Rione Terra and the Campi Flegrei

It begins with a citadel that was emptied in a single night. On 2 March 1970, the Rione Terra — the oldest nucleus of Pozzuoli — was evacuated: bradyseism, that slow heaving of the earth that no one here has ever been able to stop, had made the buildings unsafe, and the neighbourhood was closed, abandoned, forgotten. For decades it hung above the gulf like a ghost town. Then the excavations revealed what lay beneath: the acropolis of ancient Puteoli, the Roman colony founded in 194 BC that served for centuries as Rome's principal commercial port. Our tour leads take you through the underground archaeological route, along the original cardines and decumani, past the workshops, the grain warehouses and the pistrinum with its millstones almost perfectly intact: you walk the actual street of imperial Puteoli while, just above your head, the Pozzuoli of today goes on living.

Then you descend to Cuma, the oldest Greek colony in the Western world, and you stop before the Antro della Sibilla. It is a corridor 131 metres long, cut into the tufa in a trapezoidal section, with lateral openings that let the light fall in bands: the archaeologist Amedeo Maiuri brought it back to light in 1932, but it already existed in verse. Virgil, in the sixth book of the Aeneid, had imagined it as the threshold from which Aeneas descends to the underworld, guided by the Cumaean Sibyl. The tour lead tells you her legend: beloved by Apollo, she asked to live as many years as the grains of sand she held in her fist, but forgot to ask for eternal youth. She aged until she shrank away, until nothing of her remained but her voice. Stand in that tunnel of cool stone and, even if you are not one for shivers, you feel something.

Finally there is the sea that swallowed a city. At Baia, where for five centuries Roman patricians built their villas of otium among thermal springs, bradyseism did the opposite of what it did to the Rione Terra: it caused everything to sink beneath the waves. Today it is the largest submerged archaeological park in the world — an underwater Pompeii buried not by ash but by the sea. We show it to you in person: snorkelling above the mosaics, on a glass-bottomed boat, or diving among the nymphaeum of Punta Epitaffio and the Villa dei Pisoni. Fish swimming through the rooms of emperors: that is not a metaphor — it is exactly what you see.