Word: herculaneum
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...goddesses and damned as hellholes, bubbling craters are really just safety valves, through which molten rock (magma) under the earth's skin can blow off steam from time to time. Volcanoes can be depended on to act up every so often; since 79 A.D., when Pompeii and Herculaneum were first buried, old Vesuvius has popped off about once every generation...
...Explosive" eruptions of Vesuvius: in 79 A.D., when Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabiae were buried; in 1631, when 18,000 were killed...
Pompeii was bombed chiefly in its most recently excavated areas; the older, archeologically more valuable sections of Pompeii were very slightly damaged. "Fortunately Herculaneum," wrote Sir Charles Woolley, "which from the scientific point of view is much more important than Pompeii, received no hurt...
...blue gulf. Beside it rose Vesuvius, breathing a plume of smoke. Around its feet clustered warships, steamers, merchantmen from Mediterranean ports. It was ancient. Virgil had lived in the city when he wrote his Georgics. Cicero had loafed among the villas. On its outskirts were the ancient suburbs of Herculaneum and Pompeii, which had been mummified 1,860 years ago by Vesuvius' erupting ash. It was a sight, a pile of palaces, churches, an opera house, university, museum, an aquarium where famous pale octopuses swam in tanks. It was slovenly and filthy and loud. Hoarse-voiced women dumped their...