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3.99 gram slice with a lava sample from Mt. Vesuvius.   LL5

TKW 3.7 kg. Observed fall 1794 in Toscana, Italy.


Rob writes:

Excerpt from "Siena, 1794: History's Most Consequential Meteorite Fall" by Marvin, Ursula B.

The Siena fall was heralded by the appearance of an extraordinarily high, dark cloud emitting smoke, sparks like rockets, and bolts of unusually slow-moving red lightning. With a tremendous explosion a shower of stones, ranging in weight from a few milligrams to 3 kg, fell southeast of Siena. This was the first meteorite fall to occur in the vicinity of a sizeable European city and the first to be witnessed by so many people, including English visitors, that the fall of the stones from the sky could not be denied. It also was the first fall to be seriously investigated by scholars, at several universities in Italy, who collected eye-witness reports and specimens and formulated hypotheses of origin. Their task was greatly complicated by the timing of the fall which occurred 18 hours after Mt. Vesuvius sprang into full eruption. Some believed that the two events were entirely coincidental; others thought that the stones either were ejecta from the volcano (which lay about 320 km to the southeast of Siena) or had consolidated in the fiery masses of dust and ash expelled by the mountain. No explanations seemed entirely satisfactory, but, in an age when the very possibility of falling stones had been decisively ruled out by savants of the Enlightenment, the well-observed fall at Siena opened a new dialog on this subject.

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