon, Lettere memorabili, 177–88. 62. Sigurdsson, Melting the Earth, 105. 63. The phrase “burning mountains and cooling stars” is from ibid., 102, from a chapter of his book so named. 64. Paragallo, Istoria naturale, 226. 65. Paragallo reported Cornelio’s words as follows: “Hic mihi datur occasio memoranda, quae Vesuvio peculiari observatione notavimus. Complures vidimus, et in montis iugo, et in clivio, patere fonticulos distillantes quaedam Naphtae speciem, quae, et facillime ignem concipit, et semel incense nunquam extinguitur, donec totat conflagraverit; Praeteolon, vel Petreoleum vulgo nuncupant, cuius insignis quandoque copia per occultos meatos ad proximum mare delabitur, undisque supernatans tetrum odorem longe lateque diffundit; quin etiam à ventis, fluctibusque iactata defertur in littora Neapolis octo millium passum intervallo distantia” (ibid., 246–47). 66. Ibid., 255, 258, 381, 387, 417. 67. A scan of these works still held in Italian libraries and archives shows the following (in extract): Robert Boyle, Tractatus de qualitatibus rerum cosmicis, suspicionibus cosmicis, temperie regionum submarinarum, temperie regionum subterranearum, fundo maris (London: R. Davis, 1672); Tractatus de ipsa natura, sive Libera in receptam naturae notionem disquisitio . . . authore Roberto Boyle (Geneva: apud S. de Tournes, 1688); Exercitationes De Utilitate Philosophiæ Naturalis Experimentis (Lindaviae: typis et impensis Theodori Jo. Christophori Hechten, 1692); Noctiluca aeria, sive nova quaedam phaenomena in substantiae factitiae sive artificialis, sponte lucidae productione observata (Geneva: apud S. de Tournes, 1693). 68. Robert Boyle, Workdiary 22 (“Promiscuous Addenda to My Severall Treatises”), MS 8, fol. 99; MS 8, fol. 102v, Boyle Papers, Royal Society, London, http://www.livesandletters .ac.uk/wd/view/text_dip/WD22_dip.html. 69. Robert Boyle, Peter Shaw, John Osborn, and Thomas Longman, The Philosophical Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle Esq: In Three Volumes (London: Printed for W. and J. Innys . . . and J. Osborn, and T. Longman, 1725), 28, 133. 70. Ibid., 31–32. 71. Mémoires pour l’histoire des sciences et des beaux artes, 122–38, http://books.google.com /books?id=UX4EAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA1243&dq=gaspare+paragallo&lr=&cd=37#v=onepag e&q=gaspare%20paragallo&f=false. 72. Edmund Burke and James Dodsley, The Annual Register; or, A View of the History, Politics, and Literature, for the Year 1771 (London: Printed for J. Dodsley, 1772), 189. http://books .google.com/books?id=-ZFIAAAAYAAJ&dq=gaspare%20paragallo&lr&pg=RA1-PA189#v= onepage&q&f=false.

Notes to Pages 194–201  281

Chapter 7 1. Giuseppe Maria Mecatti, Osservazioni che si son fatte nel Vesuvio dal Mese d’Agosto dell’Anno 1752 fino a tutto il Mese di Luglio dell’Anno 1754 nel principio del quale è accorsa un’altra Eruzione . . . dell’Abate Giuseppe Maria Mecatti Pronotario Apostolico, Cappelano d’Onore degli Eserciti di S.M. Cattolica, Accademico Fiorentino, Apatista e Pastore Arcade. Alle Altezze serenissime di Carlo Eugenio e di Elisabetta Sofia di Brandenburg-Bareit-Culmbach (Naples: Giovanni Simone, 1754), xxv–xxvii. 2. Ibid., xxx. 3. Peter Mason, Before Disenchantment: Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World (London: Reaktion, 2009), 11–35. 4. Mecatti, Osservazioni, xxx. 5. Giuseppe Maria Mecatti, Racconto storico-filosofico del Vesuvio, e particolarmente di quanto è occorso in quest’ultima eruzione principiata il dì 25 ottobre 1751, e cessata il dì 25 febbrajo 1752, al luogo detto l’Atrio del cavallo, dell’abate Giuseppe Maria Mecatti (Naples: G. di Simone, 1752). 6. Mecatti, Osservazioni, i–ii. 7. Della Torre, Storia e fenomeni. 8. Some examples of Giuseppe Aloja’s work are in the digital archive conceived by the Scuola Normale di Pisa and the Consorzio Forma: http://pompei.sns.it/prado_front_end/ index.php?page=Home&id=2100. 9. Giovanni Maria Della Torre, Nuove osservazioni intorno la storia naturale del P.D. Giovanni Maria Della Torre C.R. Sommasco (Naples: Nella stamperia di Donato Campo, 1763). 10. Gerolamo Boccardo, Nuova Enciclopedia Italiana, Ovvero Dizionario Generale Di Scienze, Lettere, Industrie, Ecc. Ampliata Nelle Parti Scientifiche E Tecnologiche, Etc. Sesta Edizione, vol. 22 (Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1877), 489. 11. Della Torre, Nuove osservazioni, frontispiece. 12. “Per la naturale Magnificenza e pel genio, che risiede nel vostro Real animo, delle antichità, ordinando, che fossere disotterrate in più luoghi, e tra gli altri in Ercolano, non solamente si è aperto il campo ai dilettanti d’illustrate moltissimi punti principali dell’antica storia, ma ancora con ciò osservandosi gli effetti prodotti dal primo incendio del Vesuvio, e potendosi da vicino esaminare la prima lava, che ne uscì si sono somministrati importantissimi, e nuovi materiali alla storia naturale” (Della Torre, Storia e fenomeni, iv). 13. Ibid., 81. 14. Richard Olson, Science and Religion: 1450–1900: From Copernicus to Darwin (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004), 72. 15. Della Torre, Storie e fenomeni, 1–2. 16. Ibid., 105. 17. Ibid., 79. 18. A fuller sentence reads: “Essendosi posto a fare delle osservazioni dopo che eravamo scesi dal mote, e visitando le varie aperture fatte nel vallone della lava uscita, e le sensibili alzate di sassi calcinati, e di materia vitrificata, si fece ardito per entrare nell’ultima bocca, ove osser­ vando un vasto grottone a somiglianza d’un rotondo tempio che tutto terminasse in una cupola,

282  Notes to Pages 201–208 immediatamente scoperto mi fece avvisato, e consultommi di farne il disegno, che feci immediatamente incidere, come si vede nella tavola VIII” (ibid., 80–91). 19. Ibid., 1. 20. “Quì si distinguono a maraviglia i naturali strati interiori, dei quali la montagna è composta, disposti secondo l’ordine naturale, con cui sono situati in tutti gli altro monti, alcuni di terra rossiccia un poco abbrustolata, alcuni di sassi naturali di colore oscuro, altri bianchissimi compatti, e pesanti; altri sono strati di brecce, altri di lapilli, altri di arena” (ibid., 16). 21. Ibid., 16–17. 22. Borelli, Historia et meteorologia, 122. 23. Della Torre, Storia e fenomeni, 101–2. 24. Ibid., 104. 25. Martina Kölbl-Ebert, Geology and Religion: A History of Harmony and Hostility (London: Geological Society, 2009), 89. 26. Sigurdsson, Melting the Earth, 109. 27. Antonio Lazzaro Moro, De crostacei e degli altri marini corpi che si truovano su’ monti libri due di Anton-Lazzaro Moro (Venezia: Appresso Stefano Monti, 1740), 171; 189; 198; 322–323. 28. A Museum for Young Gentlemen and Ladies: A Private Tutor for Little Masters and Misses, 15th ed. (Salisbury: Printed by B. C. Collins, 1799) http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20301 /20301-h/20301-h.htm. 29. Hamilton, Observations, 84. 30. Ibid., 77. 31. ibid., 57. 32. Alain Schnapp, “Antiquarian Studies in Naples at the End of the Eighteenth Century: From Comparative Archaeology to Comparative Religion,” in Naples in the Eighteenth Century: The Birth and Death of a Nation State, ed. Girolamo Imbrublia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 200), 154. 33. Pliny the Elder, Natural History: A Selection (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 47. 34. Bembo, Lyric Poetry: Etna, 237. 35. Mascolo, De incendio Vesuvii. 36. Ibid., v. 37. Mascolo’s treatise grappled with the differences between earthquakes and eruptions. In places this tricky categorization led the Jesuit to contemplate how volatile substrata underlay the cities and cultivated fields of human civilization. Practical concerns were not absent in these considerations, of course. Knowing where earthquakes and eruptions occurred, and knowing how to spot their imminence, could greatly minimize the loss of life. He wrote as follows: “Cum purum est Caelum, tum terra labem facit. Cum tranquillum mare, tum fluctuat terra, ne felicitas sit omni ex parte constans; cum sedata sunt omnia, tum seditio viget. In montium se latebras abdunt ad damna, ut Spartacus ad latrocinia. Nati sub montibus, ipsos, demoliuntur ac tumulant” (ibid., 81). 38. Ibid., v. 39. Ibid., 16, 34–36. 40. Ibid., 312. 41. Ibid., 296–300.

