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Baiae (; ) was an ancient ancient Rome town situated on the northwest shore of the Gulf of Naples and now in the comune of Bacoli. It was a fashionable resort for centuries in antiquity, particularly towards the end of the Roman Republic, when it was reckoned as superior to Capri, Pompeii, and Herculaneum by wealthy Romans, who built villas here from 100 BC.Strabo Geographica 5.4.7 Ancient authors attest that many emperors built in Baia, almost in competition with their predecessors,Josephus: Antiquities of the Jews XVIII 7, 2 and they and their courts often stayed there. It was notorious for its Hedonism offerings and the attendant rumours of corruption and scandal.
The lower part of the town later became submerged in the sea due to local volcanic,
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Many impressive buildings from the upper town can be seen in the Parco Archeologico delle Terme di Baia.
The views and architecture of Baiae were so memorable that they inspired scenes to be depicted on ancient glass flasks made for visitors (probably in Pozzuoli in the late 3rd to early 4th century AD) many of which have been found scattered throughout the empire, and today kept in many museumsPainter, K. S. “ROMAN FLASKS WITH SCENES OF BAIAE AND PUTEOLI.” Journal of Glass Studies 17 (1975): 54–67. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24188060. notably in
/ref> Empúries and Warsaw. The one in Warsaw in particular seems to give a complete picture of that gradually becoming clear today as a result of research in the submerged archaeological area.S.E.Oscrow "The topography of Puteoli and Baiae on the eight glass flasks" Puteoli, 1979, p 77-140
The settlement was also mentioned in 178 BC under the name (" Waters").
Around 80 BC it became a fashionable resort for the Roman aristocracy. Gaius Marius, Lucullus, and Pompey all frequented it. Julius Caesar had a villa there, and much of the town became Roman Empire property under Augustus.
From 36 BC, Baiae included Portus Julius, the base of the western fleet of the Roman Navy before it was abandoned because of the silting up of Lake Lucrinus (from which a short channel led to Lake Avernus) for the two harbours at Cape Miseno south.MINIERO, Paola. Il parco sommerso di Baia: da sito archeologico ad area marina protetta In: Comunicare la memoria del Mediterraneo: Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Pisa organizzato dalla Regione Toscana online. Naples: Publications du Centre Jean Bérard, 2007
Baiae was already notorious for the hedonistic lifestyle of its residents and guests in the Roman Republic era. In 56 BC, the prominent socialite Clodia was condemned by the defence at the trial of Marcus Caelius Rufus as living as a harlot in Rome and at the "crowded resort of Baiae", indulging in beach parties and long drinking sessions. An elegy by Sextus Propertius written in the Augustan Age describes it as a "den of licentiousness and vice". In the 1st century, "Baiae and Vice" formed one of the moral epistles written by Seneca the Younger; he described it as a "vortex of luxury" and a "harbour of vice" where girls went to play at being girls, old women as girls and some men as girls according to a first century BC wag.
Nero had a notable villa constructed in the middle of the 1st century and Hadrian died at his villa in AD 138.Historia augusta, ch. 25 It was also a favourite spot of the emperor Septimius Severus. The resorts sometimes capitalised on their imperial associations: Suetonius mentions in his history that the cloak, brooch, and gold bulla given to the young Tiberius by Pompey's daughter Pompeia Magna were still on display around AD 120.
According to Suetonius, in AD 39, Baiae was the location for a stunt by the eccentric emperor Caligula to answer the Roman astrology Thrasyllus's prediction that he had "no more chance of becoming emperor than of riding a horse across the Gulf of Baiae". Caligula ordered a 3-Roman mile-long pontoon bridge to be built from impounded ships of the area, fastened together and weighted with sand, stretching from Baiae to the neighbouring port of Pozzuoli. Clad in a gold cloak, he then crossed it upon a horse. Cassius Dio's Roman History also includes the event, with the detail that the emperor ordered resting places and lodging rooms with potable water erected at intervals along the bridge. As late as the 18th century, scattered fragments were still being shown to tourists as the "Bridge of Caligula". Malloch has argued that Suetonius's account was likely coloured by his bias against Caligula; instead, he claims that "the act of bridging the Bay of Naples was an excellent and safe means by which to lay the foundation for Caligula's military glory."
