Word: vesuviuses
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...white city on a blue gulf. Beside it rose Vesuvius, breathing a plume of smoke. Around its feet clustered warships, steamers, merchantmen from Mediterranean ports. It was ancient. Virgil had lived in the city when he wrote his Georgics. Cicero had loafed among the villas. On its outskirts were the ancient suburbs of Herculaneum and Pompeii, which had been mummified 1,860 years ago by Vesuvius' erupting ash. It was a sight, a pile of palaces, churches, an opera house, university, museum, an aquarium where famous pale octopuses swam in tanks. It was slovenly and filthy and loud. Hoarse...
...next day he collapsed. His trouble, diagnosed as acute pleurisy, worsened. He had several operations for abscesses of the lungs. Early in the summer of 1921 he sailed for Naples. There, a few weeks later, in a waterfront hotel room from which he could look out on Mt. Vesuvius, Enrico Caruso died. His body, embalmed and buried for two years, was subsequently disinterred, carried in state through the Naples streets to its final resting place in the Campo Santo di Poggioreale cemetery. For several years thereafter the cemetery's gatekeeper was reported to have done a rushing business...
...picked a careful way behind stone walls up the limestone and pumice heights of the Sorrentine peninsula. From the ridge the patches of chestnut forest tumbled into the brown Campania plain. The General looked in the direction of the ashen ruins of Pompeii, the lava-scarred cone of Vesuvius. Beyond the volcano rose a huge shroud of smoke over the port of Naples. In that city of 900,000, rising in tourist times like a white amphitheater from the blue sea, the Germans were dynamiting and burning. It was clear proof that the Wehrmacht had lost the Battle of Salerno...
...apparent this week: the Germans had given up their best positions for the defense of Naples. Fifth Army troops turned westward from Salerno, occupied the lower coast and the heights of the Sorrento peninsula overlooking the port and its bay. Twelve miles off, midway between the troops and Naples, Vesuvius loomed. Other troops already held Capri, the storied island just off the peninsula, the islands of Ischia and Procida in the Bay of Naples, Ponza and Ventotene northwest...
During an eruption of volcanic Mauna Loa in Hawaii in 1935, U.S. Army airmen tried (with debatable success) to divert the flow of lava by dropping a few bombs on strategic spots. Last week Allied bombers, flying over the smoky craters of Mt. Etna in Sicily and Mt. Vesuvius on the Bay of Naples, thought of other strategic spots: could a few well-placed bombs start Etna and Vesuvius erupting...