I am very excited....

because next week I hope to travel to the Bay of Naples and spend a few hours musing on one of my classical history heroes - Gaius Caecilius - better known to history as Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus - Pliny the Younger.

In 61 CE, the young Gaius was born near the shores of Lake Como in the north of Italy and his mother Plinia was the sister of the great Roman naturalist, scientist, author and naval commander who also hailed from Como, Gaius Plinius Secundus - Pliny the Elder. Pliny the Elder was famous not just throughout Italy but also the emerging empire for his 37 volume work Natural History which first appeared on the 'bookshelves' of Waterstonium's in Rome in 77 CE. Pliny the Elder travelled the empire & enjoyed a busy life and had litle time for either a wife or children and, instead, adopted his talented nephew in his will - they all lived & loved together at times in the family villa at Misenum to the south of Naples - in fact the 43 year-old Pliny the Elder was at Misenum when the volcano of Vesuvius began to erupt in 79 CE.

A reimagined view of Pliny the Elder and his fascination with what the earth was saying when the great volcano errupted.

As the family watched in the days and hours before the main erruption, the port area of Misenum, where Pliny the Elder, an Admiral in the Roman Navy, commanded a small fleet of ships, and nearby Pompeii, Herculaneaum and Surrentum (modern day Sorrento) all felt the tremendous earthquakes. No doubt augers and soothsayers were everywhere offering gifts to placate the clearly angry Gods. On 24th August, in the early afternoon, the main erruptions began and it was a message to Pliny the Elder that had been rowed across the bay, pleading for rescue from the town of Stabiae from Rectina, a friend of Pliny the Elder, that saw him order his ships to sail to the south east of the volcano to try to take off as many people as possible. A Senator, Pomponianus was also there was his family on the shore of Stabiae but even though Pliny's ships arrived in time, the winds changed so drasitcally that they decided to wait until later that evening to leave and tragically they were all engulphed by a vast shower of pumice and toxic sulpher gases.

Pliny and his officers, sailors and those who hoped for rescue, were all found three days later with no obvious injuries - they had all died from asphixiation.

Pliny the Younger, then aged eighteen wrote about this event nearly 30 years later in a letter to the great Roman historian Tactus describing what he had witnessed and I hope to read that letter from my vantage point in Sorrento to try to capture the scene in my minds' eye as the nephew and mother watched in anguish as his great uncle and his mother's brother, and his ships, disappeared from view.