Notes to Pages 209–213  283 42. Charles de Secondat Montesquieu, Oeuvres de Monsieur de Montesquieu (Amsterdam: Chez Arkstée et Merkus, 1764), 250. 43. Dolomieu, Voyage, 7. 44. Ibid., 9–11. 45. Ibid., 17. 46. Ibid., 29. 47. Ibid., 32–33. 48. Ibid., 44. 49. The entire passage reads as follows: “Une observation qui m’a fort aide à y reconnaitre une montagne primitive, est celle de l’inclination des couches que les ravins me montroient à découvert. Toutes le montagnes formées par l’accumulation des matières lancées de leur propre centre, e par un crater unique, acquièrent une forme conique; chacque éruption qui élève la montagne, l’enveloppe d’une nouvele couche qui se modèle sur les anciennes; cette couche prend ainsi la courbure du cone, et elle est d’autant plus epaisse qu’elle se raproche d’avantage du foyer ou dou centre d’explosion. Lorsqu’une montange de cette espèce vient a s’ouvrir, a se dégrader ou à se morceler, l’inclinaison des couches de chaque portion de ce cone doit toujours indiquer le cote où étoit de centre de l’eruption, et elles doivent toutes se diriger par leur prolongement vers l’ancien sommet. C’est par cette observation simple que j’ai reconnu l’emplacement d’une infinité de craters, dont sans elle je n’aurois jamais peut-etre pas pu trouver le traces. Ce fut par ce meme moyen que je reconnus dans l’intérieur de l’ile de Lipari une grosse montagne antérieure à toutes les autres, sur la croupe et au pied de laquelle les autres se son élevées” (ibid., 44). 50. Gould, Lying Stones of Marrakech, 153–153. 51. Dolomieu, Voyage, 44. 52. Ibid., 7. 53. Ibid., 71. 54. Charles Dellon, Nouvelle Relation d’un voyage fait aux Indes orientales . . . avec . . . un Traité des maladies particulières aux pays orientaux et dans la route et de leurs remèdes, par Mr. Dellon (Amsterdam: P. Marret, 1699), 21. 55. Dolomieu, Voyage, vii. 56. “Le charactére national de Liparottes est trés marqué; ils sont braves, actifs, affectionnés à leur pays, prompts, vindicatifs et superstitieux. Les femmes y sont trés-fécondes, et leur tempérament est si prématuré, que les mariages du peuple se font ordinariement à l’age de douze ans; la meilleure troupe que le roi de Naples ait à son service, est son corps de Liparottes” (ibid., 78). 57. John Chardin, The Travels of Sir John Chardin into Persia, and the East-Indies (London: Printed for M.P. and are to be sold by George Monke and William Ewrey, 1689), 257, cited and translated in Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, 553. 58. Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, Oeuvres Diverses de M. de Fontenelle (The Hague: Chez Gosse et Neaulme, 1728), 127, cited and translated in Glacken, Traces on The Rhodian Shore, 553. 59. “Mettez un home dans un lieu chaud et enferme, il souffrira, par les raisons que je viens de dire, une defaillance de Coeur tres grande. Si dans cette circonstance on va lui proposer une action hardie, je crois qu’on l’y trouvera tre-peu dispose; sa foiblesse mettra un ceouragement

284  Notes to Pages 213–219 dans son ame; il craindra tout, parce qu’il sentira qu’il ne peut rien. Le peuples des pays chauds son timides, comme les viellards le sont; ceux des pays froids son courageux, comme le sont le jeunes-gens . . .” (Montesquieu, Oeuvres, 65–66). 60. Ibid., 73. 61. Dolomieu, Voyage, 74. 62. The principal part of the passage reads: “Ils vivent en sécurité sur ce sol, qu’ils savent bien avoir été autrefois la proie de feux souterrains, mais ils ont sur les Liparottes l’avantage de ne pas craindre de nouvelles eruptions, e d’etre rassurés contre ces événemens, par l’example que leur fournit un très-grand nombre de siècles” (ibid., 97). 63. Ibid., 115–17. 64. Ibid., 122–23, 126. 65. ibid., 139. 66. Ibid., 149. 67. “Le chaleur du climat peut etre si excessive, que le corps y sera absolument sans force. Pour lors, l’abattement passera à l’esprit meme, aucune curiosité, aucune noble enterprise, aucun sentiment géneraux; les inclinations y seront toutes passives” (Montesquieu, Oeuvres, 70). 68. These impressions appeared in a work titled “Le Climat de Malthe,” appended to Dolomieu, Voyage, 192. 69. Giovanni Tarcagnota, Delle istorie del mondo: le quale contengono quanto dal principio del mondo e successo, sino all anno 1513 (Venezia: Giunti, 1585), 781; Francesco Ferrara, Storia generale dell’ Etna . . . dall’ ab. Francesco Ferrara (Catania: stamp di F. Pastore, 1793), 40. 70. Giovanni Filippo Ingrassia, Informatione del pestifero, et contagioso morbo: il quale affligge et haue afflitto questa citta di Palermo, & molte altre citta, e terre di questo Regno di Sicilia, nell’anno 1575 et 1576 Data allo invittissimo et potentissimo Filippo, Re di Spagna &. Col regimento preseruatiuo, & curatiuo, da Giouan Filippo Ingrassia (Palermo: Appresso Giovanni Matteo Mayda, 1576). 71. Pietro Sforza Pallavicino, Arte della perfezion Christiana del Card. Sforza Pallavicini. Divisa in tre libri (Rome, 1665), 214. 72. Jerôme de Lalande, Voyage en Italie: Contenant l’histoire et les anecdotes les plus singulières de l’Italie et sa description, les usages (Geneva, 1790), 108. 73. Dolomieu, Voyage, 190–99. 74. Lalande, Voyage en Italie, 6. 75. Montesquieu, Oeuvres, 70. 76. Hamilton, Observations, 77. 77. Alsario, Vesuvius ardens, 48–52. 78. Hamilton, Observations, 108. 79. Sir Charles Blagden to Elisabeth (Charlton) Montagu, October 10, 1794, fols. 1–2, Hun­ tington Manuscript MO 478, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. 80. Sir Charles Blagden to Elisabeth (Charlton) Montagu, October 10, 1794, fol. 3v, Hun­ tington Manuscript MO 478. 81. Hamilton, Observations, 12. 82. Della Torre, Storia e fenomeni, 62–65. 83. Sir Charles Blagden to Elisabeth (Charlton) Montagu, October 10, 1794, fols. 3v–4r, Huntington Manuscript MO 478.

Notes to Pages 219–227  285 84. Hamilton, Observations, 11. 85. William Hamilton, Supplement to the Campi Phlegraei: Being an account of the great eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the month of August, 1779 . . . To which are annexed 5 plates illuminated from drawings taken, and colour’d after nature, ed. Peter Fabris (Naples: Pietro Fabris, 1779), 1. 86. Ibid. 12. 87. William Hamilton, Campi Phlegræi: Observations on the Volcanoes of the Two Sicilies as They Have Been Communicated to the Royal Society by Sir William Hamilton (Naples, 1776), 9. 88. Hamilton, Supplement to the Campi Phlegraei, 5. 89. Luigi Palmieri, Il Vesuvio e la sua storia (Milan: Tip. Faverio, 1880), 28. 90. Hamilton, Supplement to the Campi Phlegraei, 8–9. 91. Andrea De Jorio, La mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano (Naples: Dalla stamperia e cartiera del Fibreno, 1832), 241–42. 92. Andrea De Jorio and Adam Kendon, Gesture in Naples and Gesture in Classical Antiquity: A Translation of La Mimica Degli Antichi Investigata Nel Gestire Napoletano, Gestural Expression of the Ancients in the Light of Neapolitan Gesturing (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), xxi. 93. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey: 1786–1788, trans. W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1982), 204. 94. Ibid., 179–207. 95. Hamilton, Supplement to the Campi Phlegraei, 24. 96. Ibid., 26. 97. Ibid., references to plate 4. 98. Ibid., 15. 99. “On n’attendra pas sans doubte de nous que nous osions prononcer sur laquelle, depuis qu’il y a des Volcans et des Physiciens, les sentiments et le avis ont été si partagés, tout ce que nous pouvons faire ici, est de rendre compte de quelques-unes des opinions qui ont existé jusqu’ici, et de laisser choisir celle qui paroitra la plus vraisamblable” (Saint Non, Voyage pittoresque, 150). 100. Ibid., 223. 101. Ibid., 236.

conclusion 1. Franco Venturi and S. J. Woolf, Italy and the Enlightenment: Studies in a Cosmopolitan Century (London: Longman, 1972), 198. 2. Pietro Signorelli, Vicende della coltura nelle Due Sicilie o sia, storia ragionata della loro legislazione e polizia, delle lettere, del commercio, delle arti e degli spettacoli dalle colonie straniere insino a noi, divisa in quattro parti (Naples: Presso V. Flauto, 1784), 569. 3. Ibid., 232–33. 4. Ibid., 41–42, 213–17, 264. 5. Ibid., 39. 6. Scientific responses in 1631 visibly advanced this analogy to illness (Alsario, Vesuvius

