Bacoli

Beneath Bacoli sleeps the largest Roman cistern ever built: the Piscina Mirabilis, a cathedral of water on forty-eight columns that supplied the imperial fleet at Misenum. That is only the beginning of Bacoli's Phlegraean Fields: the Cento Camerelle, the so-called tomb of Agrippina, Nero's mother, killed not far from here, and the harbour of Misenum from which Pliny the Elder set out towards the eruption of 79. The ancient name was Bauli, and in the Augustan age the town was a military outpost and a capital of Roman high society alongside nearby Baiae; but the name it bears today, linguists argue, does not derive from that one at all, coming instead from the Latin vacua, empty and barely fertile land, with a diminutive added. Until the eighteenth century episcopal records wrote Bacula, and the letter i came later, to make it resemble the Roman name.

The Bacoli dialect has a recognisable sing-song across the whole Phlegraean area, so much so that neighbouring towns still use it today as proof of the slowness of Bacoli's people; some trace it back to the way sacred texts were recited. Lake Fusaro, once mistaken for the infernal marsh of the Acheron, today carries on its water the Casina Vanvitelliana, the royal hunting lodge that looks like an origami; Lake Miseno takes its name from Aeneas's trumpeter. Between seafood restaurants on the harbour and sunsets from Capo Miseno, Bacoli remains the most scenic of the Phlegraean towns, and Neapolitans know it well.