It never attained municipium, being administered throughout by nearby Cumae.
At the end of the 4th century, the fabulously wealthy consul Symmachus, who owned several villas in the Bay of Naples,Symmachus Epistles 6.9, 1.3.3—5, 2.26.1 including one called the praetorium in Baiae, wrote of the calm offered by his villa at Bauli (probably Bacoli).Symmachus Epistles 1.1.1, 1.1.2, 8.23.3
In the early 6th century, the Ostragothic king Athalaric admired the beauty of the area for its bay, the quality of its oysters and baths of natural waters with health restoring powers.Cassiodorus, Epistulae 9.6
The lowering of the ground close to the coast below sea level, due to bradyseism, seems to have occurred in two phases: between the third and fifth centuries, still in the late Imperial era, followed by a more substantial submersion a century later. The lower part of Baiae was largely submerged by the sea by the 8th century.Eduardo Scognamiglio, The survey of the submerged Bay: reteissa.it
Baiae was sacked during the barbarian invasions and again by Muslim raiders in the 8th century. It was deserted owing to recurrent malaria by 1500, but Pedro de Toledo erected a castle, the Castello di Baia, in the 16th century.
The channel between the lagoon and the sea made by cutting the sandy isthmus that separated them, and is 32 m wide and delimited by two piers about 230 m long and 9 wide. The piers were made of concrete with tuff chips arranged in layers. The concrete conglomerate was thrown into wooden caissons (arcae) testified by the presence of the typical holes left by the construction piles. In some cases the posts and the planking of the formwork are still perfectly preserved. The north pier is partly preserved in a 63 m length starting from the east.
The important archaeological remains were intensively excavated from 1941, revealing layers of buildings, villas and thermal complexes belonging to periods from the late Republican age, the Augustan, Hadrianic to the late Empire.
A cache of plaster casts of Hellenistic sculptures was discovered in the cellar of the Baths of Sosandra at Baiae; they are now displayed at the town's archaeological museum. The collection includes parts of several famous sculptures, including Ancient Athens's Harmodius and Aristogeiton and the Athena of Velletri. It suggests that the area had a workshop mass-producing marble or bronze copies of Greek art for the Italian market.
In April 2023 the sunken remains of an ancient Roman villa including marble tiled flooring, numerous marble columns and an ornate mosaic were discovered by underwater archaeologists from the Campi Flegrei Archaeological Park. The mosaic included crossing braids and hexagons with concave sides.
The public and private Roman bath of Baiae were filled with warm mineral water directed to their pools from underground sulfur springs, as many still are today. Roman engineers were also able to construct a complex system of chambers that channelled underground heat into facilities that acted as . In addition to their recreational function, the baths were used in Roman medicine to treat various illnesses and physicians would attend their patients at the springs..
In 1677 Cornelis de Bruijn visited the temple and wrote:
"Then one arrives at the temple of Diana, which is completely ruined, except for a semi-circular structure at the top that still exists. Opposite, there is also a part of the temple of Apollo, next to which one can see the chamber of the Nymph that delight themselves in different spectacles. At the top of it, I saw many figures and Relief, very strange and beautiful, as the entrance is still reasonably well preserved."
/ref> It was externally octagonal with eight large arched windows and internally circular (26 m diameter) with a balcony inside overlooking the pool. Its name is due to a statue of the goddess said to have been found there, leading to mistaken identity.Mazzella S. (1591) Site and antiquity of the city of Pozzuolo
D'Ossat noted in 1942G. DE ANGELIS d'OSSAT. IL "TEMPIO DI VENERE, A BAIA. Estratto dal Bull. del Museo dell'Imp. Rom., XIII (1942) that the dome was umbrella-shaped, indeed it was an even more sophisticated variant, composed of sixteen segments alternately spherical and veloidic. There were no such domes before Hadrian, nor anything that remotely resembled them. Indeed domes with the same design as this building can be found in Hadrian's Villa in Tivoli, for example the Vestibule of the Piazza d'Oro (Golden Square) and the so-called Serapeum. The same combination of light tuff and Vesuvian pumice is found in the Pantheon, Rome, re-structured at the behest of Hadrian.