286  Notes to Pages 227–232 ardens, 48–52). Alsario, it should be noted, was accused of plagiarizing Gabriel Naudé in his treatise on Vesuvius, a charge he vigorously denied. See Furcheim, Bibliografia del Vesuvio, 4. 7. Signorelli, Vicende della coltura nelle Due Sicilie, 39. 8. Cited and translated in Leon Pompa, Vico: A Study of the New Science (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 202. 9. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write The History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 380. 10. Signorelli, Vicende della coltura nelle Due Sicilie, 43. 11. Ibid., 45. 12. “Alle 24 hore comincio a forger da tutto’l monte, e da tutta la falda verso’l mare, una continua caligine, dove bianca, dove nera, secondo che di terra, o di cenere, era gravida, formando nell’aria scoscese balze, e rupi, havresti detto, che i giganti, che riferisce Dione, esservi stati visti, si frabricassero di nuovo la scale di monti per salir al cielo; saliva dunque’l fumo con minor empito, ma con piu spessi lampi, che da principio. Si sperava nondimeno bene, per esservi aperta l’antica bocca su la cima del Monte, per donde havea in gran parte sfogati gl’empiti suoi furiosi il monte, aggiuntavi di più la testimonianza di più persone d’haver visto, nella procession solenne del Mercordí, il Gloriossissimo S. Gennaro, su la porta dell’Arcivescovado” (Bove, L’incendii del monte Vesuvio, 9). 13. Peter Miller, “Looking at the Past, Nature, and Peoples in Peiresc’s Archive,” in Historia, ed. Pomata and Siriasi, 361. 14. Giovanni Battista Hacque, Relatione dell’assedio di Bruna e della fortezza di Spilberg,: attaccata da Torstenson, Generale dell’armi di Suezia del 1645, e difesa da Ludovico Raduigo di Souches, governatore di Bruna. Dedicata all’illustrissimo et eccelentissimo signor Ludovico Raduigo, Conte di Souches, Consigliere di Stato, e di Guerra, Maresciallo Generale di campo di sua Maestà Celesta, e generale de’ confini di Schiavonia e Petrina (Vienna: Appresso Gio: Battista Hacque, 1672), v. 15. Ibid., 13. 16. James Hutton, Theory of the Earth, or an Investigation of the Laws Observable in the Composition, Dissolution, and Restoration of Land upon the Earth (Edinburgh: Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1788), reprinted in Robert Mitchell Torrance, Encompassing Nature: A Sourcebook (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1999), 1100. 17. Napoli Nobilissima: Rivista di topografia ed arte napoletana, Volume 13 (Naples, 1904), 76. 18. Here I use a modern reprinting of Galiani’s very rare text, partly because the modern editor’s preface merits its own analysis (see below). Ferdinando Galiani, Spaventosissima descrizione dello spaventoso spavento che ci spaventò tutti coll’eruzione del Vesuvio la sera dell’otto d’agosto del corrente anno (1779), ma (per grazia di Dio) durò poco, introduction by Giuseppe Luongo (Pompei: Blado editori, 1994), 27. 19. Galiani’s word plays make translation difficult: “Perlaqualcosacché sempre si son veduti tutti i gran filosofi, istorici, mitologi, e antiquari andarla girando intorno intorno da coppa e da sotta cercando, studiando, quardando, odorando e diligenziando per vedere il dove, il come, il quando, e il perché senza poterne capire mai una sgazzerata” (ibid., 21–22). 20. Ibid., 33.

Notes to Pages 232–233  287 21. “[E] così alle volte ci sono eruzioni grandi, e scrittori pochi, ed altre volte ci sono eruzioni piccole, e scrittori assai” (ibid., 40). 22. “Io ho messo nel titolo dell’opera che questa eruzione fu spaventosissima, e non è vero niente affatto. Nelli paesi attorno alla montagna le genti fuggirono non per quello che era stato, ma per paura di quello che poteva venire. A Napoli poi nessuno ebbe spavento, né del passato, né del presente, né del futuro: e veramente la cosa non lo meritava” (ibid., 47). 23. Ibid., 12.

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index

A page number in italics refers to an illustration or its caption. Accademia degli Investiganti, 175, 176 Accademia degli Oziosi, 119–20, 121–22, 123–24 Accademia dei Lincei, 92–94, 95, 226; natural history of Mexico and, 104, 107 Accademia del Cimento, 157, 161, 167 Acquaviva, Antonio Matteo di, 96 Aeolian Islands: Dolomieu’s tour of, 209–14, 217; Falcone’s web of fire beneath, 90; Kircher on connecting channels to, 154; less accessible than Vesuvius, 139; Padovani on, 31; Recupito’s comparison of Vesuvius to, 98. See also Stromboli Agnello, Francesco, 56, 85–87 Agricola, Georg: on earthquakes, 31; Gesner’s correspondence with, 242n11; great tomes on subterranean things, 28; humanistic breadth of, 86; methodology of, 28, 31; Paragallo’s critique of, 188; reports of 1631 based on works of, 73, 152; subterranean heat and, 28, 78, 166, 202; subterranean winds and, 28–29, 86; sulfur and bitumen in theory of, 78, 89; suspicion of alchemy, 86; on unformed opinion of philosophers, 80 Aguir, Giuseppe, 193, 193–94, 195, 196

Alberti, Leandro, 56–57 alchemy: Aristotelian natural philosophy and, 27, 174; Castelli’s use of, 102; development of chemistry and, 257n34; practical knowledge in, 174; sulfur in, 27, 152; volcanic ignition and, 27, 84–85, 86, 87, 89, 152, 189 Aldrovrandi, Ulisse, 103 Alfonso I (the Magnanimous), 13, 33 Aloja, Giuseppe, 197–202, 204 Alsario, Vincenzo, 101 Amiata, Mount, 26 Anthony of Padua, Saint, 100 antiperistatic doctrine, 90, 258n38 Appuhn, Karl, 13–14 Aquinas, Thomas, 77 Aragonese rule of Naples, 13, 33, 34, 36, 38, 39, 47 Arcadian image of Vesuvius, 20, 26, 34, 35, 57 Arcos, Duke of, 117 Arduino, Giovanni, 205 Aristides, 120 Aristotelian natural philosophy: religious authority and, 54; Stelliola’s opposition to, 93. See also Scholastic natural philosophy

308  Index Aristotelian natural philosophy and volcanism, 16, 22; Agricola’s doubts regarding, 28, 78; alchemy and, 27, 174; Borelli’s rejection of, 164–65, 167; Castelli’s Incendio and, 102, 103; causes and, 77, 86–87, 90, 100, 143–44; immutability of heavens and, 147, 149; Jesuits and, 95, 96, 99–100, 164, 199; late seventeenth-century alternatives to, 174–77; as meteorological phenomenon, 99, 106, 161; the new Renaissance science and, 55, 81, 82; Padovani’s empiricism and, 31; Paragallo’s rejection of, 188; particular observations and, 23, 112, 143; practical and empirical knowledge synthesized with, 174; subterranean heat and, 165–66; subterra­ nean winds (exhalations) and, 75, 76, 78, 81, 164, 232 Aristotle’s Meteorology, 80, 99, 106, 161, 174 ash. See cloud of ash from 1631 eruption ashen crosses, 150–52 Asterio, Pietro, 84–85, 178 astrology: Agnello and, 86, 87; Asterio and, 84; D’Arezzo and, 27; Neapolitan tradition involving, 245n61; Porzio’s hostility toward, 40–41; Recupito’s attack on, 98; of Spinola, 79, 82 atheists, trial of, 176 atomism, 77, 167, 168, 171, 174, 175, 176, 179 Atrio, 57, 60 Augustine, Saint, 75 Austrian rule, ending in 1734, 226 Bacco, Enrico, 7 Baia, 40 Balzano, Francesco, 186 Barberini, Francesco, 95, 104 Beccadelli, Antonio, 33 Beltramo, Ottavio, 55, 90, 95 Bembo, Pietro, 29, 107, 140–41, 161, 207 Beni, Paolo, 54 Bergazzano, Giambattista, 70–72, 226 Berkeley, Edward, 205–6 Bettini, Mario, 149

Biondo, Flavio, 41 Biringuccio, Vannoccio, 152 Biscia, Lelio, 109 bitumen: Agricola on, 78, 89; Borelli on Etna and, 162, 166; Castelli on ignition and, 109; chemical model of ignition and, 152; in current terminology, 258n43; Falcone’s speculation on, 90; Galiani’s mocking reference to, 232; Giuliani on eruptive cloud containing, 74; gradual accretion of, 138; Imperato on ignition and, 88; inscription at base of Vesuvius mentioning, 135; Kircher on, 141, 142, 153, 154; in lahar, 66; in lava, 154, 159; Paragallo on role of, 188, 190; Recupito on periodicity and, 100; subterranean heat and, 189; Valletta’s letter to Royal Society and, 180 Blaeu, Willem, 105 Blagden, Charles, 218, 219 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 53 body politic, Neapolitan, and landscape, 18, 45, 47 Bolívar, Simón, 24 Borelli, Giovanni Alfonso: atomism and, 167, 168, 175; central fire rejected by, 164, 165; cities of residence and work, 157, 226; on earthquakes, 165; Edmund Burke’s reference to, 191; on Etna, 156–58, 159–68, 179, 184, 186, 188, 189, 190, 202, 226; on mechanism of ignition, 164–66, 175, 189, 190; minimal writing on Vesuvius, 159–60; as naturalist, 165, 168–69; Paragallo and, 184, 185, 186, 188, 189; philosophical openness of, 176; on redistribution of matter by eruptions, 202; subterranean channels and, 163–64, 185, 186 Borghini, Maria Selvaggia, 170, 171, 172 Borgia, Gaspar de, 45, 46 botany: of Castelli, 22, 23, 102, 103, 109, 168; European travelers and, 35; of the Lincei, 92, 93, 94; plant species of Vesuvius, 143, 272n26. See also medicinal plants Bottone, Domenico, 188

Index  309 Bove, Vincenzo, 60, 63, 66, 70, 229 Boyle, Robert, 190, 191 Braccini, Giulio Cesare: ascent of Vesuvius, 57–58, 66, 78; as author of historia, 178; cult of San Gennaro and, 63, 65, 68, 78; Hamilton’s admiration for, 83, 217; on Monte Nuovo, 40; as observer of 1631 eruption, 60–61, 62, 66–67, 74, 78, 228; on peasant rumors before eruption, 59 Brahe, Tycho, 81, 82 Brancaccio, Francesco Maria, 127 Braudel, Fernand, 17–18 Braun, Georg, 32, 34–35 Bruni, Leonardo, 12, 120 Bruno, Giordano, 2, 50, 93 Bulifon, Antonio, 157, 160, 171, 177–78, 189 Buoncompagno, Francesco, 61–62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69 Buoncompagno, Girolamo, 4, 6 Burke, Edmund, 191 Cagnati, Marsilio, 73, 103 calcination, 199–200, 202 Calogero, Saint, 211 Caloprese, Gregorio, 188–89 Camillo, Giovanni, 100 Campanella, Tommaso, 53, 93, 157, 245n61 Campania, 5, 10, 34, 38, 216, 217 Campi Flegrei: Borelli on extinction of volcanoes and, 167; Caloprese’s Cartesian reasoning on, 189; Capaccio’s guides to, 43, 44, 121, 122; earthquakes associated with, 10, 43; explorers and visitors to, 26, 40, 41, 87; Hamilton on, 218; Imperato’s speculations on, 88; Loffredo’s explorations of, 42–43, 61, 141; Monte Nuovo rising amid, 28, 40, 43, 87, 205; Oviedo on Nicaraguan volcanism and, 38–39; Padovani on, 31; ruins in unparalleled setting of, 44; Stelliola’s suggested exploration of, 94; Strabo’s description of, 10; subterranean fires of, 98; sulfurous gases in, 90, 158; Toledo’s improvements in, 44,

