Vesuvius

 

 

 

For Edward Hutton Mt. Vesuvius was best viewed from afar.

 

If upon the west of Naples lies the wonder of the Phlegraean fields in the paradise of the bay of Pozzuoli, to the east there stands a marvel at once more astonishing and not less beautiful—I mean the great burning mountain of Vesuvius, with the exception of Etna, the greatest of the active volcanoes in Europe. Vesuvius, indeed, fills the mind and the imagination in Naples of native and stranger alike; it dominates and gives its character to the whole of this corner of Campania, and there is no moment of the day or night but men lift their eyes to it in fear or wonder. Goethe has spoken of it as “a peak of hell rising out of paradise”, but at least we must admit that it is the most beautiful thing therein, the one thing of which we can never have enough, whose image remains always in our minds, and lends to this great bay its unique interest, and more than half its strange beauty. Without Vesuvius, Naples—the bay of Naples—would lose its identity, would become almost as any other gulf upon the Tyrrhene Sea, and the proverb which sums up the absolutely unique splendour of this place would lose all its meaning, and appear as a mere empty boast signifying nothing nut vanity.

 

This being so, to visit Vesuvius, to ascend the cone, and gaze down into the restless crater, which continually delights and threatens Naples and all her villages with beauty and terror, would seem to be encumbent upon the traveller, and yet I think no one has ever made that journey without weariness and some disappointment. Vesuvius is best appreciated from afar, from Naples itself, from the forum of Pompeii, or the baths of Queen Giovanna at Sorrento. Thence it appears of so marvellous and strange a beauty, a great purple smoking pyramid in the sun, breathing fire in the darkness, exquisite at all times alike in form and colour, that nothing else in Europe, I think, is to be compared with it, for nothing else that we know is at once so beautiful and so evil, so suggestive of those half-realized forces latent within the body of the earth, which we have always regarded as malign, whose action is always catastrophic and tragical for us and our world,  the expression of the hatred and the ill-will of the spirit of evil, of chaos, towards God, and the beauty He has made for His and our delight. To visit Vesuvius, as one did till yesterday, and after driving for hours through the dingiest suburbs of Naples, through the dreariest of the old lava fields, to arrive at the foot of the funicular railway, which took one within a few hundred feet of the top, was to lose all one’s sense of wonder, in the mere vulgarity of the surroundings, the crowd of touts and tourists, the insatiable guides, hawkers, singers, beggars, and general rascaldom, which has always infested this mountain, and for all the ease of the autostrada it is not much less tiring today.

 

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Edward Hutton: Naples and Campania Revisited. London, 1958. Pp. 171-2.