In 1631, a Neapolitan apothecary named Francesco Serao did something nobody had bothered doing before: he actually looked at what Vesuvius was coughing up. Not in the “wow, pretty lava” way tourists gawk today, but with the kind of systematic scrutiny you’d apply to, say, investigating why your neighbor’s cat keeps exploding.
Serao wandered up the mountain—still occasionally belching smoke after its catastrophic 1631 eruption that killed around 4,000 people—and started collecting samples. Rocks. Gases. Crusty mineral deposits that looked like Satan’s dandruff. He documented temperatures, noted the sulfurous stench that would make a demon gag, and catalogued the various flavors of volcanic vomit coating the mountainside.
Here’s the thing: before Serao, volcanoes were mostly explained through mythology or vague hand-waving about underground fires.
The Greeks blamed it on Hephaestus hammering away in his subterranean forge. Medieval scholars figured maybe there were coal seams burning underground, or perhaps God was just really angry about something. Nobody thought to, you know, measure stuff. Take notes. Apply the revolutionary concept that maybe—just maybe—observation beats wild speculation.
When Mountains Suddenly Remember They’re Geological Time Bombs Actually
Serao’s 1638 treatise “Historia dell’incendio del Vesuvio” wasn’t exactly a bestseller, but it marked the first time someone approached volcanic activity as a phenomenon worth studying rather than fleeing from. He described the mountain’s “perpetual workshop” of destruction, noting how different vents produced different materials. Some belched what he called “liquid fire”—we’d call it basaltic lava today. Others spewed ash clouds that turned noon into midnight.
The apothecary even figured out that Vesuvius wasn’t just randomly angry; it had patterns, rhythms, a kind of geological personality. He documented how minor eruptions would sometimes presage major ones, how the mountain would grumble and shake before really losing its temper.
Wait—maybe that sounds obvious now, but in the 1630s this was borderline heretical. Natural philosophers were still debating whether fossils were real or just rocks that looked funny. The idea that you could predict geological behavior through observation? Revolutionary.
Serao’s work influenced later volcano-watchers, including Sir William Hamilton, the British envoy to Naples who spent the 1760s obsessively documenting Vesuvius’s tantrums. Hamilton took Serao’s approach and cranked it up, commissioning paintings of eruptions, measuring lava flow speeds (around 5-10 kilometers per hour during the 1767 eruption), and generally treating the mountain like a laboratory specimen that occasionally tried to kill him.
The Part Where Everyone Realizes Mountains Are Complicated Jerks
But Serao got there first. He recognized that volcanic deposits weren’t random debre scattered by divine caprice—they told stories. Layers of ash marked previous eruptions. Sulfur deposits indicated underground chemical processes nobody yet understood. The mountain was keeping records; someone just needed to learn the language.
His observations about gas emissions were particularly prescient. Serao noted that certain “exhalations” preceded eruptions, and while he didn’t have the chemistry to explain it, he was detecting what we now know as increased sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide outgassing—key eruption precursors. Modern volcanologists use gas monitoring as a primary tool. Serao figured it out with his nose and a notebook.
The apothecary’s methodology—systematic observation, sample collection, pattern recognition—became the template for volcanic studies. When the Icelandic volcano Laki erupted in 1783, killing roughly 9,000 people directly and causing a famine that killed thousands more, scientists applied Serao’s approach to understand what happend. When Krakatoa exploded in 1883 with the force of 200 megatons of TNT, researchers catalogued its deposits using techniques pioneered by a guy with a mortar and pestle in Naples.
Turns out the first volcanic scientist wasn’t some ivory-tower academic—he was a pharmacist who got curious about the angry mountain in his backyard and decided questions beat assumptions.
No fancy equipment. No satellite monitoring or seismographs. Just observation, documentation, and the radical notion that maybe—just maybe—nature follows rules we can figure out if we bother to look.
