Travel | Italy
I Looked into the Mouth of Hell in Pozzuoli
As “Europe’s Most Dangerous Volcano” awakens, Italians shrug
“Please, signore e signora,” our cab driver says, turning back to my partner Sonya and me, his eyes no longer on the road, “roll your windows up here; the sulfur smell is about to get very bad.”
We quickly do as we are told, if only to get Paolo to turn his rather capricious attention forward as our taxi hurtles through the narrow, winding streets that lead from Naples, where we just landed, to the port city of Pozzuoli, some 12 miles from the airport on the eastern rim of the Gulf of Naples.
“Sulfur?” I think. “What sulfur?”
I am about to ask Paolo, but I think better of it. The fewer distractions for him, the better.
And then, in a weird and eerie bit of serendipity — perhaps aided and abetted by Google algorithms and location services — a headline from a just-published Washington Post article pops up on my phone: “Europe’s most dangerous volcano rumbles, and Italians weigh the risk.”
The dateline reads: POZZUOLI, Italy.
“Uh-oh,” I think.
Paolo drops us off at the marina, where we are four hours early for our weeklong catamaran tour of the…