245n60; Toledo’s villa in, 40. See also Pozzuoli; Solfatara crater Capaccio, Giulio Cesare, 43, 44–45, 121–22, 177 Capano, Scipione, 76 Capece, Antonio, 101 Capece, Ascanio, 101 Capuana, Porta, 67–69 Caraccio, Camillo, 70 Caracciolo, Antonio, 45, 47–48, 247n80 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 53, 55 carbon cycle, 14, 238n50 Cardano, Girolamo, 188 Carrera, Pietro, 162, 167 Cartesian philosophy, 161, 171, 174, 175, 176, 188–89. See also Descartes, René Cassiodorus, 97, 99, 100 Castelli, Pietro, 22–23, 24, 101–10; Borelli’s ideas and, 163, 165; as botanist, 22, 23, 102, 103, 109, 168; causal schema of, 48–49; global volcanism and, 156; interconnectivity of volcanoes and, 163; Mount Etna and, 103, 106, 109–10; pharmaceutical studies, 102, 105; role of place in work of, 168; studies of civets, 23, 104–5, 107–8, 109, 168; studies of insects, 22, 24, 103, 105, 108, 168; on sulfur near volcanoes, 158; treatise on Vesuvius, 22–23, 101–3, 105, 106–7, 110; on volcanoes of New Spain, 105–6, 139 Castel Nuovo, 35, 157 Castel Sant’Elmo, 35, 84 catacombs of Capodimonte hill, 64, 65 catastrophism, 210, 217 causes of earthquakes: Aquinas on, 77; prodigious, 73 causes of volcanism: in Agnello’s analysis, 85–87; Aristotelian natural philosophy and, 77, 86–87, 90, 100, 143–44; in Asterio’s analysis, 84–85; empirical study of particular volcanoes and, 144; in Giuliani’s tract, 74; historical narration by observers and, 83; historical view in humanism and, 14; history as propaedeutic to

310  Index causes of volcanism (cont.) understanding of, 97; Imperato on, 88–89; natural philosophy and, 16, 23; natural vs. prodigious, 72–73, 74–75; Neapolitan writers on 1631 eruption and, 54–55; Recupito on, 98–101; scientific writing after 1631 eruption and, 111; Spinola’s astrology and, 82. See also ignition of volcanoes Cavallo, Camillo, 175 central burning core: Borelli’s dismissal of, 165; Cartesian theory and, 189; Della Torre’s rejection of, 202, 205; Gassendi on, 185; Kircher on, 26, 140, 141, 154–55, 155, 164, 165, 185, 190, 202. See also subterranean heat Ceraso, Francesco, 21, 55–56, 59, 70 Cesalpino, Andrea, 23, 108–9 Cesi, Federico, 89, 92–93, 94, 107 channels. See subterranean connecting channels Chardin,  John, 212 Charles II, 176 Charles V: Marquis of Trevico and, 41; Oviedo’s natural history of the Indies for, 37; Papal State and, 121; Spanish historians during reign of, 120; triumphal entry into Naples, 68 Charles of Bourbon, 193, 197–98, 226 chemical model: of ignition, 152, 189; of subterranean heat, 166 chemistry, seventeenth-century status of, 257n34, 274n53 chorographical works, 34, 41; accounts of Mount Etna similar to, 161; natural causes and, 77; Paragallo’s natural history as, 184; response to Vesuvius and, 32, 137; of Tutini, 126. See also guidebooks Cicero, 40, 41, 44 city: chorographical works on, 34; environment and, 3; nature and, 110, 126; Vico on degeneration of, 227 classification by Renaissance naturalists, 23, 89; by Castelli, 104–5, 107–9; by Cesalpino,

108–9; Falcone’s table of eruptions, 90–92, 91; by Imperato, 87; of volcanoes, 23, 29 climate: local character and, 212–18, 225; Mediterranean civilization and, 17 cloud of ash from 1631 eruption, 61, 66, 67; Bove’s description of, 229; Falcone’s interpretation of, 90; falling on Lecce, 79, 80, 96; Giuliani’s naturalistic interpretation of, 74; Manso’s experience of, 52–53, 67–68, 70, 228; raining on Neapolitan cities, 96; reaching Constantinople, 61; receding before San Gennaro’s relics, 67–70, 69, 71, 127; Recupito’s depiction of, 96; substances believed present in, 152; trailing out over Adriatic, 80 clouds, eruptive, 16 Clusius, Carolus, 23 coatis, 23, 104, 107–8 Codro, Micer, 39 Coignet, Michel, 142 Collenucio, Pandolfo, 10–11, 12 Colonna, Fabio, 92, 94 combustion: nitro-aerial theory of, 152, 189; in Padovani’s chemical oven, 29 computational instruments, 141–42 Copernicanism: of Galileo, 22, 81, 82; of Stelliola, 93 Cornaro, Marco, 48 Cornelio, Tommaso, 55, 175, 176, 190 corpuscular theory, 166, 174 Cortés, Hernán, 37, 106 Croce, Benedetto, 11–12 Cuma, 40, 42 Dal Pozzo, Cassiano, 22, 104, 109, 110 Damian, Peter, 59, 86 da Miro, Francesco, 76 D’Andrea, Francesco, 175, 176 D’Andrea, Vincenzo, 118 Dante, 3 D’Arezzo, Francesco, 157–58, 159, 161, 162 D’Arezzo, Ristoro, 27 d’Avalos, Alfonso, 11

Index  311 de Angelis, Francesco Antonio, 76 de Cordoba, Gonsalbo, 37 De Cristoforo, Giacinto, 176 deep burning core. See central burning core de Glianos, Domenico Giovanni Battista, 183 de Gusman, Gaspar, 74 de Guzmán, Leonora Maria, 74 Dei, Benedetto, 6 De Jorio, Andrea, 221 Della Marra, Pio, 85 Della Porta, Giovanni Battista, 92, 185, 245n61 Della Porta, Giovanni Vincenzo, 185 Della Torre, Giovanni Maria, 110–11, 195–204, 196, 197, 200, 203, 204, 218 Dellon, Charles, 211 de Milo, Domenico Andrea, 170–73 d’Engenio Caracciolo, Cesare, 63–64, 122 De Pietri, Francesco, 120, 123, 124 de Rosa, Loise, 13 Descartes, René, 55, 165, 185, 188, 189, 190. See also Cartesian philosophy d’Este, Ercole, 10 di Bianca, Gianfrancesco, 76 di Capua, Leonardo, 176 Dickinson, Emily, 24 Di Falco, Benedetto, 41 di Ligorio, Francescantonio, 76 Dio Cassius, 97, 99, 229 discorso (trattato), 73–75 Disraeli, Isaac, 187–88 Dolomieu, Déodat, 209–18 Domenico, Giovanni, 55 Don Juan of Austria, 131, 132 dulcem Parthenopen, 32, 49, 133 earthquakes: Agricola on, 31; Aquinas on cause of, 77; Aristotle on, 99; Borelli on, 165; in Calabria in 1638, 101; Castelli on, 106; D’Arezzo’s thirteenth-century view of, 27; distant from southern Italy, reported in print, 72; eruption of 79 AD and, 59; eruption of 1631 and, 68, 84–85, 87, 94, 96, 97; Giuliani’s natural philosophy and, 75;

Hooke’s lectures on, 152; Hutton on volcanoes and, 231; Kircher on, 154; Loffredo on, 43; in London in 1693, 173; in Naples in 1688, 173–74; Oviedo’s Nicaraguan experience of, 39; Padovani on, 31; Paragallo’s book on 1688 quake, 182; as prodigies, 73; subterranean winds (exhalations) and, 29, 75, 164 effusive (strombolian) eruptions, 111, 270n102, 271n21 Egidio, Padre (Castelli’s source), 107 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 24 empiricism: of Castelli, 102; causal explanations of natural philosophy and, 144; erudition and history in, 92, 95; eruption of 1631 and, 80, 95; of Kircher, 153; of Padovani, 31; Paragallo’s humanistic presentation and, 183; Recupito’s rhetorical account as, 95, 164; unlettered sources exploited by, 50. See also science Enlightenment, 8, 219, 225, 233 environment. See landscape Epicureanism: antiteleological view of, 167; atomism in, 77, 171, 175, 176 erosion: Borelli on Etna’s extinction and, 167; cycle of extrusion and, 14, 205, 231; Dolomieu’s observations of, 214; in uniformity theory of Lyell, 210 erupting volcanoes. See volcanism eruption of 79 AD, 15, 32, 50; Atrio and, 57; Braccini’s reading about, during 1631 eruption, 61; Pliny the Elder’s death in, 31, 39, 52, 140–41, 185; Pliny the Younger on, 52, 59, 61, 178; rim of caldera remaining from, 58, 67, 85; warning signs preceding, 59. See also Herculaneum; Pompeii eruption of 472, 64, 74, 86 eruption of 1631, 15–16; Agnello’s search for explanation, 56, 85–87; appearance of, 58, 60, 67; appearance of Vesuvius in aftermath of, 97–98, 208; Asterio’s search for explanation, 84–85; Braccini’s observations of, 60–61, 62, 66–67, 74, 78, 228;

