I rumori, i vapori e i colori del paesaggio vesuviano nell’immaginario del Settecento europeo

In the modern age within the field of geological researches, above seismology, mineralogy and petrography but together with paleontology, Volcanology appears, whose investigation techniques (as Jean-Etienne Guettard, a French mineralogist who lived between 1715-1786, clarified on the pages of "Memories de L'Academie Royale des Sciences" in 1752) are basically founded on the lava traces, on the marks of the multiform colors released by eruptions and included in a wide range of lava and non-lava materials, on the examination of vapors emanated by sub-circular cavities existing in nature. All this was considered by Guettard as a clue of the remote presence of activity of one or more volcanoes located in the area investigated. Actually Guettard restates, but now in the middle of the eighteenth century with renovated techniques of observation of nature, the Galilean intuition, according which men have in front of them the "big book of nature" that now they have to understand, using the optical tool (microscope) with as much philological strictness (as Galilei ) starting from the hints, the traces and the clues which appear before them. "Calling things with their own name, conferring them their own functions, including observed phenomena in their belonging collection" establish that scientific method which will constitute the vade-mecum (also based on the Linnaeus method) for all those who will go from France to Campania in order to observe the effects of the erupting Vesuvius on the surrounding landscape. The study of the scientific reports of these European scholars about the "materia vesuviana” (Vesuvius topic), researched with the method of the morphological comparison of what was found on the ground and, more generally, in the homologous parts of Vesuvius area, constitutes the start point of our historical lecture, whose aim is to understand some of the natural elements that forms the "City of Vesuvius".