Mount Vesuvius

Mount Vesuvius is a somma-stratovolcano on the Gulf of Naples in Campania, Italy, about nine kilometers east of Naples, rising to 1,281 meters above sea level. It is famous for its eruption in 79 AD, which buried the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum under ash and pyroclastic material, sending a column of stones, ash and gas roughly 33 kilometers into the sky and killing more than a thousand people; the only surviving eyewitness account comes from two letters the writer Pliny the Younger sent to the historian Tacitus. Formed by the collision of the African and Eurasian tectonic plates, Vesuvius last erupted in March 1944 and remains the only volcano on mainland Europe to have erupted within the past hundred years. It is classed as one of the world's Decade Volcanoes because roughly three million people live close enough to be affected by a future eruption.