Giant skull appears above Italian volcano   Daily Mail - July 13, 2017

Eerie face forms in smoke rising over Mount Vesuvius, caused by surrounding wildfires

This is called Cloud Scrying or Pareidolia

An eerie giant skull appeared above Mount Vesuvius as surrounding wildfires spewed smoke over the Italian volcano. Around 1,000 tourists were evacuated by boat from wildfires in Sicily yesterday, as swathes of southern Italy burned after months with little rainfall. The cause of the fire remains unknown, with some pointing a finger at the mafia, but in the aftermath the ghoulish face appeared to be looming large over the sea. Rosario Scotto Di Minico posted the picture on Facebook with the caption, 'After millennia the monster of Vesuvius came out'.

Mount Vesuvius is not currently erupting, but the formation of smoke and fire around it makes it appear as though it is throwing ash and lava into the air. In a Facebook post, writer Roberto Saviano said criminal organizations in likelihood started the blaze in the Campanian national park - which have spread to the slopes of Mount Vesuvius - in order to burn rubbish in illegal landfill sites, or prevent construction projects going ahead. There were no reports of injuries caused by the blaze at the Calampiso seaside resort west of the island's capital Palermo, but the mayor of a nearby town appealed for help in the rescue. Read more ...

Mount Vesuvius Is on Fire (Not Like That, Though)   Live Science - July 14, 2017
A thick plume of smoke is rising from Italy's Mount Vesuvius, but don't panic. Pompeii isn't about to happen all over again. The smoke, visible in a new set of satellite images released by the European Space Agency (ESA), is coming from a series of wildfires on the mountain. According to the ESA, much of the woodlands in Vesuvia National Park, which contains the volcano and its surroundings, have been destroyed.

The fires have forced evacuations near Naples, while tourists on Sicily had to flee separate fires by boat, according to The Independent newspaper. Drought and high temperatures have driven the wildfires, but some officials suspect that some of the blazes on Mount Vesuvius were started by people, The Independent reported. Smoke obscures Vesuvius in new satellite images taken by the Copernicus Sentinel-2B satellite on July 12, and thermal images show a number of blazes dotting the active volcano.

Vesuvius is most famous for its eruption in A.D. 79 that destroyed the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Pyroclastic flows of mud and ash buried the towns, preserving skeletons and in some cases leaving body-shaped voids that recorded exactly where victims of the eruption died. Vesuvius killed about 100 people in another eruption in 1906 and destroyed several villages when it again erupted in March 1944. The current Italian wildfires have killed two people, according to Fox News. In all of southern Italy, including Sicily, at least 64,000 acres (26,000 hectacres) of woodland have been burned.