The drum supporting the dome was covered with stucco imitating bands of marble ashlar blocks with joints filled with blue glass paste, so that the top octagon of the drum must have appeared from the outside as made up of parallelograms of shining white marble divided by glittering ribbons of blue.F. Rakob, Litus beatae Veneris aureum. Untersuchungen am Venustempel in Baiae, in RM 68 1961 pp 114
The perimeter had a forecourt annex of exceptional architectural innovation, with a groundplan of 9 equal circles within a bounding square of 15 m sides and three circular rooms. The groundplan was merged into a different geometrical arrangement in the upper part of this chamber which was of 8 circles arranged around a large circle, topped with an elegant umbrella-shaped cupola. It was made of only curved surfaces, in total about twenty. The distinctive plan of this annex resembles elements of the pavilion of the ‘Piazza d’Oro” of Hadrian's Villa.David Jacobson, The Annexe of the 'Temple of Venus' at Baiae: An Exercise in Roman Geometrical Planning, 1999, Journal of Roman Archaeology 12, 57-71
The mosaics on the interior of the dome extended down to the window sills, while marble covered the swimming pool and the lower surfaces of the wall.
On the upper terrace were the residential areas, once richly decorated with several rooms dedicated to leisure. The third terrace is now transformed into a tree-lined garden. The fourth terrace was for service areas. On the fifth terrace are several rooms probably used as places to stay and rest, open to the sea and to the last terrace below that once was occupied by a garden, as today, perhaps surrounded by a colonnade.
The complexity of this sector on four terraces including a spa, a villa, a hospitalia (a sort of hotel for visitors to the nearby spa) is recognisable as the ebeterion built by Nero, according to Dio Cassius, for rest and recreation of the sailors of the nearby Misenum fleet.
On the highest terrace are service areas and a small balneum with rich stucco decorations on the ceiling. The next level has a large terrace bordered on three sides by a portico. In the garden are four parallel walls that perhaps delimited three triclinia in the open. Above the peristyle are several residential rooms, once richly finished, particularly the original precious mosaic floors representing theatrical masks inside geometric frames. Below this level is a semicircular building surmounted by five vaulted rooms once hidden by a façade decorated with niches and columns, overall making an impressive composition. On the axis of the complex is a room perhaps used as a nymphaeum from which flowed the water that fed an existing large external circular tank. On the peristyle of the lower terrace are paintings from two successive periods: those with an Egyptian taste (characters and symbols of the cult of Isis) from the middle of the 1st century AD; these are largely covered by paintings of the 2nd century, which depict male and female figures within architectural schemes.
/ref> Further west was the port of Cape Misenum, the base of the Roman imperial fleet. Mosaics, traces of frescoes, sculptures, road layouts and columns are also well-preserved about 5 m below sea level.Scognamiglio, E. Aggiornamenti sulla topografia di Baia sommersa. Archeologia Subacquea. Studi, Ricerche e Documenti II, 2nd ed.; Ist. Poligrafico dello Stato: Rome, Italy, 1997; pp. 35–46.
The protected areas were established in 2002 as a unique example in the Mediterranean of archaeological and natural protection underwater.
In each of the side walls were four niches housing a statue, while a water channel ran around the perimeter of the room. A horseshoe-shaped marble bed at the end of the pool is a stibadium, a convivial dining couch like the one described by Pliny for his villa;Pliny Epistles 5, 6, 36 this was placed between the water channel that ran around the walls and the large central basin. Water gushed from some statues placed in the niches on the long sides of the triclinium and from that of Baios (Ulysses' helmsman) in the apse, by means of small lead tubes inserted into the marble.
