You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones.

Today I'm talking to Rosemary Hill, a contributing editor at the paper, whose books include

a biography of Pugin, a history of at the paper whose books include a biography of

Pugin, a history of Stonehenge, and most recently Times Witness history in the age of

romanticism. She has a piece in the latest issue on Mount Vesuvius and its role in the

imaginations of 18th and 19th century tourists, politicians, artists, scientists and others.

It's a review of volcanic Vesuvius in the Age of Revolutions by John Brewer.

Hello, Rosemary, and thank you very much for joining me.

Hello, thank you for asking me.

So Vesuvius appears to have last erupted in March 1944,

not long after the Allied landings in Italy during the Second World War.

And Norman Lewis recalled a Neapolitan saying something along the lines of,

that's all we needed.

The current period of quiescence is the longest for several hundred years,

that between 1630 and 1944 it erupted more or less continuously,

sometimes more violently than others. But the edge of

the crater has been a tourist destination since the 18th century. You can get a bus most of the way up now,

but it was more arduous in the old days, wasn't it? Well, yes. I mean, you had to go up. I mean,

in the 18th century when people started to go, I suppose you just climbed. By the time

John Brewer's story begins, it is what we would call a curated experience. So everybody's kind of

set up with mules and guides. And by the time when you left Naples, you got funneled as a tourist

down to Razina, which is the only

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