312  Index eruption of 1631, 15–16 (cont.) Castelli’s treatise in response to, 22–23, 101–3, 105, 106–7, 110; Ceraso’s account of, 55–56; contemporary accounts of, 22; contrition in response to, 65, 66, 68; death toll and injuries from, 67, 70, 76; elites vs. masses reacting to, 69, 74; explained by natural causes, 77–78, 101; foolhardy approaches to, 60; Galiani’s satire on accounts of, 232; Galileo and, 22, 94–95; impact on modern volcanology, 22; inscription at base of Vesuvius following, 135, 136, 137; lava flows not prominent in, 158, 185; life appearing in aftermath of, 143; Lincei and, 94; magma expansion and, 61, 67; Manso’s account of (see Manso, Giovanni Battista); measurements of, 61; more violent than later eruptions, 137; natural history and, 18, 77, 86, 232; Neapolitan culture and, 18, 228; nobility trapped outside the city, 65, 140; panic and despair in face of, 60–61, 74, 78; perceptions of Vesuvius altered by, 49; phreatic bursts in, 61; piety and devotion in analysis of, 78, 84, 101; processions in response to, 53, 62, 65, 67, 69–70, 75, 95, 113, 127, 180, 229; Recupito’s Jesuit tract on, 95–101; refugees from countryside, 65–66, 72, 76; rescue and relief activities, 76–77; sea creatures and, 70, 101, 186; seawater thought linked to, 111, 186, 187; second phase of, 66–67; Signorelli on national decline and, 227; Spanish (Habsburg) rule and, 77, 114; Spinola’s account from Lecce, 79–80; stones falling from, 96; subterranean channels believed connected to, 185; tax relief for peasants after, 127, 140; theme of loss associated with, 48–49; Tutini on, 130, 133; unexpected quality of, 21; variety of responses to, 15–16; warning signs prior to, 59–60, 100. See also cloud of ash from 1631 eruption; eruptions of Vesuvius; God’s punishment by Vesuvian eruptions;

printed works on 1631 eruption; San Gennaro and eruption of 1631 eruption of 1649, 117, 128–29, 130, 132, 137, 142 eruption of 1660, 142, 150–51, 153, 158 eruption of 1689, 177 eruption of 1694, 182–84, 186–87, 191 eruption of 1707, 178, 179–81 eruption of 1779: Galiani’s pamphlet on, 231–33; Hamilton’s account of, 219–21, 222, 223, 230 eruption of 1794, 218 eruptions of Vesuvius: analogized to human illness, 80, 89, 154, 217; appreciation of place and, 27; evoking the past, 228–29; Falcone’s table of historical record, 90–92, 91; image and text collaborating on, 192–94, 193; long silence before 1631, 26, 78; as miracles, 85–86; modern volcanology and, 16, 18; Neapolitan dichotomies conveyed by, 20; scattering ash about the Mediterranean, 151; after 1631 through eighteenth century, 110, 111, 135, 137, 138, 229; Tutini on Spanish tyranny and, 128–33; unexpected quality of, 21. See also eruption of 79 AD; eruption of 1631; God’s punishment by Vesuvian eruptions; phreatic bursts; Vesuvius Etna, Mount: Agricola on, 28, 29; Bembo’s ascent of, 29, 107, 140–41, 161; Borelli on, 156–58, 159–68, 179, 184, 188, 189, 190, 202, 226; Castelli and, 103, 106, 109–10; compared to Vesuvius, 243n16; eruption of 1540, 28; eruption of 1669, 156, 157, 158, 161, 163, 165, 184, 186, 202, 227; eruptions of late seventeenth century, 110; eruptive patterns of, 162; Europeans’ travel to, 206; Falcone’s conjectured channels between Vesuvius and, 138; humanistic description of, 161; ice transported to Malta from, 216; Imperato’s speculations on, 88; Kircher’s depiction of, 154, 156; Kircher’s experience of, 26, 140; lava flows from, 156, 158, 159, 161–63, 185, 206, 227; Oviedo’s

Index  313 travels and, 36, 39; Padovani on, 31; Paragallo’s reference to, 188; Recupito on, 111; sixteenth-century accounts of, 161; as stratovolcano, 205; subterranean fires of, 98 explosive (plinian) eruptions, 111, 270n102, 271n21; first-century, 57 Faber,  Johann, 107 Fabris, Pietro, 218, 221, 223, 231 Falcone, Scipione, 89–92, 101, 138, 154, 156, 163, 178; subterranean fiery channels and, 90, 138, 185, 202, 214 Fazello, Tommaso, 158, 161, 167 Federigo of Aragon, 34 Ferrante, Pietrantonio, 76 fires of hell, 78, 85, 114 Florence: Benedetto Dei’s praise of, 6; Bruni on republican origins of, 120 Fontana, Francesco, 144, 145, 146, 149, 150, 156, 226 Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de, 212 forastiero, 45, 177, 178 forest, the, 3, 227 Formisano, Agostino, 193, 194 fornax chymica, 29, 30 Fortis, Alberto, 205 fumaroles, 43, 64, 90, 141, 158, 204, 210. See also solfataras Galeota, Onofrio, 232 Galiani, Ferdinando, 9, 231–33 Galilei, Galileo: astronomical controversy of, 25, 80–82, 96; atomistic concept of heat, 175; computational device built by, 142; empiricism associated with, 176; eruption of 1631 and, 22, 94–95; Jesuits and, 96; lunar surface and, 80, 144, 147, 149; Manso’s letters to, 54, 55; Signorelli on native genius of, 226; Spinola’s debt to, 79, 80–81; Stelliola’s support for, 93; students Torricelli and Viviani, 157; trial of, 96; writing in vernacular, 55, 79

Gargiulo, Domenico, 68–70, 69, 114 Gassendi, Pierre, 171, 174, 175, 176, 185–86 Gatta, Xavier della, 218 Genoino, Giulio, 46, 124, 129, 133 geological sciences: necessity of inference and imagination in, 87; in seventeenthcentury Italy, 21 geothermal vents, of Campi Flegrei, 39. See also thermal springs Gesner, Conrad, 35, 242n11 gestures, Neapolitan, 221, 222, 223, 231, 233 Gianelli, Basilio, 176 Giannone, Pietro, 8, 133 Giuliani, Gianbernardino, 74–76, 178 Glacken, Clarence, 17, 18 God’s punishment by Vesuvian eruptions: Borelli’s rejection of, 167, 168; competing with Aristotelian account, 112; concern of populace about, 72, 78; de Milo on, 170–71; learned observers’ rejection of, 78; placation through San Gennaro and, 113–14; revolt of 1647 and, 117–18, 129–31, 132, 135 Goethe, Johan Wolfgang von, 221 Grand Tour, 5, 8, 19, 20, 205–6 Greek and Roman ruins, 34, 40, 43–44 Grignani, Lodovico, 72 Grimaldo, Don Pietro, 114 Grisconio, Bartolomeo, 182 guidebooks, 35, 41; by Capaccio, 43, 45, 177–78. See also chorographical works guides: local people as, 141; Neapolitan humanists as, 177–78; Paragallo as, 187 Guise, Duc de, 117, 127 gunpowder, 90, 106, 152, 166 Habsburg rule. See Spanish (Habsburg) rule of Naples Hamilton, William, 82–83, 206–7, 217, 218–21, 223; character of Naples and, 228, 233; rock specimens found by, 223, 224; witnessing eruption of 1779, 220–21, 222, 230, 231 Harvey, William, 154

314  Index heat: on Dolomieu’s travels, 210, 212–13, 215–17; philosophical conflicts about, 176; of southern Italy, 218. See also subterranean heat herbalists: earth science knowledge of, 174; Falcone as, 89, 90, 91. See also medicinal plants; simples, pharmaceutical Herculaneum: Aloja’s drawings of antiquities from, 197; attraction of Vesuvius and, 26; Bourbon digs of, 195, 198, 221; buried, while Naples lived, 208; coming to light, 201; Mecatti on, 195; Mocetto’s depiction of, 36, 37; as most violent eruption, 15; Sanfelice on destruction of, 172. See also eruption of 79 AD Hernández, Francisco, 104, 107–8 Herschel, William, 147 Hesiod, 207 Hessen-Darmstadt, Frederich, 25 Hevelius,  Johannes, 146–50, 148, 156, 172, 195 historia: Aristotelian system strained by, 112; in Borelli’s account of Etna, 160–61, 162, 163, 165; causa linked to, 83; elucidation from contrasts of, 187; Falcone’s ignition table, 90–92, 91; Hamilton’s simple prose compared to, 220; Paragallo’s work as, 183, 184; Recupito’s narrative of, 96–97, 98, 99; in seventeenth-century tracts on volcanoes, 158–59; as significant empirical evidence, 182; of Spinola, 80, 83; substantial printed literature of, 178–79 historians: modern emphasis on interpretation, 229; observers of Vesuvius as, 110–11 historicism, Neapolitan, 228 Hoefnagel,  Joris, 32, 33, 34–36, 45 Hogenberg, Franz, 32 Hooke, Robert, 152 human body, analogies to, 45, 77, 80, 88, 89, 154, 217 humanism: appreciation of Neapolitan landscape and, 134; appreciation of Vesuvius and, 13, 14, 15, 27, 31–32, 45, 57; Borelli’s Historia et meteorologia and, 161, 165, 168; classical antiquity and, 48, 120, 121; in

conveyance of natural inquiry, 183; eruptions of Vesuvius and, 172; natural history and, 41, 42; Neapolitan, 12–13, 14, 44–45, 48, 137; Neapolitan origins of modern volcanology and, 16, 18, 19; Roman, 4, 43–44; scientific understanding and, 80, 137; of Spanish historians connecting to Rome, 120–21 humanists: aesthetic appreciation of nature, 57; in Aragonese court of Renaissance Naples, 32–34, 47; classical models of, 53; climbing Vesuvius during long silence, 26, 57; Collenucio’s Neapolitan history, 10–11; contesting outsider opinions of Naples, 6–8; exploring Campi Flegrei, 40; knowledge of ancient authorities, 74; lacking peasants’ knowledge of landscape, 59–60; as local guides for interested outsiders, 177–78; reliance on texts, 60, 199 Hutton,  James, 14, 231 Huygens, Christian, 147 iatrochemistry, 89, 102 ignition of volcanoes, 83, 88, 89; alchemy and, 27, 84–85, 86, 87, 89, 152, 189; Borelli on mechanism of, 164–66, 175, 189, 190; chemical model of, 152, 189; Della Torre’s vocabulary and, 199–200; Galiani’s satire on theories of, 232, 233; Jesuits on, 188; Paragallo’s conclusions on, 190–91; two general possibilities for, 189. See also bitumen; causes of volcanism; subterranean heat; sulfur Imperato, Ferrante, 87–89, 92, 122, 188, 201 Imperato, Francesco, 122 Ingrassia, Giovanni Filippo, 215 Inquisition, 93, 96, 175, 176 Ischia, 41, 88 Istatia, Marquis of, 195 Italian peninsula: natural beauty of, 9–10; profound regionalism in, 4; unification of, 12. See also South, Italian Italian Wars, 5, 46, 73