The decoration was aimed at recreating the atmosphere of a sea cave by the rough natural rocks that covered the apse, the lateral niches and the entrance arch and the water that flowed in the lateral channel and in the central pool. It replicated the episode from the Odyssey in which Ulysses, a prisoner together with his companions in Polyphemus's cave, tries to get the Cyclops drunk and then blinds him. The main statuary group was housed in the apse dominating the hall of which the figure of Ulysses survives, represented in the act of offering Polyphemus the cup of wine, and one of his companions carrying the skin. Cyclops probably occupied the central position.
Of the eight statues in the side niches, four were in an excellent state of conservation: two are in keeping with the intended use of the room as a banquet hall, being figures of the young Dionysus with a clear reference to the Odyssey group in the apse. Of the other two, the first portrays Claudius's mother, Antonia Minor, as Augusta in the guise of Venus Genitrix, with a diadem on her head and a winged child in her arms, perhaps a funerary Eros; the other is a girl with delicate features, with a hairstyle that recalls the youthful portraits of Nero, also adorned with gems on her head. She is possibly one of Claudius' daughters who died in infancy.
At the beginning of the 4th century the palace began to be flooded by the sea due to bradyseism and the majority of wall decorations as well as lead pipes were removed.Bernard, A., Zevi, F., Gianfrotta P.A., 1983. Baia: il ninfeo imperiale sommerso di punta Epitaffio, Napoli.
The sculptures were transferred to the in the Castle of Baia, while copies were placed in their original position in the submerged site.
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In the first nucleus of the villa exceptional architectonic solutions were adopted on the ancient promontory in front of Punta Epitaffio with an impressive modification of the original landscape, using artificial piers and quays built directly in the sea, using the astonishing advantages of pozzolana volcanic ash of Campania in the setting of pilae and concrete buildings in submerged or partially submerged conditions.
Hadrian had the villa razed to the ground and rebuilt in an even more grandiose form, experimenting with new compositional solutions. The design of the two apsidal corridors along the courtyard is one of the first significant attestations of a new genre of architecture which in its scenographic results, anticipated the Baroque. The villa shows architectural similarities with
It was built around a large peristyle courtyard garden ( viridarium) of 95 x 65 m, the entire residential complex occupying an area of 120x160 m. The spectacular northern facade probably opened onto a park that separated the villa from the Palace of Claudius and two thermal baths as well as a vast maritime district with piers, docks, fishponds and pleasant lodging pavilions.Barbara Davidde Petriaggi et al., Reconstructing a Submerged Villa Maritima: The Case of the Villa dei Pisoni in Baiae, Heritage 2020, 3, 1199–1209; doi:10.3390/heritage3040066 www.mdpi.com/journal/heritage
Of particular interest is the vast western basin (80 x 110 m) used as a landing place for large boats and protected to the south from the Sirocco winds by a series of double-row pilae.
The name is derived from a prothyrum entrance or vestibule, a space between the interior fauces of a villa leading to the atrium and the street. In this case it had two stuccoed columns that edged two short parting walls built on the sides of the threshold with doorways to the ostiarius quarters (gatekeeper's lodge).
The villa has a large variety of architectural types and is especially remarkable for the wide variety of marble flooring and wall coverings in most of the rooms.Mauro F. La Russa et al., The contribution of earth sciences to the preservation of underwater archaeological stone materials: An analytical approach, International Journal of Conservation Science, August 2015 6(3):335-348 The atrium walls were clad in marble. To the south of the atrium opens a vast apsidal hall (the apse at the back is 10.4 m wide), probably an addition to the first building and similar to the late imperial halls of the rich domus of Ostia Antica which also have rich covering of large marble slabs. The walls of the adjacent rooms were decorated with marble and many had mosaic flooring.
A mosaic floor, which belongs to a Roman villa, was discovered here in 2024.
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