Quiet Days

After our two days of pounding the Venetian cobblestones, we decided to spend the last two days of Mike and Katrina's vacation resting and staying near home. We spent much of our time reading, writing, and sleeping in the warm, lemon-scented Glass House, which is always a nice way to pass the time.

In the interest of one last site visit, we drove the quick, 5-minute drive to the Baia Archaeological Park. I visited this place a few months ago, on a quiet day while Nathan was out of town. It's a little known, lovely place to see ruins of old villas and thermal complexes completely alone. There are no other tourists. Both times I visited, there was a sum total of about four other people walking around this huge area - much different from our visit to the Roman Forum the following day (coming in a future post).

Waiting for discovery

This visit, however, I was armed with the most fantastic guidebook specific to our region - Campi Flegrei, Guide of Discovery to the Lands of Fire by Massimo D'Antonio. Using this, we could see that the big hole in the ground really was once a swimming pool, we could see the changing rooms for the thermal complex, we could know that the domed Temple of Mercury (the swimming pool built a hundred years before the Pantheon in Rome) is actually the oldest known example of a round cupola. We walked around, sometimes following dark tunnels into the terrace below, sometimes pausing to take in a vista that included the Temple of Venus, set right into the nearby neighborhood, the Baia Castle atop it's cliff, the Bays of Pozzuoli and Naples, Capri in the distance, and Mount Vesuvius hovering over the mainland, a view that we could imagine those bathers so long ago enjoying as they walked upon mosaic floors, from sauna to warm pool to cold pool.

Back to Cumae

I got a little sidetracked while writing about my aunt and uncle's visit to the nearby Cumaen ruins. Since I wrote so recently about the ruins themselves, I thought I'd just share a few photos of our day spent in my neck of the woods.

Driving to the Cumae ruins, we pass under Arco Felice, an ancient entrance to the Cumaen city - it's fun to stand at the ruins of the city now and look far off into the distance at the arch. We look over many farms and fields, and it's one of those, "what lies beneath" moments. Driving underneath this arch, we drive over the top of cobblestones that are part of the original ancient street.

Standing among the ruins of the Temple of Apollo, looking out at the beautiful sea view and the mountainous island of Ischia (original home to the first Cumaen settlers on this site), it's easy to see why they picked out. Miraculously or through some feat of unexplainable, Italian zoning (?what?), much of the area in front of Cumae has remained undeveloped, so standing here, visitors can really get a feel for what those citizens so long ago saw themselves - we hear the term "window to the past" so often, yet this place truly seems to be such a thing.

My aunt and uncle sitting on the sides of a Christian baptismal font. Built in about the 6th century BC, this place was a Greek Temple (today called the Temple of Jupiter, but I don't know that historians actually know the recipient of the worship). The Greek temple was reworked into a Roman Temple a few hundred years later, and then a Christian Basilica. A small Christian cemetery was found within the church and nearby to the old baptismal font.

Temple of Venus, located in Baia. This temple is quite literally, on the side of the road through Baia - and right across from Monkey, a yummy coffee/gelato/hot chocolate bar. This "temple" is yet another example of older historians naming every big ruin they came across as a temple. The Temple of Venus is actually a huge thermal room, built in the early 100s. It was most likely connected to the thermal baths (now ruins) on the other side of the road - I'll have more about them later. The outside was once covered in blue, glass tiles - can you picture how beautiful this must have been!

Via Panoramica, obviously named. We have Lago Miseno in the foreground, the Pozzuoli Bay behind it, and far in the distance, just a smudge on the horizon on the right side (possibly doesn't even show at this small size) is Mount Vesuvius.

We had a wonderful, relaxing day just driving around this historic area. Although we started to have a little problem that was quickly handled Italian style. As we left the Cumae ruins, carrying our bag of former sandwiches from Gennaro, some self-appointed rule-enforcer ran up to the guard working the entrance pointing at our bag and telling him we ate in the ruins and he needed to check our bag. Check our bag - are you kidding me? The guard looked at this lady with disgust, looked at me, and asked, in Italian, "Did you eat in the ruins." I looked at his face, caught his cue for my response, looked at our empty bag, and then looked back at him with complete shock and a huge, "Eat! Noooooo!" He looked back at the lady, shrugged, and said, "See, no problem." We trundled off with the lady glaring at us. I'm amazed sometimes at the rules Italians want to enforce. We spent over two hours in the ruins and we were the only people there the entire time. Eating a sandwich and then packing out your trash - not okay. Throwing that same plastic bag out the car window on the road driving away from the ruins - perfectly acceptable. In fact, go ahead and add a mattress, sofa, and a few thousand plastic bottles while you're at it.

