Mount Etna eruption a few days ago......

It must be an awesome - and sobering - experience to live in the shadow of such a natural phenomenon....and the visual effects of an eruption are always enhanced at night. I visited the excellent exhibition at the British Museum earlier this year which examined life and death in Pompeii and Herculaneum and it was a poignant to see the final moments of whole families and their pets captured by casts made from the cavities created by their bodies trapped under volcanic ash.