Stromboli
Visiting Stromboli
Jump to the picturesIbn Jubayr was a traveller, geographer, poet, and secretary to the Almohad governor of Granada. He wrote a travel chronicle describing his pilgrimage to Mecca and back home via Sicily in 1183–1185. Of Stromboli he wrote:
At the close of night a red flame appeared,
throwing up tongues into the air.
It was the celebrated volcano.
We were told that a fiery blast of great violence bursts out
from air-holes in the two mountains and makes the fire.
Often a great stone is cast up and thrown into the air
by the force of the blast and prevented thereby from
falling and settling at the bottom.
This is one of the most remarkable of stories, and it is true.
As for the great mountain in the island, known as the
Jabal al-Nar [Mountain of Fire],
it also presents a singular feature in that some
years a fire pours from it in the manner of the
"bursting of the dam".
It passes nothing it does not burn until,
coming to the sea,
it rides out on its surface and then subsides beneath it.
Let us praise the Author of all things
for His marvelous creations.
There is no God but He.
Mark Twain's "The Innocents Abroad", published in 1869 about a trip made in 1867, includes this in its 32nd chapter:
At seven in the evening, with the western horizon all golden from the sunken sun, and specked with distant ships, the full moon sailing high over head, the dark blue of the sea under foot, and a strange sort of twilight affected by all these different lights and colors around us and about us, we sighted superb Stromboli. With what majesty the monarch held his lonely state above the level sea! Distance clothed him in a purple gloom, and added a veil of shimmering mist that so softened his rugged features that we seemed to see him through a web of silver gauze. His torch was out; his fires were smoldering; a tall column of smoke that rose up and lost itself in the growing moonlight was all the sign he gave that he was a living Autocrat of the Sea and not the spectre of a dead one.
Where Next In Italy?
( 🚧 = under construction )
In the late 1990s into the early 2000s I worked on a project to
scan cuneiform tablets
to archive and share 3-D data sets,
providing enhanced visualization to assist reading them.
Localized histogram equalization
to emphasize small-scale 3-D shapes in range maps, and so on.
I worked on the project with Gordon Young,
who was Purdue University's only professor
of archaeology.
Gordon was really smart,
he could read both Sumerian and Akkadian,
and at least some of other ancient languages
written in the cuneiform script.
He told me to go to Italy,
"The further south, the better."
Gordon was right.
Yes, you will very likely arrive in Rome,
but Italy has domestic flights and a fantastic train system
that runs overnight sleepers all the way to
Palermo and Siracusa, near the western and southern corners
of Sicily.
So, these pages are grouped into a south-first order,
as they should be.