Campi Flegrei

"...these traces of a mythical past, which reach even the depths of the sea, fail to justify alone that mysterious spell that like a subtle aura pervades the Campi Flegrei. The presence of an ancient energy, both arcane and profound, is felt with each step, a force which does not belong to humankind, arising where history and legend blend and fade. It is the breath of the earth itself, potent primordial blast of heat transforming with its touch, rising to the surface through the mouths of volcanoes, symbols of a land which the first Greek settlers at the dawn of civilisation [sic] would name "The Lands of Fire."

Nunzia Massa, editor of Campi Flegrei, by Massimo D'Antonio, 2003

 

We live smack in the middle of the Campi Flegrei (Phlegraean Fields), which basically means burning fields. Our entire area is one large caldera, the crater that's left behind after a volcanic eruption, and within the caldera are smaller craters and fumaroles (steam vents for geothermal activity). Within this tiny area, comprising mostly of the towns of Pozzuoli, Agnano, Arco Felice, Lucrino, Baia, Bacoli, and Monte di Procida, are glorious ruins and sites - places that go unremarked, skipped over in the guidebooks, and in visiting them, you can find yourself essentially alone in a place with incomprehensible history and legend behind it.

Pozzuoli Amphitheater

For each of our guests, I try to encourage them to spend at least one day right here in our neighborhood, but even one full day only scratches the surface. The list of things to visit include an amphitheater (like the Colisseum, but not quite as big - this one was the third largest of ancient Rome), numerous temple ruins, ruins of Cumae, Lago d"Averno (the entrance to Hell), Archeological Museum of Baia with treasures brought up from submerged Roman villas, Terme di Baia (large ruins of an area of houses and thermal complexes), Solfatara (which I blogged about months ago), modern day thermal baths on the same sites as ancient ones, Piscina Mirabile...the list goes on.

With Paige and Julia, we needed an easy day. A day to sleep in, wander down to the salumeria to have Gennaro make us some panini sandwiches, then an easy trip to a couple of interesting things before a return home for a quiet evening. We elected to visit the Pozzuoli amphitheater, where it's allowed to actually walk in the tunnels beneath, the places where the set designs and the animals in cages were hauled up to the arena using pulley systems. Sadly, upon our arrival, we found the tunnels closed due to all our rain. Walking into the arena, we looked through the grates opening onto those tunnels and saw that they were indeed flooded. Perched atop a fallen, marble column, we ate our paninis and pondered the brutal history of the arena and the roars of a bloodthirsty crowd. With rain beginning, we drove over to the Cumae ruins, yet another local site I hadn't yet visited.

Cumae as an upper and a lower section, and as the handy English signboards located all over the site advised, we did not get to both. We concentrated on the upper city, which holds Sybil's Cave (different from Sybil's Grotto on Lago d'Averno), a couple of temples, and views over shrub brush to the sea, with so little development that it was easy for us to get a sense of what the people of the city saw themselves, 3000 years ago. Many times in this blog, I'll comment about something being 2000 years old. I round. I'm not a historian, so it doesn't matter to me when there's a time difference of a couple of hundred years - not when we're talking about things that are thousands of years old. So much of what is around us is from the heydey of the Roman Empire. Ancient literature and most archaeological evidence date Cumae's founding to 730 BC. However, there have been a few artifacts found which lead some historians to believe the area was inhabited as far back as 1000 BC. So to visit Cumae is to walk a 3000 year old path.

The 730 BC settlement was a Greek colony, then the Romans took over after a few hundred years.  Wars and invasions and takeovers resulted in the fatal blow in 915 AD - after a 2000 year run, the city was finished and became a hideout for thieves and bandits, using Cumae as home base to launch their ambushes. The city was completely leveled in 1207 AD, and like so many cities and villages in this region, it became lost to time and nature. Interest in the city emerged when it was re-discovered in the 1600s. At that time excavation began off and on until the early 1900s, when real excavations began. Those continue today.

