Please let Under Vesuvius be your visa-free journey to the Campania region of Italy, centered on the Vesuvian area between Naples and Sorrento and around the corner, so to speak, to the Amalfi Coast and then back again out to sea to Ischia and Capri.
I was captivated and enthralled by this place. I wrote this book hoping to let the same happen to you. To spark cherished memories if you've been there before; to whet your appetite to go if you have not done so yet.
I learned about writing a travelogue from two fabulous American Grand Tourists -- Mark Twain and James Fenimore Cooper. They reached across the centuries and miles with Innocents Abroad and Gleanings in Europe - Italy, respectively. Both men disdained the rote repetition in the books of their time, which just listed what their authors saw. Twain and Cooper thought about the essence of what they witnessed. Each wrote about people whom those others overlooked or dismissed. About places those others left unvisited or whose true significance they simply did not appreciate. I have attempted to do the same in the verse half of this book.
I invite you to meet David the vintner, Marie the cheesemaker, Sylvia the tour guide, and Chef Aiello. I encourage you to empathize with the ancients swept up in the cataclysm of AD 79 at Pompeii and Herculaneum, as well as their descendants ravaged by Axis artillery and Allied bombs millennia later during the Italian Campaign, only then to be horrified by the last Vesuvian eruption in 1944. And with temerity I ask you to endure an epic, final explosion of Campania.
I entice you to smell the lemons, be warmed by the sun and refreshed by the sea breeze, take in the radiant colors of flowers and painted buildings, marvel at the expressions of the sacred and profane in ancient frescos and medieval ceramic tiles.
And lastly, wander with me through the woods and hills to a fictional abbey in the 16th century, where men and women, saints and sinners, struggle to build a chapel with spectacular stained glass windows. All the while haunted surreptitiously, or hunted unknowingly, by the specter of lead poisoning and its scourge of debilitation and death. Windows on the World comprises the second part of this book. It is a short story written about the past, a precautionary tale for our present day, and a harbinger of the future.
I can't wait to have you join me.