Index  315 Janurarius, Saint, 219 Jesuits: animistic and corpuscular theories condemned by, 174; Fontana’s microscope shown to, 146; goal of civilizing southern Italy, 38; ignition of volcanoes and, 188; Journal de Trevoux and, 188, 191; not committed to single philosophy, 198–99; repression of Neapolitan natural science, 175–76; on volcanoes in the Indies, 106. See also Aristotelian natural philosophy; Kircher, Athanasius; Mascolo, Giovanni Battista; Recupito, Giulio Cesare; Schott, Gaspar Kauffman, Angelica, 198 Kircher, Athanasius, 25–26, 110, 140–43, 150–56, 178–79; on ashen crosses, 150–52, 153; Borelli’s rejection of speculations by, 163–64, 165; Castelli’s mention of, 109, 110; central burning core and, 26, 140, 141, 154–55, 155, 164, 165, 185, 190, 202; climb of Vesuvius, 140–43; measurements of Vesuvian crater, 141–42; Paragallo’s reading of, 185; subterranean channels and, 154–55, 155, 185, 186, 214 Krakatoa, Mount, 15 lahar, 16, 66–67, 68, 70, 76, 186, 187; composition of, 66; Recupito on, 96, 97 landscape: Aeolian Islands’ character shaped by, 212; Aragonese rule and, 47; Braudel on, 17; cities asserting dominance over, 126; earthquakes and eruptions generating, 31; erosion of, 214; as human invention, 18; of Italian South, 5, 8, 16–17; literary celebration of, 13; local identity within empire and, 9; meaning assigned by beholders of, 2–3; of Naples as natural Paradise, 11, 33–34; Neapolitan body politic and, 18, 45, 47; Neapolitan character and, 10; on passing from Naples to Rome, 1–2; Renaissance appreciation of, 15, 45; Tutini’s defense of Naples and, 6; Vesuvian, 16. See also nature; place

Laudati, Domenico Benedetto, 182 Laurenzana, Duke of, 188 lava: gold believed to be contained in, 77; natural history interest in, 16, 23; scientific observations of, 111 lava flows from Etna, 156, 158, 159, 161–63, 185, 206, 227 lava flows from Vesuvius, 158, 159, 185, 186–87, 206; Aloja’s depiction of, 199–201, 200, 204, 204; European travelers’ observations of, 205–6; Hamilton’s observations of, 218, 219, 223; Mecatti’s 1754 encounter with, 192, 193, 194, 195; mid-eighteenth century four-year bout of, 194; not prominent in 1631, 158, 185; Paragallo’s observations of, 182–83, 184–85; Recupito on, 96, 97; strata built up to form mountain, 202, 205 lazzaroni (urban poor), 6, 69, 117, 122 le Maire,  Jacob, 105 Lemos, Count of, 119 Leonardi, Vincenzo, 107 Leone, Ambrogio, 36, 50, 98, 141 Lewis, Norman, 2 Libavius, Andreas, 106 lichens, 143, 215, 272n25 Lincei. See Accademia dei Lincei Livy, 10 Lodovici, Lodovico, 94 Loffredo, Ferrante, 41–43, 50, 61, 141 Longo, Egidio, 55, 63, 74, 95 Lucretius, 77, 171, 189 Lyell, Charles, 21, 210, 271n22 Mabillon, Jean, 177 Magliabechi, Antonio, 173–74, 176 Magliocco, Giovanni Domenico, 58, 66, 78 magma, 14, 111; eruption of 1631 and, 61, 67; phreatic bursts and, 36, 180; at subduction zone, 206 Maine, Duc de, 188 Malpighi, Marcello, 165, 169

316  Index Malta, 215–16, 217 Manso, Giovanni Battista, 52–55; Braccini’s observations and, 60, 61; classical antiquity and, 52–53, 61, 228; cult of San Gennaro and, 63, 67–68, 70, 78, 113; as a leader of procession, 62; presiding over Oziosi, 119; Valletta’s letter compared to, 178, 179 Maravall, José Antonio, 134 Marcellinus Comes, 64 Marino, Giovanni Battista, 119 Marino, John, 20 Mars, 144, 145, 146, 147 Martin V, 44 Marucelli, Alessandro, 23 Marucelli, Francesco, 23 Masaniello, 116, 130 Masaya volcano, Nicaragua, 37, 39 Mascardi, Giacomo, 105, 168 Mascolo, Giovanni Battista, 186–87, 207–8 Mattioli, Andrea, 108 Matvejevic, Predrag, 2, 242n7 Mazzella, Scipione, 41, 43 Mecatti, Giuseppe, 192–94, 193, 195, 203 Medici court, 157 medicinal chemistry. See iatrochemistry medicinal plants: Castelli’s knowledge of, 102; Magliocco’s expertise in, 58; nanci of Nicaragua, 39. See also herbalists; simples, pharmaceutical Mediterranean biodiversity, 134 Mediterranean character, 242n7 Messina, Antonio Suarez, 135 metallurgy, 28, 84, 89, 152 Metastasio, Pietro, 188 Meteorology (Aristotle), 80, 99, 106, 161, 174 Micheli, Pietro, 79 microcosm/macrocosm analogy, 88. See also human body, analogies to microscopes: Della Torre’s use of, 197, 198; Fontana’s construction of, 146; Hamilton’s use of, 223 Milton, John, 53, 55 mineralogy, 84, 89

minerals: Agricola on, 28; Hamilton’s rock specimens, 223, 224; Imperato’s study of, 87–88; slowly accreting in Vesuvius, 76; specimens collected from Vesuvius, 16 mining, 28, 152, 174, 190 miracles: baroque Neapolitan hunger for, 76; in Carrera’s history of Etna, 162; eruptions of Vesuvius as, 76, 85–86; Inquisition and denial of, 176; Kircher’s classification of prodigies and, 151; of Saint Calogero in Aeolian Islands, 211. See also San Gennaro Mocetto, Girolamo, 36, 37 Montagu, Elisabeth Charlton, 218, 219 Monterrey, Count of, 62, 67, 74, 76, 113, 114 Montesquieu, 209, 212–13, 215, 216, 217–18 monticelli, 177, 193, 211 moon, 80, 144, 146, 147, 149, 195 Morales, Ambrosio, 120 Moreri, Louis, 24 Mormile, Gioseffe, 114 Moro, Antonio Lazzaro, 205, 210 Morton, Earl of, 219 mountains: European travelers’ delight in, 35–36; as landscapes defined by humans, 3; orogenesis of, 167, 169, 205, 210 Muir, John, 3 Musumeci, Saverio, 227 Nacatime, 39 Naples: affinity between Vesuvius and, 181– 82; Aragonese rule of, 13, 33, 34, 36, 38, 39, 47; aristocracy of, 115–16; benefits of nature for, 33, 35, 134; as a center of Renaissance culture, 12–13, 36; creeping up flanks of Vesuvius, 15; demographic surge by early seventeenth century, 115, 116; dichotomy between landscape and inhabitants, 9–10, 11, 20, 38; exoticism in representation of, 9, 13, 19, 20, 21, 218; gestures of common people, 221, 222, 223, 231, 233; historical myths of, 121; instability both geological and political, 220; late seventeenth-century philosophical conflicts in, 171, 175–76;

Index  317 lazzaroni (urban poor) of, 6, 69, 117, 122; metonymic equation of nature and, 7, 21; popolo civile of, 117, 119, 121, 122, 123, 125, 128; reformers of late eighteenth century, 226; reformist visions of seventeenthcentury historians, 121–26; religious orders competing in, 95–96; scientific observers of seventeenth century in, 55; sirocco in, 216; stereotypes about, 4–12; togati (professional class) of, 115, 123. See also revolt of 1647; South, Italian; Spanish (Habsburg) rule of Naples natural history: Bembo’s descriptions of volcanic activity and, 140; Borelli’s thinking and, 165, 168–69; eruption of 1631 and, 18, 77, 86, 232; fully formed by seventeenth century, 23; of Hernández on Mexico, 104; Imperato’s Historia naturale, 87–89; vs. natural philosophy, 23; as one kind of Recupito’s history, 97; origins of modern volcanology and, 18; Renaissance, 3, 16, 19; in tracts on volcanoes, 153–54; unencumbered observation in, 199 naturalists: broad spectrum of curiosity, 169; descriptions of local people by, 211–12; drawn to Vesuvius, 26; erroneous pictures created by, 195; erudition filtering experience of, 143; explorations both indigenous and exotic, 103–5; Galiani’s satire including, 231–33; of the Lincei, 94; of Naples, in dialogue with colleagues elsewhere, 191; native accounts used by, 50–51; Renaissance, 16, 23, 27–28 (see also Agricola, Georg; Padovani, Fabrizio); as volcano watchers, 3. See also Castelli, Pietro; classification by Renaissance naturalists natural philosophy: Agnello’s explanation and, 86; Asterio’s explanation and, 84; causes of volcanism and, 16, 19, 23; Falcone’s explanation and, 90; late seventeenth-century alternatives to Aristotle, 174–77; Spinola’s historia and, 80. See also