The most well-known discovery at Cumae is the Sybil's Cave, a long and eery, trapezoidal tunnel. The ancient Sybil's were Oracles. I wrote about the Cumaen Sybil previously, in Going to Hell...Twice (Sybil info is closer to the end of the post). The Greeks didn't put a whole lot of stock in prophecies, but the Romans loved them. When this cave was discovered, it was attributed to Sybil mainly due to ancient writings describing her cave. However, it's outside the acropolis (and the city walls), and it's not connected to the Temple of Apollo, where other ancient writings say was her location. So maybe this was her cave, maybe not, but it is believed to have been some type of sacred space. Looking down the tunnel with the light from the right side openings casting their glow, I paused for a moment to reflect. Who was the man who stood here thousands ago? Not the general answer - the specific. Out of the the thousands of others who walked this path before me, I think about one in particular. What was his name? Did he have a family? What were his hopes and dreams, and did he live any of them out? Cumae, like so many places here, can connect us, link us, to those everyday people who came so long before us.

Around Our House

I think I used up all of my energy in our first two months here. A friend invited me to her house for dinner last night, and while we were discussing living in Italy, I realized that we've now lived in our house for two weeks. In that time, my excursions to explore our neighborhood have consisted of three dinners out (including the Chinese restaurant!), one short drive to a little beach area called Capo Miseno, and a visit to the Baia Archeological Park, which I did on Sunday. That's it. I have not gone out for gelato (horror of horrors), I have not walked around the nearby lake, I have not gone to the supermercato (grocery store), I have not walked around the shopping area in the next village over, I have not explored any of the great ruins we have within a 5-10 minute drive from our house, other than my Sunday excursion. It's shameful, really. But I wanted to write just a little about our area.

We live in the area of Campi Flegrei (in English, called the Phlegraean Fields). It's home to thousand years old ruins, volcanic craters, a place where myths were born and the Sybils offered up their oracles. Amazing wines grow on it's hills, and those hills abound with Greek and Roman ruins, the oldest of which pre-dates Christ by about five more centuries. We don't really live in a village. I call it a roundabout (a traffic circle) because really, we're located in between two smart looking, seaside villages. Our little roundabout hosts a gelateria, a newspaper stand, a salumeria (fancy 7-11), macelleria (butcher), tabacchi (guess what that is), and several restaurants. Oh, and my favorite, a "beauty farm." The roundabout and these lovely places are on a small lake which was once a hotspot among the wealthy Romans. Many of their villas are either long gone or under the sea...which leads to some disturbing information. We live on the slopes of a place called Monte Nuovo (new mountain), so called because the entire mountain appeared in one week in 1538! This is not a joke. A volcano erupted, and in the ensuing aftermath, this mountain was formed. Nathan finds it "cool" that witnesses actually watched a mountain form 500 years ago; I find it terrifying. Also nearby is what I hope will become a favorite: Terme Stufe di Nerone. Thermal baths. In the 1960s, two brothers re-discovered thermal baths and grottos located among some Roman ruins on land they inherited from their mother. They created a modern complex to "take the waters," have massages, etc. I look forward to trying it out!

The Archeological Park of Baia is a lovely area with lots of ruins to explore. In places, columns and pedastals are just sort of toppled over. One of my favorite things was the most unassuming - as I walked down a dirt path and found about five rows of mosaic tiles poking up from the dirt, the remains of an old floor taking its last gasp before time covers it completely. One of the men working at the site was generous enough to share tidbits of info with me, which increased my enjoyment of the site immensely. Especially because we conversed in Italian. His sentences were long and fluid, while mine were punctuated with lots of pauses and the vocabulary of a two year old, but still, it's progress. He showed me a little area I would have completely missed, which is an itty, bitty room that used to be a sauna. A culvert in the floor allowed the steaming water to pass through, and the ceiling still had the carvings of the Romans decorating it.

There is also a huge, domed structure, called a temple, but what I've learned is that a few hundred years back, when lots of these sorts of things were "found," folks labeled anything they weren't sure about a temple. Nowadays, there are a few more ideas about the varying purposes of structures, but the temple names have stuck. So the Temple of Mercury is built just as the Pantheon in Rome was built (Thomas Jefferson based his design of UVA's Rotunda on the Pantheon), only this one in Baia was built 100 years earlier. It is eerie to visit because you enter through a short, stone tunnel, and step out onto a metal walkway. After you've stepped out, you realize there is water about 2 inches below this metal walkway - I'm a child of the 70s/80s, so I just can't help but say this - it was a "Goonies" moment. As with so many fascinating ruins here, they are edged with modern (sort of) buildings edging them. What sorts of treasures and history lie beneath these apartment buildings and houses?

 

Can you make out the remains of the frescoes?