Word: herculaneum
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...potential mother of all maxi-disasters is named Mount Vesuvius, which lies just 7 miles to the east of Naples and is by all accounts the volcano that poses the greatest risk of taking a major human toll. The eruption in A.D. 79 destroyed the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum and killed about 16,000 people. There are 18 towns on the city's outskirts, with a combined population of more than 550,000, that could be devastated if the volcano roars again...
...hunted frantically amid the soupy devastation for mud-covered survivors, it was soon clear that Nevado del Ruiz would rate as one of the deadliest volcanic eruptions in all of recorded history, roughly equivalent to the A.D. 79 explosion of Mount Vesuvius, which destroyed the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum...
...Ingres took with every last detail of her costume and massive jewelry--the cascading rose-embroidered fabric, the tassels on the bodice--almost defies belief. On the other it harks back in time. Her pose is taken from that of the goddess of Arcadia in an antique mural from Herculaneum that Ingres saw in Naples; whence her bizarre hand, that pampered starfish of flesh. Then there is the profile reflection of her face in the mirror, one of the most discreetly enigmatic "presences" in all painting...
...mind and pocket of the man whose name it bears: J. Paul Getty, the oil billionaire who in 1974 had installed his collection of Roman and Greek antiquities, French furniture and medium-level European paintings in a preposterous $17 million replica of the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum, overlooking the Pacific at Malibu. Those who sneered at this as the Disneyism of a crackpot Scrooge McDuck were staggered when, after Getty died in 1976, it turned out that he left his museum almost $700 million--the largest endowment ever given to a cultural institution...
...Antique, are lost to us; try as we may, we cannot feel the reverence for it that he did. For Canova, the Antique was a truth mine. He visited every ancient site in Italy he could get to -- Naples, Paestum, the newly excavated sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum; his connections gave him access to private hoards of statuary from Rome to Venice...