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town of Taormina, across low folded mountains and a fertile
river valley, to the cold, inhospitable summit of the volcano. Thus
Etna is placed in context, with only its soft silver cloud being
allowed to suggest its potential for mayhem.4ยน It is interesting
that the 'cottage chimney' analogy that Brett used in describing
Etna was of the same domestic tone as that drawn by William
Hamilton over a hundred years earlier when likening Vesuvius in
full spate to 'quivering like timbers in a water-mill' and flowing
'like the Severn, at the passage near Bristol'.
The progress of understanding takes place with jerks, reverses
and reconsiderations. Rather than paint Pompeii in the full flow
of its terminal disaster, the Italian realist Filippo Palizzi (1818-
1899), a generation younger than Briullov and Schopin, shows
it instead being dug out again. Later nineteenth-century artists
such as Palizzi and Poynter garnered the social and architectural
details in their paintings from archaeological digs in process
in Pompeii, Egypt, the Middle East and elsewhere. Taking an
alternative view of the subject in his Study of an Excavation
(Pompeii) (1864) Palizzi gives us a midday calm, as the men with
shovels have downed their tools and left the site temporarily to
wildflowers and silence. Palizzi's compatriot, Gioacchino Toma
(1836-1891) takes a different kind of modern view in his Sotto
al Vesuvio di Mattina (1882). Here Vesuvius smokes gently, while
a steam engine puffs energetically below it, travelling as fast as
it possibly can. What vanity, suggests Toma, a man who had
fought with Garibaldi to unify Italy and had been imprisoned
for his pains; just wait until Vesuvius blows and then see how
clever the steam engine is.
The understanding of volcanoes was not helped by authors
such as Bulwer Lytton or indeed Jules Verne whose Journey to
the Centre of the Earth (1864) takes us back to the view proposed
by Athanasius Kircher exactly 200 years earlier, and to the ex-
periences of Baron Munchausen in the late eighteenth century.
Verne suggested that the volcano that launched his Professor
Lindenbrook and nephew back to the surface of the earth was
part of an interconnected warren of drains and channels running
between the centre and the surface, which could allow the good
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