This dramatic print was printed from three plates inked with orange, dark blue and black (the registration marks are visible at the edges of the sheet), with details added by hand. It is one of a pair, the other showing an eruption of Vesuvius, both after the Neapolitan landscape painter Alessandro d'Anna. The prints emulate the spectacular nocturnal views of eruptions in Sir William Hamilton's Campi Phlegraei (1776–9), but they were produced by a German engraver who had never travelled to Italy and published in Paris.