Tag: travel
Iceland from the West to the South: A Meh Guide With Some Eye-Popping Mistakes
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So of course with all of the Iceland Volcano excitement, I had to run out and buy a bunch of books on Icelandic geology. It’s actually not super easy to find affordable ones in English. So I was very pleased to find one published by Springer for a good price: Iceland from the West to the South by Wolfgang Fraedrich. Springer is all about science written by scientists. I was stoked.
I have now read it, and…I’m considerably less stoked.
A 16th Century Volcano Adventure: “The Marvelous Hills of Sulphur”
It’s early 1550, and a young Sir Thomas Hoby is traveling through a volcanic wonderland. Britain hasn’t had anything comparable to the Campanian coast of Italy for tens of millions of years. There are places where geothermally-heated water rises through fractures and faults, used by humans to treat various ailments for milennia, but nothing as raw and exciting as what he sees here.
Taking the highway to the town of Pozzuoli, he marvels at the medical baths (Sudatorii) on the shores of Lago di Agnano: “…they cause good digestion and resolve raw humors, they lighten the body and heal the inward parts, they dry up fistles and wounds, and are very good against gout.”* In an age when medicine is still far more of an art than a science, these medicinal baths fed by volcanic springs are often the best chance at relief for people suffering from poor health.
He is probably unaware that these wonderful Sudatorii are a mere remnant of a medical spa industry that had been booming less than twelve years before.