A catastrophe waiting to happen

Gillian Darley’s book has the pace, colour and deliberation of a Vesuvian eruption, which is fitting; for we must get used to the fact that sooner or later the volcano will erupt again with a devastating power.

The subtitle of the book is quite accurate. Vesuvius probably is the most famous volcano in the world, because unlike all others it has attracted for some 2,000 years multifarious extraordinary people to study it. Darley enumerates these in their legions, showing that Pliny the Younger, writing after the 79 AD eruption, was not the first. She recounts the experiences endured by individuals who include the patient 18th-century diplomat Sir William Hamilton, courageous 19th-century scientists, including Palmieri and Matteucci, who stayed put on the mountain during eruptions, and the overworked American electrical engineer Frank Perret, who came to Naples for a rest but found himself driven to make a vivid photographic and written record of the 1906 eruption.