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In AD79 it was Pompeii's most popular hang out, where locals would stop off to meet friends and partake in a snack of baked cheese smothered in honey. Now, nearly 2000 years after the Italian city was buried under ash and rubble by the devastating eruption of Mount Vesuvius, its favourite snack bar has re-opened. For the first time the thermopolium, as it is called in Italy, will be open to tourists after having undergone and excavation and restoration process over the past few months. Tomorrow 300 VIPs selected at random will attend an advance opening of the snack bar...

An Italian couple and their 11-year-old son died in a freak accident on Tuesday when they fell into a 10ft-deep hole that suddenly opened up in a highly active volcanic area near Naples. Police said the child strayed beyond safety barriers and was swallowed up by the pit, plunging into boiling hot mud at the Solfatara Crater in Pozzuoli, part of a huge volcanic area known as the Campi Flegrei or Phlegrean Fields. His father, 45, reportedly rushed to his rescue but also fell into the sink-hole. The boy’s mother, 42, then went to their aid, but she too was...

Before a volcano erupts, there are usually signs of what’s to come; small earthquakes, heat emission, and ground swelling, to name a few, have all been observed to precede eruptions. Volcanologists also monitor the changing composition of gas emissions at volcanoes in the months leading up to an eruption. However, precursory variations in gas have not yet been verified to occur in volcanoes hosting active lava lakes. To find out if volcanic gas emissions might also be used to predict eruptions at lava lake–hosting, carbon-poor volcanoes, Aiuppa et al. looked at Chile’s Villarrica volcano. Villarrica towers 2847 meters over the...

When Mount Vesuvius erupted and buried the Italian city of Pompeii in ash, killing 2,000 people, it was regarded as one of the most catastrophic natural disasters and is still studied heavily today. By comparison, a nearby supervolcano called Campi Flegrei, which means “burning fields,” would put the lives of 500,000 Italians at risk and cause damage that would extend to the surrounding nations.

A volcanic field off the shore of Sicily, near Naples, has become active, scientists report. The Campi Flegrei volcano is much larger than nearby Mt. Vesuvius, the volcano whose eruption destroyed the ancient city of Pompei. An eruption of this “supervolcano” could endanger much of Europe. News of the volcanic activity was made public less than a week after the blood of St. Januarius failed to liquefy when displayed in the Naples cathedral. Sicilians have long believed that when the miracle of St. Januarius does not occur, disaster will follow for the people of Naples. A supervolcano caused the largest...

The Italian name for the caldera — Campi Flegrei, or “burning fields”— is apt. The 7.5-mile-wide cauldron is the collapsed top of an ancient volcano, formed when the magma within finally blew. Though half of it is obscured beneath the crystal blue waters of the Mediterranean, the other half is studded with cinder cones and calderas from smaller eruptions. And the whole area seethes with hydrothermal activity: Sulfuric acid spews from active fumaroles; geysers spout water and steam and the ground froths with boiling mud; and earthquake swarms shudder through the region, 125 miles south of Rome. And things seem...

BEC CREW 22 DEC 2016 It's dangerously close to hitting a critical pressure point. A 12-km wide cauldron that forms a vast supervolcano on the coast of Italy is showing signs of reawakening after almost 500 years of inactivity. Not only is this site rumoured to be responsible for the extinction of the Neanderthals, it’s got 500,000 people living around it right now, and researchers say it appears to be approaching a critical pressure point that could lead to an eruption. You might imagine a supervolcano as like a regular volcano, only supersized, rising up out of the ground and...

A slumbering Campi Flegrei volcano under the Italian city of Naples shows signs of "reawakening" and may be nearing a critical pressure point, according to a study published Tuesday. Italian and French scientists have for the first time identified a threshold beyond which rising magma under the Earth's surface could trigger the release of fluids and gases at a 10-fold increased rate. This would cause the injection of high-temperature steam into surrounding rocks, said lead author Giovanni Chiodini, a researcher at Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Bologna. "Hydrothermal rocks, if heated, can ultimately lose their mechanical resistance,...

The ground on the western edges of Naples, Italy is rising, spurring worries of a possible volcanic eruption, but scientists now think they know exactly what is causing the uplift and may be able to better predict any potential eruption. Using GPS measurements, a group of scientists at the National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology in Italy monitored the ground’s motions for several years, and based on the patterns they observed, they believe the uplifting is caused by magma intruding from a shallow chamber. The rising motions of the ground reached a peak rate of about three feet per year...

