Quarto

Quarto is a milestone that became a town: ad quartum, the fourth mile from Puteoli on the via Consolare Campana, and the mile is still in the civic arms. Along that road went merchants, travellers and slaves bound for Capua and then Rome; according to the Acts of the Apostles, Paul passed this way too, landed at Pozzuoli and taken to Rome a prisoner, with Luke beside him and centurions as escort. The plain around is the largest extinct crater of the Phlegraean Fields, and for Pliny the Elder it belonged to the Leboriae, the land he praised as the most fertile of all: it was the kitchen garden and vineyard of Puteoli, and Phlegraean Falanghina still has one of its historic zones here.

To let the road through, the Romans cut the hill in two: the Montagna Spaccata is a cleft seventy-eight metres wide, fifty high and two hundred and ninety long, with its retaining walls in opus reticulatum still exposed — and the earthquake of 1980 did not even graze it. Along the via Campana stand two-storey mausolea, hypogea and kilns: the necropolis of via Brindisi keeps the Fescina, a tomb with a pyramidal cusp that resembles nothing else. Grown fast as a residential town of the Phlegraean belt, Quarto keeps its feet in the fields and its eyes on Pozzuoli: the Solfatara and the Rione Terra are ten minutes away.