The last eruption of Mount Vesuvius to date occurred in 1944, when Allied troops advanced northward from southern Italy in the fight against fascism. Curzio Malaparte describes this eruption in his novel The Skin (La Pelle, 1949) as an apoca-lyptic metaphor of war. In the chapter “The Rain of Fire,” he allegorizes nature as an animated body from whose “wound” streams of “blood” pour, and the erupting vol-cano as a mythical monster that “howls,” “roars,” “screams,” and “barks” as bomb-ers pass overhead and a colonel named Hamilton is ordered to Pompeii – from the modern scene of destruction to the ancient one.
2. William Hamilton with the King and Queen of Naples watching a stream of lava on 11 May 1771 (Plate XXXVIII of Hamilton’s Campi Phlegraei, 1776)
Volcano Images
After the first collection of Hamilton’s volcanic texts, Observations on Mount Ve-suvius, Mount Etna, and other volcanos (1772), had only been sparsely illustrated with five black-and-white illustrations and a map, he commissioned the artist Pietro Fabris (ca. 1730–1792) to produce a series of field drawings for the subsequent edi-tion of his Campi Phlegraei in color.
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