A mile aside from the Baiæ road is the Grotto del Cane, distinguished for dogs and mephitic vapors, which, as Henry Bergh’s country-people, we declined to enter.
Pozzuoli—Puteoli, when Paul landed there, after his shipwreck—is a dirty, sleepy little town, in general complexion so dingy, and in expression so down-hearted, the visitor is inclined to suspect that its self-disgust had something to do with the gradual sinking of its foundations for the last three hundred years. The steps by which St. Paul gained the pier are dimly visible under the waters lapping lazily above them. Nothing seems alive but the breeze, fragrant of sea-brine, and shaking the blue surface of the bay into wavering lines and bars of shaded green, purple, and silver, that were worth seeing if Puteoli was not.
We alighted at the Temple of Serapis, _restored_ by Marcus Aurelius and Septimus Severus. The site has shared the fate of Pozzuoli, having been lowered by a succession of volcanic shocks a dozen feet below its former level. The Egyptian deity was magnificently enthroned before the decline of paganism, and this sea-side country, upon a pedestal in a circular temple, enclosed by a portico of Corinthian columns—African marble—sixteen in number. The pillars have been removed to the royal palace at Caserta, and the salt ooze lies, sullen and green, over their bases. The quadrangle of the temple had once its guard of forty-eight granite columns, and a porch supported by six of marble, three of which are left standing. It is a mournful ruin, the water lying deep in the sunken centre and in pools over the highest part of the uneven pavement, and is not made cheerful by the incongruous addition of bath-houses on one side. Salt springs, some of them hot, broke through the crust at the latest eruption—that which threw up Monte Nuovo in 1538.
Cicero had a villa on this coast—the “Puteolaneum,” beloved only less than Tusculaneum. It was built upon rising ground, now occupied by a vineyard and orchard, but commanding a beautiful view of sea and shore. Here, Hadrian was buried after his decease at Baiæ, A.D. 138, and rested until the construction of his Roman mausoleum.
Passing the amphitheatre of Pozzuoli, crumbled down to the seats, in the arena of which Nero fought in person, and Diocletian fed wild beasts with Christian martyrs by the hundred; by the chapel that commemorates the death of Januarius, the patron saint of Naples, we were in a steep road full of rough stones—a country lane where horses could hardly hold their footing. Here Ernesto, the useful, who was, at once, coachman and guide, informed us regretfully, that we must walk to the gate of Solfatara. Moreover, with augmented regret—that, although he had, up to this point, been able to protect us from the sallies of other _ciceroni_, at, at least, five places where Baedeker parenthesizes—(“Guide—1 franc for each pers.”)—he dared not push righteous audacity too far. The tempers of the Solfatara men were uncertain and hot, like their volcano—(nearly extinct).