Del Nuevo Mundo a Nápoles. La erupción del Huaynaputina (1600) y su impacto en la circulación del conocimiento

This article examines several aspects of the circulation of naturalist knowledge across the Atlantic, focusing on texts that disseminated in Europe the news of an eruption that occurred in the Andean region in 1600: that of the volcano near the Peruvian city of Arequipa, Huaynaputina. The study reconstructs the institutional and media channels through which first-hand information reached the main centers of knowledge production and dissemination, shedding light on the sequence of mediations and re-elaborations that led to both the selection of original testimonies and their transformation into typified narratives, subsequently fixed in texts that became, in some way, reference points.The article also seeks to provide a deeper understanding of how news of the catastrophe was received in Catholic Europe, and especially in the Kingdom of Naples, highlighting the adaptations and the aspects considered most compelling by Neapolitan authors and audiences. At the same time, it shows that, while knowledge from the American continent undoubtedly aroused fascination within Neapolitan society, it was neither systematically assimilated nor further developed, being at times dismissed as unusable, and at others as inconsistent with local traditions and the epistemological frameworks that characterized Naples’s learned circles.