"Sterminator Vesevo" (Vesuvius the great exterminator): Diary of the Eruption of April 1906 — John Shaqi
"Sterminator Vesevo" (Vesuvius the great exterminator): Diary of the Eruption of April 1906Serao, Matilde
History
"Sterminator Vesevo" (Vesuvius the great exterminator): Diary of the Eruption of April 1906
Serao, Matilde
Vesuvius (Italy); Volcanoes
They have fled terrified through their farthest fields, way down as
possible. The most courageous have past the night in the open air, with
their children around them, trembling with fear praying, and weeping.
Next day they have been wandering around their houses, trying to free
them from the weight of the cinders and stones, helping each other,
simply resigned and abandoned to their fate, trying all the means to
conquer it. The third night, the last one, they have all slept with
their poor little ones, clasped in their arms, on the straw, in the
fields, not daring to go back into the houses.
Men and women are now looking at their buried fields, their destroyed
harvest, the heavy cinders, the heavy rocks. They look at the work of
this night which throws them in the most abject poverty and starvation,
they look over it all with eyes of calm despair, and it seem to me a
shame for the human heart that they hope nothing, and ask nothing from
the men of Naples, their brothers in God, their brothers in Jesus. They
ask nothing, because they know of obtaining nothing.
At Somma Vesuviana one man has died in Margarita street. An old man by
the name of Raffaele, known as Tuppete, He died in his bed, crushed
under the fall of his roof. Twenty or thirty houses have tumbled down
at Somma Vesuviana, one church is in great danger, the walls of another
are cracked. Men bend their heads and are silent, others sadly admit
that their misery is nothing compared to the destruction of Ottaiano
where more than one hundred and fifty people have died. Has Ottaiano
then been destroyed only by the fall of lapillus and stones? Surely
the lava cannot run on it, as the town is placed on the opposite side
of the eruption.--Have really so many people perished under this heavy
and fiery rain, while not one has perished under the lava? Is it Pompei
again? Let us go there then, if it is true.
AT OTTAIANO
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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