ave so fearsome and so dour a name
To that choice vintage, which of all think I
Most warms the heart's blood with its genial flame?
Smiles, and not tears, the epithet should be
Of juice wrung from so fair a vinery.")

* * * * * *

Scarcely had the above pages been written, than the Mountain, which had
been drowsing for more than thirty years, suddenly awakened to give
appalling evidence of its latent activity and powers of mischief. The
eruption of April 1906 has, in fact, surpassed all previous outbursts
within living memory, and it may probably be reckoned amongst the most
violent of all hitherto recorded. Many of the details of this event
doubtless remain fresh in the memory, and in any case the sad condition of
numerous towns and villages, and of the beautiful Vesuvian districts, the
_paesi ridenti_ as the Neapolitans affectionately term these fertile
lands, will serve for some years to come as a sinister and ever-present
reminder of the horrors of the past and of the dread possibilities of the
future. All vegetation for miles around the volcano has been injured or
destroyed, for not only was the Mountain itself covered deep with grit and
ashes, but the streets and gardens of Naples, the luxuriant plain of
Sorrento, and even the heights of Capri, twenty miles distant across the
Bay, were shrouded in a funereal mantle of the greyish-yellow dust that
Vesuvius had flung into the air to let fall like a shower of parching and
destructive rain upon the earth. How vast was the amount of matter ejected
from the crater and scattered in this form over the surrounding country,
we may judge from the scientific calculation that 315,000 tons fell in
Naples alone! Everywhere appeared the same scenes of desolation, the same
dreary tint, for so thickly had this aerial torrent of ashes descended,
that buildings, trees and plants were completely hidden by it, the whole
landscape suggesting the idea of a recent heavy fall of dirty-coloured
snow. _Paesi ridenti_, indeed! It was a land of ugliness and mourning, a
city of stifling air and of human terror.

A few days previous to the eruption, which began on April 5th, the island
of Ustica, which lies some forty miles north of Palermo, had been visited
by earthquake shocks of such violence that the Italian Government at last
decided to remove the greater part of its population to the mainland, as
well as the convicts attached to the penal settle