Word: vesuviuses
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...shabby Italian seaport of Pozzuoli, just outside Naples, is widely known as the home town of Sophia Loren. But Pozzuoli (pop. 70,000) has another distinction. Perched atop a geologically active area that includes Vesuvius and boiling sulfur springs named the Campi Flegrei ("Fiery Fields"), the ancient town has been quite literally rising and falling at least since Roman times. These terrestrial undulations-an example of what some geologists call bradyseisms (from the Greek roots bradys, or slow, and seismos, earthquake) -usually occur gradually and imperceptibly. But lately Pozzuoli has been moving at an extaordinary rate. Last week, after parts...
...Herculaneum, writes Joseph Deiss, an amateur archaeologist and vice-director of the American Academy in Rome, is to "walk 2,000 years into the past." The world is more familiar with what happened to neighboring Pompeii on the same day that Herculaneum died; erupting on Aug. 24, A.D. 79, Vesuvius buried Pompeii in a sudden fiery rain of stone and ash, entombing nearly one-tenth of its 20,000 citizens and inflicting terrible damage on the city. Herculaneum, however, was more fortunate. Granted time by the wind, which blew west toward Pompeii, nearly all of Herculaneum...
Traditionally, the first novelist bursts upon the literary scene like a day-old volcano-exploding platitudes, scattering an unbreathable ash of adjectives, devouring cash advances like sacrificial maidens. The noisy thing may turn out to be a mountain or a molehill, but on the chance of producing a verbal Vesuvius most publishers annually sponsor a series of these fictional eruptions, timing them to coincide with the great silence that descends on the book business between July 4 and Labor...
...eighth in a row, a record unmatched in any professional sport. Bill Russell, who now takes over from Auerbach as coach, gave the valedictory. "Of all the Celtic teams," said he, "this is the shortest on ability and the longest on heart." Red stood by, puffing away like Vesuvius...
...View of Vesuvius. Then, suddenly, came fame. Chekhov liked his early stories; Tolstoy was delighted by his crude force ("You . . . are a real peasant!"). Moscow's intelligentsia embraced the tall, stooped figure in high boots and belted black tunic. Gorky's wildly onomatopoeic Song of the Stormy Petrel became the battle anthem of the revolution, and soon he was hip deep in politics: setting up capitalist pigeons for Lenin to pluck, polemicizing both for and against the Bolsheviks. During the Leninist purges following the October Revolution, Gorky used his special relationship with Lenin to save many writers...