Mount Vesuvius (4,100 feet), the pride and dread of the Neapolitans, was likewise an island during prehistoric times. The marine shells found in the tufa of Monte Somma prove this, and on the east the volcano is still surrounded by plains but little elevated above the sea. Formerly the mountain was covered with verdure to its very summit, but the explosion of A.D. 79 shattered its cone, and the ashes thrown up into the air shrouded the whole of the country in darkness. Even at Rome the sun was hidden, and an age of darkness was believed to have set in. When at length the light reappeared, the face of the country was found to have undergone a marvellous change. The mountain had lost its shape, the fertile fields were hidden by masses of débris, and entire towns had been buried beneath ashes.
Since that terrible event Mount Vesuvius has vomited lavas and ashes on many occasions. No periodicity has been traced in these outbursts, and the intervals {292} of repose were generally of sufficient duration to enable vegetation to resume its sway. But these eruptions have become more frequent since the seventeenth century, and hardly a decade passes by without one or more of them. Each of them modifies the contours of the mountain, whose great central vent has undergone many changes. The crescent-shaped mass of débris which surrounds the old crater, known as the Atrio del Cavallo, was undoubtedly of loftier height previously to the great outburst of 79 than it is now. The vicinity of Naples has facilitated a study of the phenomena attending volcanic eruptions, and an observatory, permanently occupied, has been built close to the cone of eruption.
Fig. 107.—ERUPTION OF MOUNT VESUVIUS, APRIL 26TH, 1872.
The neighbourhood of Mount Vesuvius, like that of all other volcanoes, abounds in hot and gas springs, but there are no subsidiary craters. The nearest volcano is Monte Vultur (4,356 feet), a regular cone on the eastern slope of the peninsula. Its dimensions are larger than those of Vesuvius, but no eruptions are on record, though a slight escape of carbonic acid is still going on from the two lakes which occupy the bottom of its vast crater. On a line connecting Ischia, Vesuvius, and Monte Vultur, and about half-way between the two latter, we meet with the most abundant carbonic acid spring of Italy. The gas escapes with a hissing noise from the pond of Ansanto, and the ground around the spring is covered with the remains of insects, killed in myriads on coming within the influence of the poisonous air. Near it the Romans erected a temple in honour of Juno the Mephitic.
The disasters resulting from volcanic eruptions are great, no doubt, but they {293} are exceeded by those caused by earthquakes. Some of these are unquestionably caused by a subterranean displacement of lava, and thus, when Vesuvius begins to stir, Torre del Greco and other towns at its foot incur the risk of being buried beneath ashes or destroyed by earthquakes. But the Basilicata and Calabria—that is to say, the two provinces lying between the volcanic foci of Vesuvius and Etna—have many times been shaken by earthquakes whose origin cannot be traced to volcanic agencies. Out of a thousand earthquakes recorded in Southern Italy during the last three centuries, nearly all occurred in the provinces named, and they were occasionally attended by the most disastrous results. The earthquake of 1857 cost the lives of 10,000 persons at Potenza and its vicinity, but the most disastrous of these events happened in 1785 in Southern Calabria. The first shock, which proceeded from a focus beneath the town of Oppido, in the Aspromonte Mountains, only lasted a hundred seconds, but within that short space of time 109 towns and villages were overthrown, and 32,000 of their inhabitants buried beneath their ruins. Crevasses opened in the ground; rivers were swallowed up, to reappear again lower down as lakes; liquid clay flowed down the hill-slopes like lava, converting fertile fields into unproductive wastes. The commotion of the sea added to these horrors. Many of the inhabitants of Scilla, afraid to remain on the quaking land, fled to their boats, when an enormous mass of rock detached itself from a neighbouring mountain, and, tumbling into the sea, produced a wave which upset the boats and cast their fragments upon the shore. Want of food brought on famine, and typhus, as usual, came in its train.
We are not yet able to predict earthquakes, and can only provide against them by a suitable construction of our dwellings. There exists, however, another cause of misery and depopulation which the Neapolitans might successfully combat, as was done by their ancestors. In the time of the Greeks the swamps along the coast were certainly less extensive than they are now. War, and a return towards barbarism, have caused the rivers to be neglected, and to produce a deterioration in the climate. Baia, a place once famous on account of its healthiness, has become the home of malaria. Sybaris, the town of luxury and pleasure, has been supplanted by a fever-plain “which eats more men than it is able to nourish.” These paludial miasmata, poverty, and ignorance decimate the population of La Puglia, Basilicata, and Calabria. Even certain Asiatic diseases, such as elephantiasis and leprosy, ravage the country, which, from its rare fertility and fine climate, ought to be in the enjoyment of the greatest prosperity.
Continental Sicily is indeed a favoured region, and its eastern slopes more especially might be converted into one huge garden, for the rainfall there is abundant. Naples enjoys a semi-tropical climate, and its winter temperature is hardly inferior to the annual mean of London. Snow very rarely falls, and only remains on the tops of the hills for a few weeks.[101] The vegetation along the coast is of tropical luxuriance. Oranges and lemons bear excellent fruit; date-palms uplift their fan-shaped leaves, and sometimes bear fruit; the American agave {294} stretches forth its candelabra-like branches; sugar-cane, cotton, and other industrial plants, which elsewhere in Europe are scarcely ever met with outside hothouses, grow in the fields. In the forests of Calabria the olive-tree affords as much shade as does the beech with us. Even the bare rocks on the coast yield excellent grapes and garden fruits. Naples, Sicily, Andalusia, and certain districts of Greece and Asia Minor realise our beau idéal of the sub-tropical zone, and only the heaths on the Adriatic slope and the upper valleys of the Apennines remind us that we are still in Central Europe.
This delightful country is inhabited by a people having the most diverse origin. It is now 2,300 years since the Samnites occupied the whole of it from sea to sea. They were more numerous than the Romans, and might have conquered the whole of Italy had there been more cohesion amongst them, and some of that talent for organization which constituted the strength of their adversaries. But they were split into five tribes, each speaking a different dialect; and whilst the Samnites of the hills quarrelled with their kinsmen in the plains, the latter were at enmity with the Hellenized Samnites who lived near the Greek towns on the coast.
The whole of the coast of Southern Italy, from Cumæ—founded more than a thousand years before our era—to Sipuntum, of which some ruins remain near the modern Manfredonia, was dotted with Greek colonies. In these districts of Southern Italy the bulk of the population is of very different origin from that of other parts of the peninsula. To the north of Monte Gargano, Celtic, Etruscan, and Latin elements preponderate, whilst Hellenes, Pelasgians, and kindred races dominate in the south. Not only did civilised Greeks found their colonies there, but the aboriginal population, the Iapygians, spoke a dialect akin to the Hellenic, and Mommsen may be right when he conjectures that these Iapygians were of the same origin as the modern Albanians.