Features of the Domenico Fontana’s Water Conduit (the Canal of Count Sarno) and the Date of Pompeii Destruction

A. Tschurilow, Features of the Domenico Fontana’s Water Conduit (the Canal of Count Sarno) and the Date of Pompeii Destruction

Fig. 1 The epitaph of the persons who died because of the eruption of Vesuvius in 1631 on the villa of Faraone Mennella in Torre del Greco

On one of these plates, the list of damaged cities, along with the quite prosperous Resina (Ercolano) and Portici contains POMPEII and HERCULANEUM, the cities that supposedly had disappeared almost two thousand years ago!!!

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A. Tschurilow, Features of the Domenico Fontana’s Water Conduit (the Canal of Count Sarno) and the Date of Pompeii Destruction

And this monument was not a remake as confirmed by authors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The French traveler Misson who visited Italy in 1687-1688, published a book in 1691 about his travel to Italy and there is a chapter describing his visit to Vesuvius. The Amsterdam edition of 1743 shows the Latin text of the epitaph 1 In 1700 Domenico Antonio Parrino published a two-volume

without any translation.

book about Naples and its surroundings, in which he described in details the coast of the Bay of Naples, the city and villas, their past and present, the location of the place and he

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mentions the above epitaph without any comment. The book Historical and Critical Description of the Underground City found at the outskirts of the Mt. Vesuvius by an anonymous author, published in Avignon in 1748, also shows the complete epitaph in 3 Another traveler, Johann Georg Keyßler, in 1751 also paid

Latin without translation.

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attention to this epitaph and included it in his book.

Does this mean that Pompeii was destroyed in fact as a result of the eruption in December 1631?

Pompeii and Herculaneum were marked on the maps from fifteenth - sixteenth century and on the illustrations in books of the time about the eruption of Vesuvius in 1631. Besides, in his book De incendio Vesuvii excitato XVLJ. Kal. Ianuar anno trigesimo saeculi decimo septimi, Neapoli, 1633, the author Mascolo, an eyewitness of the eruption, wrote this:

"...Everything on the way was swept away by this storm and the fire whirl. Stocks and flocks were drawn and scattered around, fields, woods, huts, houses, towers were destroyed and thrown about. Two of these fire flows were very quick, one of them vigorously ran down to Herculaneum, the other one ran to Pompeii (the cities once recovered from the ashes, I do not know if they will be alive again)... And about Herculaneum and Pompeii (this is how I call both the ancient city and the one next to it)

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I will tell you a little bit later."

and then explains:

“What to tell about Pompeii?... Now, on the contrary, it was not only horrified by the roaring bicorn Vesuvius but was buried without a splendid burial procession under the ashes, and there is probably not [even one] eyewitness of this misery left from the city of Annunciate, as its called now. And such a great disaster did not happen during Nero when [the city] was damaged by an earthquake and when during a theatrical performance a casual argument between Nucerians and Pompeians became the reason for a bloody wrangle, first with stones and then with knives. And now the Pompeii itself

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looks really miserable..."

1 Maximilien Misson, Voyage d'Italie ed. augm. de remarques nouvelles et interessantes, Amsterdam : Clousier, 1743 2 Domenico Antonio Parrino, Napoli Città Nobilissima, Antica e Fedelissima, Esposta a gli Occhi et alla Mente de’ Curiosi, diviso in due Parti - Stamperia del Parrino, Napoli, 1700 3 Moussinot. Memoire historique et critique sur la ville souterraine decouverte au pied du Mont- Vesuve... Avignon : chez Alexandre Giroud, 1748 4 Johann Georg Keyßler, Neueste Reisen durch Deutschland, Böhmen, Ungarn, die Schweiz, Italien und Lothringen. Theil 2. Hannover, 1751 5 Giovanni Battista Masculi (Mascolo), De incendio vesuvi excitato XVLJ. Kal. Ianuar anno trigesimo saeculi decimo septimi, libri X cum chronologia superiorum incendiorum ephemeride ultimi ed. Roncagliolo Secondino, Napoli, 1633, 16 6 Ibid., 34 - 36

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A. Tschurilow, Features of the Domenico Fontana’s Water Conduit (the Canal of Count Sarno) and the Date of Pompeii Destruction

Fig. 2 The coast of the Bay of Naples after the eruption of Vesuvius, 1631 (Mascolo "De incendio Vesuvii..." Neapoli, 1633)

BRIEF HISTORY OF THE DISCOVERY OF POMPEII

Both Herculaneum and Pompeii were discovered by the world purely by chance. In the winter of 1748 Rocco Joaquin de Alcubierre (1702 - 1780), a major of the Naples Royal Engineering Corps, was assigned the task to restore the damaged water supply to the powder factory in Torre Annunziata whose mill was driven by water from the upper Sarno river coming down through the specially constructed irrigation ditch. One section of this water conduit at Torre Annunziata was underground and went under a hill covered with vineyards and olive trees. Exploring the canal and talking to the local inhabitants who told him stories about multiple finds of ancient items and marble debris in these places,

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Alcubierre came to the conclusion that the hill is hiding some city buried by Vesuvius. This conjecture was supported also by the hill name, "the city" (Cività).

However, the first accidental discoverer of Pompeii is considered to be the renowned pope's architecture and engineer Domenico Fontana (1543 - 1607) from Melida (Switzerland), who became famous for the completion of the construction of St. Peter's Basilica, the transfer and the erection of the Egyptian obelisk in its square, the cathedral in Laterano and the construction of Palazzo Reale in Naples, and he was also the man to

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build the water conduit under Pompeii.

7 Alcubierre, R., et al., Pompeianarum Antiquitatum, Fiorelli, Neapoli, 1860

8 Giovanni Pietro Bellori, Le vite de' pittori, scultori e architetti moderni, «Vita di Domenico Fontana da Milì, architetto», Roma, 1672

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