Aristotelian natural philosophy; Cartesian philosophy; science nature: aesthetic appreciation of, 6, 57, 143; alienation from, 18–19; American culture and, 3; in Christian and classical traditions, 47–48, 143; cities and, 110, 126; cultural effects of, 17–18; divine purpose of, 170–71; human attitudes toward, 3–4; human control of, 48–49; human history and, 228; metonymic equation of Naples and, 7, 21; Naples enjoying benefits of, 33, 35, 134; peasants’ knowledge of, 59–60; rhetorical uses of, 6, 47–48; senescence of, 47, 48, 49; separation between culture or history and, 83; social arrangements and, 45; Venetian view of, 13–14. See also landscape Newton, Isaac, 178 Nicaragua, Masaya volcano, 37, 39 nitro-aerial theory of combustion, 152, 189 novatores, 171, 175–76 Nuovo, Monte, 28, 40, 43, 87, 205 Ocampo, Florián de, 120 Oldenburg, Henry, 157, 165 Omodei, Antonio Filoteo, 161, 167 Oñate, Count of, 128, 130 oral sources, 50–51 organic vs. inorganic matter, 89 Orilia, Francesco, 124 Orlandi, Giovanni, 72 orogenesis, 167, 169, 205, 210 orography of Borelli, 160, 161 Osuna, Duke of, 45–46, 123, 124, 247n81 Oviedo, Gonzalo Fernández de, 36–40, 41, 42, 45, 50, 141 oxygen, 189 Oziosi. See Accademia degli Oziosi Padovani, Fabrizio, 29, 30, 31 Palermo, sirocco in, 215, 216 Pallavicino, Sforza, 215–16 Panormita, 33 Pantelleria, 215

318  Index pantometrum Kircherianum, 142 papacy, 4–5; Habsburg monarchs as patrons of, 121 Pappalardo, Diego, 227 Paracelsus, 188 Paragallo, Gaspare, 24, 174, 182–91, 198 Parthenopen, dulcem, 32, 49, 133 Paul IV, 73 peasants: disgust of learned urban elites for, 6; fleeing destitute countryside for Naples, 115; fleeing 1631 eruption into Naples, 62; landed aristocracy and, 115–16; perceptions of the environment, 18; tax relief for, after 1631 eruption, 127, 140; warning signs of 1631 eruption and, 59–60, 100 Pereisc, Nicolas, 185–86 periodicity of eruptions, 14, 91, 100, 111–12, 143, 159, 167, 231 Perrey, Nicolas, 71 Petrarch, 12, 140, 141 Petrucci, Gioseffo, 153 Philip II of Spain, 108, 115, 121 Philip IV of Spain, 77, 114, 123, 124, 131, 133 phreatic bursts: in 1500, 36, 50; in 1631, 61; in 1707, 180; Padovani’s chemical oven and, 29 Piaggi, Antonio, 218 picturesque, the, 20, 181, 205, 218, 220, 221, 223, 225. See also visual representation of Vesuvius Pighio, Stefano, 57, 58, 78 Piscelli, Antonio, 68 Pius II, 26 place: appreciation of Vesuvius as, 27; ideas and, 3–4; scientific culture and, 168–69. See also chorographical works; landscape plague: of 1576 in Palermo, 215; of 1656 in Naples, 133 Platania, Giacinto, 227 Platonism, 77, 167 Plinian (explosive) eruptions, 111, 270n102, 271n21; first-century, 57 Pliny the Elder: Bembo’s reference to, 140–41; Castelli compared to, 103; death of, 31, 39,

52, 140–41, 185; Kircher’s familiarity with, 140; Oviedo’s emulation of, 37, 38, 39; Pereisc’s reflection on, 185; Stromboli as described by, 207 Pliny the Younger: letters to Tacitus, 52–53, 61, 96, 178; Mecatti’s evocation of, 192; on warning signs of eruption, 59 pneuma (hot exhalations), 78, 164–65. See also subterranean winds (exhalations) Pompeii: attraction of Vesuvius and, 26; Bourbon digs of, 221; buried, while Naples lived, 208; coming to light, 201; Mecatti on, 195; Mocetto’s depiction of, 36, 37; most violent eruption and, 15; Paragallo’s suggestions about, 184; Sanfelice on destruction of, 172. See also eruption of 79 AD Pontano, Giovanni, 32–34 popolo civile, 117, 119, 121, 122, 123, 125, 128 Popolo, Porta del, 4, 5 popular revolt. See revolt of 1647 portents: Porzio on, 41; resonance in seventeenth-century culture, 100. See also prodigies Porzio, Lucantonio, 176 Porzio, Simone, 40–41, 205 Posillipo, Cape, 32 Pozzuoli: explorers of, 40; Falcone’s conjectured channels between Vesuvius and, 138; guidebooks including, 41, 42–43, 44, 121; Imperato on fires from earth in, 88, 89; Oviedo on, 38–39; Toledo’s improvement of tunnel to, 44. See also Campi Flegrei printed historiae of eruptions, 178–79. See also historia printed works on 1631 eruption, 21–22, 55–56, 63, 72–75, 79–80; Castelli’s Incendio, 22–23, 101–3, 105, 106–7, 110; Recupito’s Nuntius, 64–65, 95–101, 164 printers: Antonio Bulifon, 157, 160, 171, 177– 78, 189; Constantino Vitale, 87; Giacomo Raillard, 174, 182; Leccese, 79; Neapoli­ tan, 41, 53, 55, 63, 72, 95, 265n20, 268n67; Ottavio Beltramo, 90, 95; Roman, 105, 168 Procopius, 35, 64, 99, 151

Index  319 prodigies, 72–73, 74–75; Kircher’s classification of, 151–52; revolt of 1647 and, 118. See also portents pyroclastic flows and materials, 16, 31, 195, 196, 214, 220, 238n52 pyrotechnics, 89, 152, 174 Pythagoras, as Stelliola’s model, 93, 94

Rowland, Ingrid, 2 Royal Society: chemical model of ignition and, 152; Hamilton’s reports to, 218, 219, 220; request to Borelli, 157, 161, 165; Valletta’s letter to, 178–82, 191 ruins, Greek and Roman, 34, 40, 43–44 rural inhabitants. See peasants Ruscelli, Girolamo, 11

Quinones,  Juan de, 77 Raillard, Giacomo, 174, 182 Ray,  John, 103 rebellion of 1585, 114 Recchi, Nardo Antonio, 108 recovery narrative, 47 Recupito, Giulio Cesare, 178; on ash falling far away, 151; Borelli’s differences from, 164; Edmund Burke’s reference to, 191; on Etna, 111; on eviscerated Vesuvius, 135, 137; later conflicts of Jesuits and, 175; Nuntius of, 64–65, 95–101, 164; Signorelli on, 226 relationi, 55, 72, 73, 77, 133 Renaissance: alienation from nature and, 18; classical models in, 53; improvement of nature in, 48; microcosm/macrocosm analogy in, 88 (see also human body, analogies to); Naples as a cultural center of, 13; naturalists of, 16, 23, 27–28 (see also Agricola, Georg; Padovani, Fabrizio). See also humanism Republic of Letters, 101, 109, 119, 157, 178, 181, 188, 191, 195, 226 revolt of 1647, 116–19; Genoino as early leader in, 46, 124, 129, 133; Tutini and, 124, 127–29, 131, 133, 134; Vesuvius’s angry reactivity to, 117–18, 135; writings with influence on, 121, 122 Rome: as center, 4–5; humanism in, 4, 43–44; landscape on passing from Naples to, 1–2; sirocco in, 216; Tiber flood of 1599, 73, 103; Vesuvian eruption of 1631 viewed from, 105, 106, 109, 110 Roncagliolo, Giovanni, 53, 55, 63 Roncagliolo, Secondino, 55, 63

Saint Non,  Jean Claude Richard de, 223, 225 Salutati, Coluccio, 12 Sanfelice, Antonio, 172 San Gennaro: cult of, 63–65; eruption of 1707 and, 180, 181; eruption of 1779 and, 221; failure of blood to liquefy in 1649, 130–31, 132; martyrdom amid Solfatara crater, 64; Tutini’s hagiography of, 126–27 San Gennaro and eruption of 1631, 62, 63–65, 67–70; Bove’s description of, 229; honored for saving Naples, 113; as miracle, 74, 75, 78, 114, 127; Neapolitan politics and, 117; super­ stition of the urban mob and, 8, 225 San Giovanni, Porta, 4, 5 Sannazaro,  Jacopo, 33 Sarnelli, Pompeo, 136 Savio, Francesco, 55 Schama, Simon, 2, 3–4 Scheiner, Christoph, 80 Schipa, Michelangelo, 247n81 Scholastic natural philosophy: antiperistatic doctrine in, 90, 258n38; natural phenomena and, 75, 77; Recupito’s Jesuit tract and, 95; volcanism and, 87. See also Aristotelian natural philosophy Schott, Franz, 57 Schott, Gaspar, 142, 150–51, 153 Schouten, Willem, 105 science: curiosity about Vesuvius and, 16, 37, 49; Hamilton’s version of objectivity in, 220; historia and, 80, 83; inquiry into causes and, 83, 84; Italian culture of, 14; located in place, 169; organic and mechanistic analogies in, 138–39, 240n75. See also empiricism; natural philosophy

