Visiting Vesuvius: Guides, Local Knowledge, Sublime Tourism, and Science, 1760–1890

Abstract

This article examines the activities of guides on the volcano Mount Vesuvius in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They worked in a double capacity—as aids to savants seeking to unlock the scientific secrets of the volcano and as the creators of a tourist infrastructure that helped visitors enjoy the sublime experience of a steadily erupting volcano. The essay examines their contribution to scientific knowledge of the volcano and their role in developing sublime tourism, a phenomenon that, despite an earlier existence, burgeoned in the late eighteenth century. It argues that guides were vital to both, but that a long-standing attempt to circumscribe their role as knowledge makers grew more and more effective in the nineteenth century, as mineralogists’ concern with specimens (shared by so many visitors and amateurs) gave way to geologists’ concern for the interrelations of rocks and strata, and as the Neapolitan state developed scientific institutions, notably the volcanic observatory with its instruments on the slopes of the volcano, that took over functions previously served by the guides. Though the guides—or some of them—were able to profit from the flow of visitors, not least because of their special knowledge and skills, their activities were also transformed as the growth of a state infrastructure of roads and railways pushed them to the margins, and as transnational organizations, like the Thomas Cook travel agency, absorbed their labor.