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

By Sean Cocco

Mount Vesuvius has been famous ever since its eruption in 79 CE, when it destroyed and buried the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. But less well-known is the role it played in the science and culture of early modern Italy, as Sean Cocco reveals in this ambitious and wide-ranging study. Humanists began to make pilgrimages to Vesuvius during the early Renaissance to experience its beauty and study its history, but a new tradition of observation emerged in 1631 with the first great eruption of the modern period. Seeking to understand the volcano’s place in the larger system of nature, Neapolitans flocked to Vesuvius to examine volcanic phenomena and to collect floral and mineral specimens from the mountainside.
 
In Watching Vesuvius, Cocco argues that this investigation and engagement with Vesuvius was paramount to the development of modern volcanology. He then situates the native experience of Vesuvius in a larger intellectual, cultural, and political context and explains how later eighteenth-century representations of Naples—of its climate and character—grew out of this tradition of natural history. Painting a rich and detailed portrait of Vesuvius and those living in its shadow, Cocco returns the historic volcano to its place in a broader European culture of science, travel, and appreciation of the natural world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Nov 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9780226923734

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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

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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

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Watching Vesuvius

A HISTORY OF SCIENCE AND CULTURE IN EARLY MODERN ITALY

Sean Cocco

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

A Claire e Bianca

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Vesuvius in the View South

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

2. Marvelous Excesses: The Eruption of 1631

3. Histories of Ignition: From Historia to Causa

4. Contesting Vesuvius: Discordant Meanings in the Context of Revolt

5. On the Face of This Earth: Vesuvius and Its Kind

6. Watching and Philosophizing: From Controversy to Cosmopolitanism

7. Formed by Explosion: Geology in the Neapolitan Picturesque

Conclusion: Returns to the Past

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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, 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 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 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 millennial 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 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 Renaissance 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 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, 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 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, 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 historical 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 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 fifteenth century 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 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 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 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