3-070-508 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The earthquake in the Island of Ischia: view from the garden of the Gran Sentinella, 1881. 'Some account was given last week of the destructive earthquake and loss of life on Friday, the 4th March, at Casamicciola, in the Isle of Ischia, Bay of Naples...we have since received from a Naples correspondent, R. Michely, several sketches, with photographs, representing the actual effects of this great disaster. We gave a brief description of the island, with its small towns and villages, and Mount Epomeo, an extinct volcano, rising in the centre. Casamicciola, famed for its medicinal springs, is a favourite watering-place for invalids from Naples, being twenty miles distant from that city and seven or eight miles from the nearest point of the mainland...[Our view] of Casamicciola now presented was taken from the garden of the hotel called La Gran Sentinella, and shows the scene of destruction in the upper part of the town. Many houses and walls, thrown down by the first shock, which continued only a few seconds, have covered this part with heaps of ruins, from which the dead bodies of the inhabitants were gradually dug out, some of them in a sadly mutilated condition'. From "Illustrated London News", 1881.