POZZUOLI (Italy): Archaeologists are used to rummaging in the dirt for lost treasures, but they rarely have to do it with an entire city weighing down on them.
Yet for 10 years, an Italian team has been beavering away underground to reveal the wonders of Pozzuoli, once the port of ancient Rome, which is buried under a 16th century city.
Excavators at Pompeii, entombed in ash and toxic debris by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, were able to remove the volcanic material and expose the city to the open air.
But in Pozzuoli, whose beauty was such that the great Roman orator Cicero called it “little Rome”, the ancient streets were encased in the foundations of a new city built by the Spanish in the 1500s, when they ruled what was then the Kingdom of Naples.
“It would be unthinkable to destroy or damage the Spanish city because it is of major historical and architectural import,” said Costanza Gialanella, the archaeologist in charge.
“But it would be equally unthinkable not to excavate the ancient city. It was a thriving port in its heyday — much more important than Pompeii, which was a provincial town.”
Which leaves those doing the digging in a tricky situation.
“It’s a very strange site, to put it mildly,” said Vincenzo Imperatore, a structural engineer taking part in the work.
“As we excavate we have to replace the material we’re taking out with steel beams to prop up the top level. It complicates things even more that we are in a very active seismic area.”
To the visitor’s eye, the results are spectacular.
Modern-day Pozzuoli, a few kilometres north of Naples, is a bustling seaside town, famous in Italy as the birthplace of screen legend Sophia Loren. The historic quarter is built on a high promontory jutting out into the Tyrrhenian Sea.
UNDERGROUND WARREN: From the sea the view is of ruined, yellowing stone buildings. There is no sign of life. From land, approaching through the busy streets of the modern town, there is scaffolding and some of the buildings are restored and freshly painted in bright colours.
This is because several of the 16th century Spanish buildings are being turned into luxury hotels, where visitors to the ancient site underneath will enjoy a glorious sea-view.
Leaving daylight behind, you delve into a surprisingly well-preserved warren of Roman streets, paved with huge stones and lined with little shops, inns and houses.
Small private altars are visible in the corners of some of the shops and there are also ancient flour mills, deep wells, vaulted storage rooms and stone heads that used to be fountains.
Modern engineering is visible in many places, with thick grey steel beams holding up the ceilings.
The most breathtaking moment of the tour comes as you climb up into the open, to what was both the heart of ancient Pozzuoli and of its Spanish successor: the Capitolium.
A vast, white marble temple from the first century BC stands there, with well-preserved colonnades and walls.
It also features gilded arches, a white and gold dome and fragments of religious frescoes — the remains of a Baroque church which the Spanish built using the ancient structure.
The temple used to be almost covered up, but came to light in 1964 when a fire destroyed much of the church.
The story is emblematic of Pozzuoli and its long history, punctuated by various disasters.
GOLDEN AGE: The city was founded as a coastal military outpost during one of Rome’s wars against the Carthaginians. Inhabited by just 300 men, it was designed to stop Hannibal and his men from receiving vital supplies from their city’s ships.
A natural port, Pozzuoli grew to be Rome’s sea trading post. During its golden age, under the emperor Augustus in the first century AD, tens of thousands lived there.
Replaced by Ostia as the main port for Rome in the second century AD, Pozzuoli declined. It was always inhabited, but after the fall of the Roman empire it became a backwater.
In 1538, the nearby Monte Nuovo volcano erupted, scaring the population away. Their desertion gave the Spanish rulers the opportunity, a few years later, to take over the crumbling Roman city and build a new one on top, in their own style.
Pozzuoli was repopulated, and generations lived there, gradually forgetting that underneath lay a sizeable Roman city.
The next disaster occurred in 1970, when a prolonged bout of seismic activity caused the ground to rise and fall, worrying the Italian authorities who declared the historic part of Pozzuoli unsafe and evacuated all the residents.
The city lay ignored and empty for more than two decades, until regional authorities, helped by European Union funds, decided to excavate and renovate it — a process which has already taken 10 years, and is expected to last a further eight or nine.
“It’s worth every bit of effort, time and money,” said archaeologist Gialanella.—Reuters
