Mount Vesuvius

Where is Mount Vesuvius?

Mount Vesuvius is part of the Somma-Vesuvius volcanic complex, Campania.

You will find it in: Italy.

Summit: 40.821° N, 14.426° E

The story behind it

In the year 79 the mountain shot a column of ash and pumice many kilometres into the sky, and Pompeii and Herculaneum vanished under what fell back down. A young Roman called Pliny the Younger watched from across the bay and later wrote two letters about it, comparing the cloud to a pine tree with a tall trunk and spreading branches. His description is so exact that volcanologists still call this kind of tall, explosive eruption Plinian. Historians argue about the exact day: the old reading of his letters gives 24 August, but finds at Pompeii, including a charcoal inscription, point to the autumn instead. Vesuvius also has an unusual shape, because the young cone sits inside the half-ring of an older volcano called Monte Somma, whose highest point, Punta del Nasone, reaches 1 132 metres. That is why any volcano in the world with a new cone inside an older caldera rim is now called a somma volcano. The summit height changes a little after each eruption, the last one being in March 1944, and the world's first volcano observatory was built on the slope in 1841; when a funicular railway opened in 1880, two Neapolitans wrote the song Funiculì, Funiculà to celebrate it.

Find it on the globe

Mount Vesuvius is there as a small peak with its own shape — a horn, a ridge, a volcano — standing on the surface. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.

It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.