Word: herculaneum
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Elegant Simplicity. England in the 18th century was caught up in the throes of a classical revival. The digs at lava-overlaid Herculaneum in Italy were uncovering arts of antiquity that the world was seeing for the first time. Architect Robert Adam was recapturing the glories of Greece and Rome in his neoclassic columns and pediments. Wedgwood, too, plunked for the neoclassic against rococo excesses, writing in 1769: "Elegant simplicity-I shall more than ever make that idea a leading principle." He glazed red figures similar to Etruscan pots onto the matte surfaces of his ironlike black basalt ware. Then...
...Spiky Little Towers." Goethe at first chats away like any tourist. There is no outhouse at one inn. The ruins of Herculaneum are a mess, and should have been "excavated methodically by German miners instead of being casually ransacked as if by brigands." He relates a meeting with Emily Hart, the 22-year-old protegee of Quinquagenarian Sir William Hamilton, then English ambassador to Naples. Emily, who later became Lady Hamilton, and still later helped Nelson win the Battle of Trafalgar, used to sashay around her villa swathed in clinging Greek robes. "Our fair entertainer seems to me, frankly...
...striding about the town, reciting to himself the paragraphs that will soon be transferred verbatim to his notebooks. Like most authors, Wilder hates to write. Sometimes he plays hooky in the Yale library ("I flip through an archaeological journal and read a piece about a new excavation in Herculaneum. I even read medical journals"). He "does" Finnegan's Wake, pores over Kierkegaard, works at his hobby of dating the plays of Lope de Vega, strums on the piano, or reads a score of a Palestrina Mass. After lunch he usually takes a long nap. After 5, visitors come...
...goddesses and damned as hellholes, bubbling craters are really just safety valves, through which molten rock (magma) under the earth's skin can blow off steam from time to time. Volcanoes can be depended on to act up every so often; since 79 A.D., when Pompeii and Herculaneum were first buried, old Vesuvius has popped off about once every generation...
...Explosive" eruptions of Vesuvius: in 79 A.D., when Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabiae were buried; in 1631, when 18,000 were killed...