A hidden "super volcano" near Pompeii threatens an eruption that could make Vesuvius look like a picnic, scientists warn. The Phlegraean Fields zone of intense seismic activity -- which the ancient Romans believed was the gateway to hell -- could doom millions of people in the Naples area if it erupts, Reuters reports. Scientists plan to drill more than two miles below its surface to monitor any signs of a pending eruption in the huge chamber of molten rock, but some experts fear that the drilling itself could trigger an earthquake or eruption. Areas like the Phlegraean fields "can give...

An ancient port in Naples, believed to be the harbour 25 centuries ago when it was called Palepolis by the Greeks who ousted the Etruscans, has been discovered in the sea off the iconic Castel dell'Ovo, archaeologists said Thursday. Underwater archaeologists have found four submerged tunnels, a three-metre-wide street with cart-furrows still there and a long trench for soldiers, six meters down to the right of the castle, Neapolitan archaeologist Mario Negri said... The first settlements in the area were made in the ninth century BC, nearly 3000 years ago, when Anatolian and Achaean merchants and travellers arrived in the...

The Italian government on Thursday dissolved four town councils due to evidence of mafia infiltration. The affected towns were Laureana di Borrello, Bova Marina, and Gioia Taura, all located in Reggio Calabria at the toe of Italy’s boot, as well as San Felice a Cancello in Caserta, Campania. […] Government-appointed commissions will take over council duties, the ministry said, and local elections scheduled for June 11th will no longer take place in two of the Sicilian towns. […] In 2016, the government disbanded the local council of Corleone because of suspected mafia infiltration of the Sicilian town which helped inspire...

A fresco-covered Roman villa, found underneath a church on Italy's sun-kissed Amalfi coast, is set to open to the public for the first time in July.... Italy's Culture Undersecretary, Antimo Cesaro... told Ansa the ruin was "a perfectly preserved archaeological treasure of enormous artistic value". The enormous villa dates back to the second century BC and was first unearthed eight metres below the church of Santa Maria dell'Assunta in central Positano, Campania, in 2004. Prior to its discovery, the impressive abode had lain hidden since AD 79 when an eruption of Vesuvius buried it under volcanic stone and ash. The...

'Catastrophic' event at Campi Flegrei 39,000 years ago Volcanic eruption near Naples may have killed Neanderthals Some researchers are suggesting that Neanderthals were driven to extinction by a massive volcanic eruption near Naples. The suggestion is one of the topics under debate this week at a conference at London's British Museum examining what forces led to the destruction of the Neanderthals and what led to the triumph of the homo sapiens. One new theory holds that a gigantic eruption of the volcano in the Campi Flegrei area near Naples 39,000 years ago was catastrophic for the Neanderthals. That was the...

The Neanderthals were a hardy species that lived through multiple ice ages and would have been familiar with volcanoes and other natural calamities. But the eruptions 40,000 years ago were unlike anything Neanderthals had faced before, Cleghorn and company say. For one thing, all the volcanoes apparently erupted around the same time. And one of those blasts, the Campanian Ignimbrite, is thought to have been the most powerful eruption in Europe in the last 200,000 years... The researchers acknowledge that there are gaps in the volcanoes theory. For instance, the time line needs to be better defined -- did...

Researchers have securely dated a prehistoric human stone tool industry that is thought to have been used by early modern humans, or possibly late Neanderthals, around the time when early modern humans were beginning to emerge in Europe, arguably sometime between 40,000 to 50,000 years B.P... The Uluzzian, a prehistoric stone tool techno-tradition represented by lithic artifacts unearthed by archaeologists at cave locations primarily in Italy and Greece, has been a central contender as a possible "transitional" industry between the typical stone tool types (the Mousterian) used by late European Neanderthals and those (Aurignacian, Châtelperronian) of the earliest modern human...

AT night the mice and the dogs are masters. The garbage is piled up to the second floor of the houses, and in the darkness it comes alive. Plastic bags and sacks vibrate, emitting the sounds of things pulled apart, scavenged. By day the rats disappear, the dogs are quiet, and men, women, children reappear. The traffic, normally chaotic, here and there is stopped by overturned garbage cans and the trash that blocks the streets. The garbage — thousands of tons of it — has gone uncollected for three weeks, because all the available landfills are full. The evil odor...