320  Index scientific community, 101 Scientific Revolution: alienation from nature and, 18–19; observers of Vesuvius and, 55 Scilla, Agostino, 103, 168 Scorriggio, Lazzaro, 55, 63, 72, 268n67 Scylla and Charybdis, 26 sea creatures: fossilized in high elevations, 205; found after 1631 eruption, 70, 101, 186; whale bones in volcanic rock, 220 seawater: chemical theories of volcanism and, 152; speculations about 1631 eruption and, 111, 186, 187. See also water Shaftesbury, Earl of, 178, 179, 180, 181 shepherds and woodsmen, 57, 59. See also peasants Sicily: Falcone’s web of fire beneath, 90; Sig­ norelli on predicament of, 227; sirocco in Palermo, 215, 216. See also Aeolian Islands; Etna, Mount Signorelli, Pietro Napoli, 226–28 Sigurdsson, Haraldur, 22 simples, pharmaceutical, 57, 58, 102, 105. See also herbalists; medicinal plants Sirigatti, Vincenzo, 79 sirocco, 215–16 Sixtus V, 57 Solfatara crater, 42, 43, 44, 64, 89 solfataras, 40. See also fumaroles; sulfur Solinus, 99 Somma, Mount, 40, 113, 130. See also Vesuvius Somma caldera, 50, 98, 204 South, Italian: Central America’s affinities with, 38; concepts of, early modern, 12, 20–21; economic downturn of late sixteenth century, 116; as exotic, 13, 19, 21, 218; northern European gaze on, 19, 217; orogenesis in, 205; transformed under Habsburg rule, 38; Vesuvius as metonym of, 13, 16, 21, 225; volcanism associated with, 28, 209, 218. See also Italian peninsula; Naples Spain’s affinities with Naples, 7 Spanish (Habsburg) rule of Naples, 33, 38; conquest in 1503, 33, 38, 114; corruption

and decline associated with, 227; eruption of 1631 and, 77, 114; Loffredo’s service under, 41; loyalty and resistance to, 11, 40, 47, 114–18, 121, 123, 124, 245n60; traditions of describing landscape and, 33. See also Charles V; Philip II of Spain; Philip IV of Spain; revolt of 1647 Spanish Empire: apologists for dominance of Italy, 120–21; local institutions and identity under, 9; Naples as jewel of, 12; Naples’ military and strategic role for, 35 Spanish viceroys: Capaccio’s alliance with, 122; Count of Lemos, 119; Count of Mon­ terrey, 62, 67, 74, 76, 113, 114; Count of Oñate, 128; Duke of Arcos, 117; Duke of Osuna, 45–46, 123, 124, 247n81; eruption of 1631 and, 49, 62, 63, 69, 76; eruption of 1694 and, 184; Gaspar de Borgia, 45, 46; Giuliani’s loyalty to, 74, 75; Neapolitan nobility and, 115; Pedro Toledo, 11, 34, 40, 44, 116, 245n60; revolt of 1647 and, 46, 47, 116–18, 124 spaventevole, 228 spavento, 231 spaventosissima, 233 Spinola, Giovanni, 79–83, 86–87, 96 spiritus nitro-aerus, 152, 189 Starace, Vincenzo, 117, 122, 247n80 Stelliola, Nicola Antonio, 93–94, 226 Steno, Nicolas, 186 Stereocaulon vesuvianum, 143, 272n25 Strabo, 10, 202 stratigraphy, 201, 205, 210, 211 Stromboli, 26, 98, 140, 207, 214, 271n21. See also Aeolian Islands Strombolian (effusive) eruptions, 111, 270n102, 271n21 Suarez, Francisco, 90 subduction zone, 14, 15, 206 subterranean connecting channels: Borelli’s rejection of, 163–64, 185, 186; Falcone on, 90, 138, 185, 202, 214; Kircher on, 154–55, 155, 185, 186; Paragallo on, 185–86

Index  321 subterranean heat: Agricola on, 28, 78, 166, 202; Borelli on, 165–66, 189; Cartesian theory of, 189; Hutton on volcanic cycle and, 231; Kircher’s depiction of, 154–56, 155, 202; mountain generation and, 205; vs. theorized near-surface reactions, 189. See also central burning core; ignition of volcanoes subterranean winds (exhalations): Agricola on, 28–29, 86; of Aristotelian paradigm, 75, 76, 81; Borelli’s rejection of, 163, 164, 165; D’Arezzo on, 27; Galiani’s mocking reference to, 232; Padovani on, 29, 31. See also pneuma (hot exhalations) sulfur, 152–53; Agricola on, 78; in alchemy, 27, 152; as Aristotelian material cause, 90; Borelli’s thinking and, 162, 164–65, 166; Boyle on, 190; Castelli’s knowledge of, 158; collected on an Aeolian island, 210; D’Arezzo’s familiarity with, 157–58, 159, 162; Galiani’s mocking reference to, 232; medicinal properties of, 158; Paragallo on role of, 188, 190; in theorized near-surface reactions, 152, 189; on Vesuvius, 258n41. See also solfataras Summonte, Giovanni, 42, 122, 124, 125 superstition, 8, 9, 59, 63, 211, 219, 220, 225, 231, 233 Susanna, Carlo, 183 Tacitus, 52, 61, 178 Tanucci, Bernardo, 193–94, 195 Tasso, Torquato, 53, 55 tectonic subduction zone, 14, 15, 206 Tellez-Girón, Pedro, Duke of Osuna, 45–46, 123, 124, 247n81 Theocritus, 26 thermal springs, 41. See also geothermal vents Thirty Years’ War, 25, 116, 229–30 Tischbein, Johann, 221 togati (professional class), 115, 123 Toledo, Pedro, 11, 34, 40, 44, 116, 245n60 topographical description, 34, 160, 208

Torricelli, Evangelista, 146, 157 trattato, 73–75 travelers, European. See Grand Tour trial of the atheists, 176 Tutini, Camillo, 5–8, 9–10, 113, 118, 121, 123, 124–34, 226 uniformitarian theory of Lyell, 210, 271n22 Urban VIII, 95, 104, 109, 110, 121 urban rebellion of 1585, 114 Valletta, Giuseppe, 173–76; letter to the Royal Society, 178–82, 191 Varro, Marcus Terentius, 75 Venice: managed natural setting of, 48; myth of the sea and, 2–3; Osuna’s plot­ ting with, 46 Verde, Marino, 118, 128, 130 Vesuvius: accessibility to climbers, 139; contested metonymy of, in 1647, 117–18, 134; as cosmopolitan object, 8, 21, 24, 191; enormous physicality of, 2; erudite local understandings of, 16, 18; fertile slopes of, 2, 6, 26–27, 134; on Grand Tour, 205–6; health benefits attributed to, 36; historical association of city and, 228; indigenous vs. foreign understandings of, 3, 4; inseparable historical and natural features of, 83, 228; many meanings of, 16, 110, 233; as metonym for character and nationality, 207–9; as metonym of Italian South, 13, 16, 21, 225; as metonym of political instability, 126; as metonym to figure body politic, 18; new cone rising in, 142, 172, 177, 192, 193, 196, 196; Padovani on, 31; plant species of, 143, 272n26; in reference works of seventeenth century, 23–24; scientific curiosity about, 16, 37, 49; shifting metonymies in later seventeenth century, 137; Signorelli’s comparison to barbarism, 227; as stratovolcano, 202, 205, 238n52; two peaks of, 97–98, 172, 177. See also eruptions of Vesuvius; visual representation of Vesuvius

322  Index Via Appia, 5 viceroys. See Spanish viceroys Vico, Giambattista, 227 Villa, Marquis of. See Manso, Giovanni Battista Virgil, 26 Visconti, Giangaleazzo, 120 visual representation of Vesuvius: in Hamilton’s Campi Phlegraei and Supplement, 218, 221, 222; by Joseph Wright of Derby, 230, 230; in Mecatti’s Osservazioni, 192–95, 193. See also Della Torre, Giovanni Maria Vitale, Constantino, 87, 268n67 Viviani, Vincenzo, 157 volcanic soil, 6, 15; formed by lichen, 143; Hamilton’s observations on, 220 volcanism: Agricola on, 28–29, 31, 86; Aristotelian natural philosophy and, 23, 81; Castelli on, 49, 156; chemical theories of, 152, 189; effusive (strombolian), 111, 270n102, 271n21; explosive (plinian), 57, 111, 270n102, 271n21; historical events of, 228; Hutton’s understanding of, 14, 231; in Kircher’s classification of prodigies, 151–52; local character and, 38, 217; of Mediterranean world, 206–7; orogenesis and, 205; Padovani on, 29, 31; Renaissance understanding of, 16, 23, 81, 111; on Stelliola’s list of pursuits, 94; today’s understanding of,

14–15; urban masses equated to, 129. See also Aristotelian natural philosophy and volcanism; causes of volcanism; ignition of volcanoes; subterranean heat volcanoes: imagined on moon and Mars, 144–50, 145, 148; of the New World, 37, 38–39, 105–6, 139; periodicity of, 14, 91, 100, 111–12, 143, 159, 167, 231. See also Aeolian Islands; Etna, Mount; Krakatoa, Mount; Nuovo, Monte; subterranean connecting channels; Vesuvius volcanology: chemical ignition theories in, 152, 189; roots in seventeenth-century Naples, 3, 16, 18–19, 138–39; specificity of particular volcanoes in, 143–44, 160, 168 volcano watchers, 3, 14; with calm curiosity, 172–73; classical, Renaissance, and baroque poeticism of, 220; histories of eruptivity gathered by, 182; philosophical stature of, 176–77 von Humboldt, Alexander, 24 water: Dolomieu’s observations of erosion by, 214; in lahar, 66, 67. See also erosion; phreatic bursts; seawater woodsmen, 57, 59. See also peasants Wright,  Joseph, of Derby, 230, 230 Zuñiga y Fonseca, Manuel de Guzmán, 62