Northern Italians are said (by themselves) to be industrious and responsible; southern Italians lazy and corrupt. That’s why the “Northern League” wants to have the top half of the country amputated from the parasitic boot, which will be left to limp on its own.
What a lot of beauty, and pleasure, would then lie south of the border! Naples, for instance — unlike Turin with Fiat, or Milan with banking — has no wealth-creating powerhouse, no crown of smoke, but its hinterland, the province of Campania, is rich with some of Italy’s most evocative, ghost-ridden ancient sites.
If only the hot ash of Vesuvius had preserved the decor of Baiae and Puteoli (today’s Pozzuoli), we should see that Pompeii was minor-league when it came to Homes and Gardens. One Pompeiian house is labelled as Cicero’s, but his main summer residences were at Formiae and at Baiae, the Cap Ferrat of the Tyrrhenian coast, north of Naples.
Cicero denounced Baiae as “synonymous with lusts, passions, adulteries, beach-life, dinner parties, orgies, and yachts”. No wonder the rich never tired of the place! They even had an offshore oyster farm to supply the right stuff to revive the flagging orgiast. But the most reckless raves in the area came long after Cicero had been murdered, near Formiae, in 43BC.
In AD39, the emperor Caligula had a three-mile-long bridge of boats built between Baiae and Puteoli (Pozzuoli) across the bay. Two decades later, Nero tried to have his domineering mother, Agrippina, drowned “accidentally” in the bay while cruising in a — little did she guess — collapsible boat. When that failed, Nero had her stabbed. Caligula and Nero proved the truth of the dictum, “All power corrupts, but absolute power is much more fun.”
One of the charms of Baiae’s ruins is that you can be alone on the palatial site, with only imagination as your guide. The big battalions of snappers head south for Pompeii and Herculaneum. Baiae’s fanciest gated community was built on a long slope down to the sea, which, in Roman times, stopped a hundred metres short of where it is today. Unlike nearly every town in the Roman world, Baiae had neither temples nor an amphitheatre. Religion was for the plebs, and an amphitheatre might attract Campanian louts, such as those who started a notorious riot in Pompeii.
Since the whole region is volcanic, Baiae sported sumptuous thermal baths. Orchestras played as the pampered few took the Acque della Rogna, the kidney-waters, a specific against the delicious, but heavy, wines from the fertile slopes of Vesuvius.
Earthquakes and eruptions have roughed up the detail of the imperial palace, but the surviving arcaded terraces, with their long command of the sea towards Capri and Sorrento, prove that dilapidation has its grandeur.
Roman architecture is often more remarkable, grander, and more useful than anything the tasteful Greeks ever did. The invention of concrete encouraged Roman engineers to think big, and bigger. The edifice at Baiae known as the Temple of Mercury — a half-size replica of the Pantheon in Rome — has an unsupported dome almost 20 metres wide. I was just wondering to my wife how Mercury strayed into this godless zone, when a voice answered my question from behind me, in the oversized doorway into the adjacent tepidarium (warm-water pool).
“Probably, Freddie, only because a statue of the flighty god was found on site. The patron of messengers, his winged sandals made him, as you might say, the first airmail postman, just the chap to get love letters delivered promptly.”
I didn’t need three guesses to know that our isolation had been ruptured by my old college friend Professor (now emeritus) Know-All. The old boy was wearing a wise grey beard, knee-length khaki shorts, brown ankle-socks, virile sandals, backpack and floppy canvas hat.
As I moved on to point out to my wife the cramp-holes indicating that the grandiose structure had once been lined with marble, the Professor pursued me with, “The dome’s rather subtler than you give it credit for, Freddie.”
“I know,” I said. “Its shell gets steadily thinner, doesn’t it? As it rises to the hole in the roof. So lessening the massive thrust on the thick retaining walls.”
“You’ve read the usual books,” the professor said. “Did they mention that there was a stairway to the roof, so that the hole could be closed in bad weather?”
“More than likely,” I said.
“Been to Cumae yet?”
Wary of having him attach himself to us as our guide for the day, I said, “Um, not this time.”
“I’ve just come from there, or I’d offer to show you round. Very good spot for seeing the effects of bradyseism. You know what that is.”
“Um... from the Greek bradus, meaning slow. Because...” Got it! “...it involves a form of... slow-motion earthquakes. Hence bradyseismic.”
“You’ll find Cumae inexplicably numinous,” the professor said. “The long gallery is uncannily like the one on top of the walls of the Mycenaean palace at Tiryns, if you’ve ever been there.”
“The one with the inward sloping walls?”
“Of course. You’ll also find the trapezoid form matched in the style of the Incas’ holy city of Machu Picchu in the Andes. The significance of triangles is something that bears further study.”
