3-070-998 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Casamicciola and Mount Epomeo, in the Island of Ischia, Bay of Naples, 1881. 'The beautiful island of Ischia has been visited by a terrible earthquake, causing great loss of life at the small town of Casamicciola, which is a favourite seaside resort, in the summer, for Neapolitans and foreign sojourners...The island is seven miles long, and four or five miles broad, with Mount Epomeo rising in its centre, and with lofty cliffs on the south and east sides...Casamicciola, on the northern shore...had three or four thousand inhabitants before the recent disaster, by which nearly three hundred lives, according to the latest estimate, have been destroyed. The mineral springs of Casamicciola have been celebrated, from the ancient Roman times, for the cure of gout and rheumatism, and of scrofulous diseases and other maladies...The earthquake began on Friday (yesterday week) at one o'clock in the afternoon, the shock that time, which only lasted a few seconds, demolishing about three hundred houses in the little town, at Old Casamicciola and Menella, but not the larger buildings, the principal hotels, or the bathing establishments. Hundreds of the inhabitants were buried in the ruins of their dwellings...'. From "Illustrated London News", 1881.