Page:Great Neapolitan Earthquake of 1857 Vol 2.djvu/164

Rh side of the town, and upon the most broad and level part of the spur; the two others on the north and south sides respectively. The two latter are obviously local secondary oscillations of the spur itself.

The main cause of this place having suffered so little, appears plainly enough to be the sifting that it received in 1851, which demolished all the old and less firm buildings, so that it now consists only of the stout ones that remained, and which are but few, and of the numerous new and substantial buildings since constructed. I could obtain here no information worth recording from the chief inhabitants, and in the afternoon I pushed on to the city of Melfi, and at once waited upon the Intendente, whom I found at his palazzo, and who obligingly brought me in his carriage over the town and its immediate neighbourhood.

Melfi stands upon a rolling country of swelling hills, all of deep tufa, with great beds of lapilli interposed, often of great size, and masses of lava here and there; it is of exuberant agricultural richness, as the Photog. (No. 333 Coll. Roy. Soc), close to the town, with Vulture in the distance, may indicate. The great rounded mass upon which the city stands, is more than a mile and a half across both ways; it is surrounded nearly, by the Torrente di Melfi, and the Aqua Negra, whose beds, in the bottom of deep ravines of erosion, are probably 300 to 350 feet below the mean level of the place. The elevation above the sea is given by Palmieri and Scacchi at 1600 feet; by Don Arabia at 1688; and I made the level of the Castello yard 1700 feet, by an imperfect observation, however. It is therefore about 200 feet lower than Rionero, and about

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