2023 may be the first summer I’ve felt (somewhat) relieved that I’m not in Italy. From the impenetrable crowds to the endless string of severe climate events, it has been a very tough season for residents, tour guides, and tourists.
The last weeks of July saw tornados and supercell storms in Milan, Udine, and across northern Italy; a river of ice in a village in Lombardy; and wildfires around Palermo. The Amalfi Coast also saw more turbulent than usual scirocco winds batter its shores.
“I have seen 65 summers in my life, what I am seeing now is not normal. We can no longer deny that climate change is affecting our lives. We can't ignore it and we can't do nothing."
—Beppe Sala, Mayor of Milan
“Non è normale”—it’s not normal. And it’s not over yet.
Meanwhile, against this backdrop of heat, hail, and hordes, comes a flurry of news out of Pompeii, including the discovery of a fresco of a proto-pizza to scholarship on ancient brothel graffiti. That’s because archaeologists this summer have begun the biggest excavation of Pompeii in a generation.
Ever a fascinating topic, the eruption of Vesuvius in the year 79 and the near-instant destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum is the subject of the most recent episode of “The Rest of History,” the terrific (and very fun!) podcast from the British historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook.
This week’s episode on “Roman Apocalypse: Pompeii” and next week’s episode on the construction of the Colosseum are build-up for Holland’s latest book Pax: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age which is set to be published in September.
Here is a brief excerpt, transcribed from the podcast discussion:
“His sister tells him that a remarkable cloud has appeared in the sky. And so Pliny the Elder…rushes out and he looks out over the Bay of Naples and he sees a cloud—like nothing anyone has ever seen. ‘In appearance and shape, it most closely resembled a pine tree,’ Pliny the Younger later writes, ‘for it had a column of great length and height as though it were a trunk overtopped by a number of branches.’ But I guess if we saw it today, we would probably describe it as a mushroom cloud.”
Pax: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age by Tom Holland (pre-order: amazon | bookshop)