In one sense Dumas’ facetious description is correct: the New Mountain was born with extraordinary celerity, and woods, lake and village—familiar and beloved landmarks to the people of Baiae and Pozzuoli—disappeared at its birth. But the event was no peaceful act of Nature; on the contrary, it was accompanied by loud rumblings, by showers of red-hot stones, by clouds of smoke, by torrents of scalding water, and by the retreating of the sea, which left thousands of fish lying helpless on the exposed shore. The village of Tripergola, a summer pleasaunce of the Angevin kings of Naples, and many traces of ancient Roman villas and engineering works, all perished in this notable cataclysm. Four eye-witnesses have left us details of this strange scene of desolation, whilst only a few days after Mother Earth had brought forth this new mountain, one of them, the Spanish Viceroy of Naples, the valiant Don Pedro of Toledo, owned sufficient pluck and curiosity to make the ascent of the Monte Nuovo, still smoking hot and reeking of sulphur. Who can tell when this parvenu volcano may spout forth fire and ashes? Would any sane person have the courage ever to settle within range of a possible eruption? No, the Phlegrean fields are interesting to visit, but he must require a strong nerve who would fain dwell beneath the shadow of this dormant crater.
It is a very short walk from the base of the Monte Nuovo to the “golden shores” of Imperial Baiae, which is certainly not an imposing place in these days. What with the destroying hand of time and the still more obliterating action of the neighbouring volcano, there is little left for the fancy to build upon; certainly the three ruined shells that are called temples by courtesy, but served probably a much humbler purpose than that of worship, are not particularly striking. It requires not only a good classical knowledge, but also no small amount of imagination to picture the Baiae of the Roman poets.
“If Pozzuoli has gone down in the world, still more so Baiae. It does not require any more sinking; it is low enough as it is, so low that some of its ancient villas and palaces can only be visited in a diving-bell. So dreary and deserted is the site, that at first glance the visitor feels mightily inclined to question the veracity of the historian, and to doubt whether Baiae—Baiae the gay, the fashionable, the dissolute, the beloved of emperors, statesmen and poets—ever existed. But when he is shown the enormous sub-structures lying under water, and the masses of solid masonry wherewith the surrounding hills are over-spread, incredulity gives place to amazement. What towns of lath and plaster are Brighton, Newport and Trouville, when compared with this ‘Rome by the sea,’ where the materials used for the foundations of a single villa would more than suffice for the construction of a dozen ‘genteel marine residences’ of the modern style! What would a Roman architect think of the card-board streets and squares, and the stucco crescents and terraces, of an English watering-place? of those ‘eligible family [pg 316]mansions’ wherein dancing is dangerous, and to venture on whose balconies is perilous in the extreme? Echo answers: ‘What!’ ”[13]
Here on this desolate strip of sea-shore, now dominated by the Spanish viceroy’s frowning fortress on the hill above, the great and opulent of ancient Rome founded a city composed wholly of palaces. Here were no noisy market-places to annoy aristocratic nerves; no slums to afflict plutocratic nostrils; no families of the proletariat to disturb the refined senses of the jaded pleasure-seekers who retired hither in the winter months. A writer, from whom we have just quoted, makes comparison between Baiae and Brighton or Trouville; but in reality the fashionable American resort of Newport has more in common with the old classical watering-place than any modern European sea-side resort. The hot sulphur baths on the Lucrine shore formed of course only a shallow excuse for the annual migration of Roman fashionables to Baiae, where blue-blooded senators and pushing plutocrats indulged in fierce social struggles for individual pre-eminence. Yet certain of the natural warm springs had been enclosed in splendid buildings, and were used by the luxurious citizens, so that even to-day the Thermae of Nero (Stufe di Nerone) are pointed out by the local guides. “Quid Nerone pejus? Quid thermis melius Neronianis?” (what is worse than Nero? yet what more beneficent than his baths?) asks the poet Martial, whose name will ever be bound up with the tales of luxury and vice that are associated with this spot. Baiae in winter, Tibur (Tivoli) in summer, the two names stand [pg 317]for the beau-ideal of a Roman existence, the cynosure of every wealthy citizen.
But let us ascend out of the close and enervating air of low-lying Baiae to the breezy heights of Misenum, which has immortalised the name of the Trojan trumpeter whose end was mourned by the tears of pious Aeneas himself. In gaining its summit and in gazing upon the landscape spread around us, we have penetrated, so it seems, into the very heart of Italy: not the Italy of Roman history, but the land of Ausonia itself, the fabled shore that the Trojan hero sailed at his goddess-mother’s bidding to discover, when all the world was young and the high dwellers of Olympus still condescended to take a personal interest in the affairs of favourite mortals. Surely the vine-clad terraces of Lake Avernus, the pools of the Lucrine and the Mare Morto, the verdure-clad hillocks lying beneath us must conceal the true secret of the antique Tyrrhenian country, in whose history the rise and fall of Roman power afford but one amongst many epochs. Looking to northward, beyond the little landing-stage of Torregaveta, we behold the heights of Cumae, that was a flourishing city with harbour and citadel hundreds of years before a certain Romulus built a wall of mud near the banks of Tiber and slew his brother Remus for leaping over his handiwork. The founding of Rome is enveloped in impenetrable clouds of legend; the building of Cumae is a fact:—here then we obtain a key to Italian history. Rome, whose origin is lost in mists of obscurity, is a flourishing modern capital; Cumae is but a shapeless mass of crumbling ruins, overgrown with ivy and cytizus, and inhabited by lizards and [pg 318]serpents. But both cities, dead Cumae and living Rome, present but passing events in the long slow progress of the centuries, which have witnessed successive phases of civilisation and destruction in this
“Woman-country, wooed, not won,
Loved all the more by Earth’s male lands,
Laid to their hearts instead.”
Is the Genius of Italy, the Sibyl of Cumae, still living, we wonder, in some dim recess, some secret cavern of Cimmerian gloom, beneath those decaying heaps of the ancient Greek city? She was old, very old, we know, when pious Aeneas found her shrieking her strange prophecies, and that was long ages before Hellenic wanderers raised a fortress upon the wooded heights above the dread lake of Avernus.—Venerable Mother of Italy! dost thou still survive muttering thy strange warnings in some sunless labyrinth, that the rapacious guides of Baiae have yet failed to penetrate? Art thou, like King Arthur of romantic Wales, still keeping watch over the destiny of thy country, ever ready to assist in the hour of need?
“Thy cave was stored with scrolls of strange device,