The Volcanological Museum of the Vesuvius Observatory is in the territory of Ercolano, in the Observatory's historic building on the slopes of Vesuvius, at 608 metres, within the National Park. Since the laboratories and the monitoring centre moved to Naples in 1970, the building has been entirely given over to the museum and the library.
What to see
The building is nineteenth-century and neoclassical, on three floors with two entrances: the monumental one, on the main floor, has a colonnaded pronaos. From the panoramic terraces you can see the crater and the lava flow of the 1944 eruption. The route runs through nine rooms on two floors. The first displays historic instruments, including seismoscopes, in the Mercalli and Wiechert rooms; on the second are the director's office with period telephone and radio, the library, the room of Vesuvian minerals, that of meteorological instruments and the Octagonal Room, with the Vesuvian medal collection, ashes from the various eruptions and Luigi Palmieri's two electromagnetic seismographs. In the Great Hall, now the Palmieri Hall, the ceiling painted by Gennaro Maldarelli has been restored to save the five surviving paintings of the original nine. Outdoors, near the main entrance, volcanic bombs and ropy lava are on show.
The permanent exhibition uses films, rocks, minerals, instruments, books and paintings to explain types of eruption, their hazards and the history of the Observatory and its scientists, and shows in real time the seismic and geochemical data of the monitoring network. The mineral collection dates back to 1852, when Arcangelo Scacchi bought it from Teodoro Monticelli; in 2011 it was enriched by Mariano Carati's donation of over 440 pieces, 170 of them on display, covering 130 of the 270 species known from Vesuvius. The library holds about fifteen thousand volumes: the most precious is the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher's «Mundus subterraneus» of 1668.
Visiting
The museum is on the slopes of Vesuvius, at an altitude of 608 metres. Opening hours, bookings and tickets should be checked on the official website of the Vesuvius Observatory.
Our editors' tip
Among the films kept here is the one by the Lumière brothers from 1898, the oldest in the world devoted to a volcanic eruption, alongside Roberto Troncone's documentary on the 1906 eruption and footage of the 1944 eruption shot by the Allied Fifth Army.
