Word: vesuvius
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Even in its more refined moments, seicento art in Naples was geared to a love of strong sensation and imminent catastrophe: crowds and Vesuvius in the background, diseases of the body, instabilities of the soul, Thanatos and Eros beating the big bass drum. One recognizes in the Magdalens and Madonnas the women that visitors like John Evelyn wrote of, "generally well-featured, but excessively libidinous." Even still lifes by artists like Paolo Porpora and Giovanni Battista Recco have the swollen intensity of painting infatuated with the surface of the world. However, Recco's picture of objects on a kitchen...
...remains of Pompeii and Herculaneum were being excavated, in a clumsy treasure-hunting way, from the volcanic ash that had shrouded and preserved them since the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79. Elsewhere in Italy, the ruins of Roman public life could easily be seen-temples, stadia, places of assembly. But the archaeology of Naples gave the visitor a sense of how the ancients lived when at home-when they came off their plinths, shed their cuirasses hérdïques and settled down with their wine cups and mild painted pornography, no longer behaving like noble Romans. Naples...
With a natural style essential to Simon plays, Achtman and McPhee display their characters' foibles coping with absurd situations--a robbery, for instance, in which the thieves steal everything but Mel's khaki pants--until Mel flips out. As his life unravels Achtman builds to a Vesuvius-like explosion. Eventually regaining control, he learns a new perspective, distinguishing the true necessities of life his cache of East Side luxuries...
...explosion occurred in a heavily populated area, the loss of life would have been awesome. Geologists estimated that St. Helens spewed out about 1.5 cubic miles of debris, a blast on about the same order of magnitude as the one in A.D. 79 from Italy's Vesuvius, which buried Pompeii and Herculaneum with...
...black cloud riven by darting tongues of flame, which then dissolved into long plumes of fire. We could hear the shrieks of women, the screams of children. Most were convinced that this must be the end of the world." So wrote Pliny the Younger of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, the most famous volcanic explosion in history. The blast buried the Roman towns of Herculaneum and Pompeii under mud and hot ash and killed at least 2,000. In more modern times there have been several catastrophic eruptions of volcanoes. Among them...