“Must do,” I said. “Good to see you again.”
Cumae was the earliest Greek settlement in Italy. Founded in 750BC by colonists from Euboea (today’s Evia, off the coast of Attica), history gave it a bumpy ride: the colony endured attacks by a series of local enemies and was then assimilated by expanding Rome. Although bradyseism dried up its harbour, its oracle — where transmissions began in the 7th century BC — was for centuries the most talkative in Italy. Anthologies of the priestesses’ gnomic utterances (in Greek) were regarded with superstitious reverence. Before crucial decisions had to be made by the Senate, it ordered consultation of the “Sibylline books”, the Romans’ I Ching. When the books were destroyed by fire in 83BC, fakes continued to be used with unabated credulity. Mankind is hot for gospels.
Cumae’s upper town has now crumbled away. Only the stumps of the temples of Apollo and Jupiter (later a Christian church) remain on the acropolis. Below it, however, lurks the Sibyl’s lair, described with eyewitness accuracy by Virgil, who has Aeneas visit it in the sixth book of the Aeneid. As you walk down the long, yes, trapezoidal subterranean gallery, you understand why Dante chose Virgil as his guide to the underworld. You seem already to be there when you get to the “ adyton” — a gloomy chamber deep under the hill — where the Sibyl delivered enigmatic messages from Apollo.
Legend said that Cumaean priestesses (Sibyl was their generic name) were cursed with immortality, hence the famous question, “Sibyl, Sibyl, what do you want?” To which she replied, “To die is what I want.”
We drove back to Cape Misenum, past the water-filled crater of Mount Avernus. Virgil’s line “facilis descensus Averni” — easy the descent to Avernus — alludes to the legend that the gaping mountain was the entrance to Hades. Disregarding the Stygian associations, the Romans used the crater’s wide, placid waters to train their navy.
A canal connected nearby shipyards to the naval base at sheltered Bacoli, where the Romans built a gigantic, two-tiered concrete cistern, the Piscina Mirabile (this you have to see), 75 metres long, 25 wide and 15 metres deep. Vaulted like a great cathedral, it supplied fresh water to the fleet and was replenished by a long aqueduct (which had a branch line to Pompeii) built by Augustus’s right-hand man, Agrippa. The only comparable structure I know is the pillared underground reservoir that served Byzantine Constantinople.
Between Baiae and Bacoli, you can’t miss the burly, charmless castle first built by the Aragonese (who then ruled the Kingdom of the two Sicilies) in 1495 and rebuilt from scratch, after an earthquake in 1538, by Pedro of Toledo in a single year. Here again, we were entirely alone in the castle’s Archeological Museum with its superhuman statues of Roman emperors.
We had lunch in Pozzuoli, in a fish restaurant on the quay, and then we were off to the Flavian amphitheatre, the second biggest — after fun-loving Capua — in the Roman provinces. In its lee are the foundations of a huge market, which for centuries was labelled, more glamorously, as a temple of Egyptian Serapis. Anything else? Masses: Campania is an inexhaustible landscape of marvels, natural and man-made, from Trajan’s arch in chilly inland Benevento all the way south to the trio of Greek temples in once-malarial Paestum. All you need is stamina.
Frederic Raphael travelled as a guest of Italian Expressions
Travel brief
Getting there: British Airways (0870 850 9850, www.ba.com) flies to Naples from Gatwick, BMI (0870 607 0555, www.flybmi.com) flies from Heathrow, EasyJet (www.easyjet.com) from Stansted, and Aer Lingus (0818 365000, www.aerlingus.com) from Dublin.
Where to stay: Grand Hotel Parker’s (00 39 081 761 2474, www.grandhotelparkers.com) was the 19th-century favourite for British travellers, and has been impressively refurbished, with doubles from £175. Or try the Hotel Britannique (www.hotelbritannique.com), with doubles from £117. Il Casolare di Tobia (00 39 081 523 5193, www.datobia.it) is a quirky agriturismo B&B, with doubles from £38, close to Bacoli.
Tour operators: Italian Expressions (020 7433 2675, www.expressionsholidays.co.uk) has three nights’ B&B at the Grand Hotel Parker’s from £595pp, including British Airways flights from Gatwick and car hire. Or try CV Travel (0870 606 0803, www.cvtravel.co.uk), or Harlequin Holidays (01708 850300, www.harlequinholidays.com).
Getting around: Holiday Autos (0870 400 4461, www.holidayautos.co.uk) has three days’ inclusive car hire from £70. Or try Alamo (0870 400 4562, www.alamo.co.uk), Sixt (0870 156 7567, www.e-sixt.co.uk) or Hertz (0870 844 8844, www.hertz.co.uk).
