Vesuvius, the volcano overlooking Naples, needs help in its bid to become one of the world's New Seven Wonders of Nature, backers say.
The peak best known for burying Pompeii in 79 AD is currently lagging Mt Blanc and the Matterhorn in the mountains category on the www.new7wonders.com/nature site, the town council of Ercolano warned Friday.
Ercolano, whose ancient site Herculaneum was also destroyed by the volcano, appealed for support on a website it has just set up, www.vesuvio.napoli.com.
Top runners in the New Seven Wonders of Nature race include the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, Mt Everest, Loch Ness, Ayers Rock and the Great Barrier Reef.
More than a billion people recently picked them from 220 contenders as 77 'semi-finalists'.
A shortlist of 21 will be announced on July 21 and voting will continue until 2011.
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 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.
