Vesuvius is small, as volcanoes go, but it has loomed large on tourist itineraries for as long as such things have existed. A coloured engraving from a schoolbook of 1851 shows it as a teeny little cone dwarfed by immense peaks from elsewhere. The volcanoes of Kamchatka, South America and Asia tower above it. But they are dull. The only signs of life the artist John Emslie grants them are sullen emissions of grey smoke, while he has coloured Vesuvius in fiery shades and placed it front and centre. Rising above a great city and a beautiful bay, surrounded by sites hallowed in mythology and literature (the Sibyl’s cave at Cumae, the entrance to the Virgilian underworld at Avernus), site of one of the most famous natural disasters ever recorded, Vesuvius has a special place in cultural history. For centuries it has been a magnet for scholars and sensation-seekers, for artists and impresarios. John Brewer, in this study of the people who visited and studied and rhapsodized over and shuddered at Vesuvius between the middle of the eighteenth century and the end of the nineteenth, reveals it to have been a busy crossroads where art and science and commerce intersected.

Despite its subtitlethe book is only cursorily concerned with the volcano as political metaphor. Bourbons and Bonapartes come and go in Naples. Across Europe republics and empires are established and overthrown. To Brewer such upheavals are background noise. His focus stays tightly on the people “on the volcano”. (The phrase recurs insistently.) They are a large and disparate group. His pages are crowded with celebrities – Alexandre Dumas, Chateaubriand, Madame de Staël. Equally interesting – if not more so – are the quieter, more scholarly visitors and the “invisible” ones, the servants and the workers who cared for them all.

The book is organized as a series of essays rather than as a sustained argument. This leads to a lot of repetition and some narrative anomalies. (Charles Babbage has been repeatedly referred to before he is finally introduced on page 95). Volcanic is therefore best read piecemeal, but its fragmented structure suits Brewer’s approach, which is creatively opportunistic. He is not imposing a unifying story – whether of sociological progress or scientific enlightenment. He is not writing a nostalgic lament for a heroic, less vulgar age of travel. He is not constructing a thesis on the symbolism of the death-dealing mountain and its place in Romantic culture. He does a bit of all those things, but he is primarily a receptive observer. It is as though he is waiting at the Hermitage, halfway up the flanks of Vesuvius, noting who turns up and what their testimony reveals about the intellectual enthusiasms, half-crazed obsessions or idle whims that induced them to take a trip to one of the most physically unstable places on earth.

Brewer begins with the Hermitage’s visitors’ book covering 1826–8. Its 2,300 entries include, in the words of a British naval officer’s wife, “very silly remarks, and more silly verses”. (She was probably thinking of the puns about asses, of which Brewer remarks there were many.) Signatories’ comments also contain a great deal of gush about “the sublime” – the concept that all educated travellers of the period carried in their mental portmanteaus. Out of this compendium of triteness Brewer makes something new, a vigorous and vividly detailed crowd scene.

The stereotype of the aristocratic young Grand Tourist with his tutor, he demonstrates, was outdated by this period. Vesuvius visitors were clergymen, physicians, professors, painters, scholars. Many of them were soldiers – the successive foreign occupations of Naples meant there were a lot of men (French, Austrian, Swiss) – stationed in the city looking for something to do on a day’s leave. One in five visitors were women. There were local families out for a picnic. There were lone seekers of rapture-inducing majestic prospects. The latter were irritated by the jollity of less pensive trippers such as the party of Manchester businessmen noisily celebrating one of their number’s having won a wager that he could scramble to the top of Vesuvius from sea level in under an hour.

The book’s most engaging chapter is on the local people who made their living on the volcano. They were essential, and numerous: a visiting group of two ladies and one gentleman hired thirty guides. Brewer’s account of their business is an illuminating study in the economics of tourism. First comes the scrum at Resina, where – at the beginning of the author’s period – the carriage from central Naples would be met by an intimidating crowd of men and donkeys, the former grabbing at visitors and yelling out their prices for the ascent. By the 1820s there follows reform under the aegis of the self-appointed union leader-cum-regulator Salvatore Madonna, who acted as an agent for the other guides, fixed prices, turned the scrum into a kind of taxi rank and oversaw the evolution of an orderly programme. Every visitor was taken on donkey-back to the Hermitage, where they were plied with the local wine. Every visitor – some of whom protested furiously – was fitted with a kind of harness and hauled ignominiously up the final ascent. (It took twelve men working in shifts to get the obese amateur geologist the Duke of Buckingham to the top.) At the crater’s brink they were sold oranges by local traders, who had been seen trotting sure-footedly past them as they were manhandled up. Their guides offered them eggs baked in the hot lava. Once back at the bottom of the mountain they could visit the gift shops to buy chunks of colourful minerals and postcard-sized pictures, as well as shoes to replace those ruined by scrambling over hot rock and saw-toothed lava.

Scholars of all kinds swarmed the mountain. Brewer uses the inclusive word “savant” of the geologists, mathematicians, archaeologists et al. They relied heavily on the guides. Salvatore Madonna and his fellows were non-academic vulcanologists whose expertise often greatly exceeded that of the learned gentlemen. They knew how to detect the warning signs and get their clients out of harm’s way when an eruption was imminent. They knew which minerals were to be found where. The more generous of the savants acknowledged their contribution. Others, as blinded by xenophobia and snobbery as Percy Bysshe Shelley, who thought all modern Italians “degraded, disgusting and odious”, condescended to the guides as untutored fellows, possessed only of peasant cunning.

Brewer switches easily between the theoretical and the anecdotal. He writes about the companionship of fellow travellers and the rivalries between fellow researchers. He writes about vulcanological disputes between Plutonists and Neptunists. He writes about travel writing. He writes about transport – the cart and the donkey giving way to the railway and the funicular. He writes about the way tourism destroys its own assets, rendering the exotic homelike: in the 1860s Thomas Cook arranged for British Vesuvius visitors to eat lunch comfortably, served by English-speaking waiters, before ascending the final slope. He writes about “the ’ramas” – the dioramas and panoramas that allowed volcano lovers to experience the thrill of eruptions without the inconveniences of foreign travel. He writes about several of the characters who became prominent actors on the volcano: Déodat de Dolomieu, heroic, vainglorious explorer; Sir William Hamilton, connoisseur of ancient arts and modern sciences, who was Britain’s ambassador to Naples and Vesuvius’s ambassador to the world; Teodoro Monticelli, kindly, assiduous curator to the Academy of Sciences in Naples.

At last, in his penultimate essay, Brewer writes about the first story that springs to mind when Vesuvius is mentioned – that of the eruption of 79 CE that engulfed Herculaneum and Pompeii. To mid-eighteenth-century visitors the volcano was “awful”, but not frightening: contemplation of it afforded the unthreatening frisson of feeling oneself dwarfed by Nature’s grandeur. By the 1830s, as more and more of the buried dead were being uncovered, when Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii was a bestseller and operas and painting recreated the dreadful deaths of the Pompeians, Vesuvius had been reimagined as a killer. Visiting it was a kind of extreme tourism. The pleasure of going there was sharpened by the thought that one might not come back.

John Brewer’s books have tended to be interdisciplinary, open-ended and discursive. He recently described this one to an interviewer: “It brings together art history, history of science, history of culture, economic history, the history of travel. That’s the kind of history that I like to write. It’s a bit messy, but I like messy in that way”. Done the way he does it, with deep scholarship sparked by serendipity, I like messy too.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett