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An Intimate History
by Richard Fortey
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Near the tip of the southern peninsula, Sorrento commands a wonderful
prospect of Mount Vesuvius across the entire Bay of Naples. From this
steep-sided town, Vesuvius looks almost the perfect, gentle-sided cone.
It could be a domestic version of Mount Fuji, the revered volcanic
mountain in Japan. It can appear blue, or grey, or occasionally stand
revealed in its true brown colours. On clear days Vesuvius is starkly
outlined against a bright sky: a dark, heavy, almost oppressive
presence. Or on a misty morning its conical summit can rise above a mere
sketch or impression of the lower slopes, which are obscured in vapour,
as if it were cut off from the world to make a house for the gods alone.
At night, ranks of lights along Neapolitan roads twinkle incessantly.
Vesuvius is often no more than a dark shape against a paler, but still
Prussian blue sky. The lights might persuade you that the mountain was
still in the process of eruption, with points of white illumination
tracking lava flows running down the hillsides. From Sorrento, you can
make of Vesuvius what you will, for within a day it will have remade
itself.
The Bay of Naples is where the science of geology started. The
description of the eruption of Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii
in a.d. 79 by Pliny the Younger is probably the first clear and
objective description of a geological phenomenon. No dragons were
invoked, no clashes between the Titans and the gods. Pliny provided
observation, not speculation.
Not quite two millennia later, in 1830, Charles Lyell was to use an
illustration of columns from the so-called Temple of Serapis at Pozzuoli,
north of Naples, as the frontispiece to volume 1 of the most seminal
work in geology—his Principles of Geology. This book influenced the
young Charles Darwin more than any other source in his formulation of
evolutionary theory: so you could say that the Bay of Naples had its
part to play, too, in the most important biological revolution.
Everybody who was anybody in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
visited the bay, and marvelled at its natural and archaeological
phenomena. For geology—a latecomer to the pantheon of sciences—the area
is the nearest thing to holy ground that there is. If you were going to
choose anywhere to retrace the growth in our understanding about how the
earth is constructed, what better place to begin? Where else more
appropriate to explain first principles? The long intellectual journey
that eventually led to plate tectonics started in this bite out of the
western shin of Italy's boot-shaped profile. A voyage around this
particular bay is a pilgrimage to the foundations of comprehension about
our planet.
Everything about Sorrento is rooted in the geology. The town itself is
in a broad valley surrounded by limestone ranges, which flash white
bluffs on the hillsides and reach the sea in nearly vertical cliffs—an
incitement to dizziness for those brave enough to look straight down
from the top. Seen from a distance, the roads that wind up the sides of
the hills look like folded tagliatelle. Stacked blocks of the same
limestone are used in the walls that underpin the terraces supporting
the olive groves. In special places there are springs that spurt out
fresh, cool water from underground caverns. These sources are often
flanked by niches containing the statue of a saint, or of the Virgin:
water is not taken for granted in these parts. There are deep ravines
through the limestone hills, probably marking where caves have
collapsed. The country backing the Bay of Naples is known as Campania,
and the same name, Campanian, is applied to a subdivision of geological
time belonging to the Cretaceous period. If you look carefully on some
of the weathered surfaces of the limestones, you will see the remains of
seashells that were alive in the age of the dinosaurs. I saw some
obvious clams and sea urchins, belonging to extinct species, emerging
from the cliffs as if they were on a bas-relief. A palaeontologist can
identify the individual fossil species, and use them to calibrate the
age of the rocks, since the succession of species is a measure of
geological time. The implication is clear enough: in Cretaceous times
all these hilly regions were beneath a shallow, warm sea. Limy muds
accumulated there as sediments, and entombed the remains of the animals
living on the sea floor. Time and burial hardened the muds into the
tough limestones we see today. They are sedimentary rocks, subsequently
uplifted to become land; earth movements then tilted them—but this is to
anticipate. What one can say is that the character of the limestone
hills is a product of an ancient sea.
Excerpted from Earth by Richard Fortey Copyright © 2005 by Richard Fortey. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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