Vesuvius makes Seven Wonders final

Naples volcano joins Grand Canyon, Ayers Rock, Kilimanjaro

Vesuvius has made the final of a worldwide Web vote to name the New Seven Wonders of Nature.The volcano overlooking Naples, perhaps best known for burying the Roman city of Pompeii, was joined by 27 other finalists including the Grand Canyon, the Matterhorn, the Amazon, the Dead Sea, the Great Barrier Reef, the Black Forest, Angel Falls and the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland.The Galapagos and the Maldive Islands also made the cut along with Kilimanjaro, Table Mountain and Ayers Rock and can be voted for at www.new7wonders.com/nature.The city of Ercolano near Naples, whose past incarnation Herculaneum was also buried by Vesuvius, hailed Tuesday's news on a website set up to boost the volcano's bid. ''Vesuvius has made it,'' said a message on www.vesuvio.napoli.com, which stressed the city's efforts in ''highlighting the beauty and historical value of this Neapolitan icon and overcoming its fame as a destroyer''.The UN-recognised New Seven Wonders of Nature race will end in 2011 with a Web vote by an anticipated one billion people.''Let's make sure Vesuvius is one of the seven,'' the E The 28 finalists were picked from 77 semi-finalists in June, out of an original list of 220 sites.The New7Wonders organisation, a Swiss-based nonprofit foundation, originally collected 441 nominations over the Internet after it opened the selection process in 2007.This is the second New Seven Wonders web poll and is restricted to the natural world.All of the world's wonders were included in the first competition which ended in 2007.The Colosseum in Rome was picked along with the Great Wall of China, the Machu Pichu Inca ruins of Peru, India's Taj Mahal, Petra in Jordan, and the Statue of Christ the Redeemer overlooking Rio de Janeiro.The Acropolis in Athens, the Angkor Wat temples in Cambodia, New York's Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, the Alhambra, Stonehenge, the Sydney Opera house and the Giza Pyramids in Egypt did not make the final cut but remain on the site as finalists.The Pyramids were the only site which was also one of the original Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and the only one which still stands.The other six were the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Mausoleum of Maussollos at Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes and the Lighthouse of Alexandria.New7Wonders founder, Swiss filmmaker and adventurer Bernard Weber, used some of the proceeds from the first competition to help pay to restore the Bamiyan Buddhas, which were blasted to pieces by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in March 2001.He has pledged to keep funding heritage conservation with his new venture.

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