If you’re like me, I bet you’ve never even heard of Pozzuoli, right? It is the first town past the western suburbs of Naples – just a tiny fishing village. But it has several “claims to fame”:  Roman ruins, the Solfatara volcanic crater, the destination of St. Paul in AD 61, the location of the beheading of St. Januaruis (the patron saint of Naples), as well as the town in which Sophia Loren spent a part of her childhood.

We set out on Saturday, October 6 to “see the sights” of Pozzuoli, founded circa 530 BC. There was almost no way possible that we could have missed the Amphitheatre Flavio – practically in the center of town. Known as the third-largest amphitheatre in all of Italy (it was capable of holding an audience of 20,000) it is remarkable for its well-preserved passages beneath the main arena. It was here in AD 305 that seven Christian martyrs, among them St. Januarius, were served up to the lions. St. Januarius survived this ordeal, only to be beheaded later.

In the middle of a plaza near the port, stand the remains of the Temple of Serapis, which was in reality not a temple at all, but a market. This ruin has been badly affected by bradyseism (the gradual up and down movement of the earth’s crust). The water rises and falls on a consistent basis, and the locals will tell you that when the water rises excessively, a natural disaster of some type is imminent. They reference its high water level of 1980 and the subsequent earthquake in Italy as proof of this “warning” phenomenon. Luckily, the water level was quite low on the day we passed by.

The islands of Ischia are visible all along the coast of Pozzuoli and we had a stunning view as we decided to find the Cave of the Sybil in Cuma, the earliest known Greek colony on the Italian mainland. After a long, long search travelling in what we were sure was the exact wrong direction, we finally located the Acropoli di Cuma (perhaps only 15 miles outside of Pozzuoli on the other side of the small town of Baia but it seemed much, much further!).  The Antro della Sibilla Cumana boasts a series of trapezoid-shaped tunnels leading to the chamber where the oracle Sybil was believed to have passed on messages from Apollo. Finding this cave was our big accomplishment of the day, and we decided to reward ourselves with dinner at a restaurant overlooking the beach in Pozzuoli on our way back to Naples.

The owners of the small restaurant where we stopped are