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| Joseph de Ca'th Lon visits the Baths of Baia |
Today, The Grandma has continued reading the Joseph's guide about the Neapolitan city of Baia. It's so exciting that she has been also seeing the photos that Joseph took there.
Among the most significant and remarkable remains are several dome-like structures such as the great so-called Temple of Mercury, the Temple of Venus, and the Temple of Diana, which were traditionally credited to some of the more famous residents of the town's villas, although they were not temples but parts of thermal baths.
This colossal ogival dome, today half collapsed, originally collected vapours coming from the ground below and was used for thermal baths. It was decorated with marble friezes depicting hunting scenes.
The Temple of Mercury consists of an enormous 21.5 m diameter dome, a miracle of engineering and the largest in the world prior to the construction of Rome's Pantheon in AD 128. The dome has a central hole or oculus and was made with large tuff blocks.
It was, and is still today, used to enclose the frigidarium or cold pool of the public baths. From eighteenth century descriptions it appeared to have had six niches of which four were semicircular.
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| A Joseph's selfie in the Archaeological Park of Baia |
The Temple of Venus is another octagonal building, sunken 3 metres in the ground, had eight large arched windows and a balcony inside overlooking the pool. It owes its name to Scipione Mazzella who claimed to have found the statue of the goddess there.
Overlooking the sea is the Villa of the Ambulatio with a series of six terraces connected to each other by a complex of staircases of which the last leads to the sector of Mercury. It is named after the 'ambulatio', the long corridor with two longitudinal naves on the second terrace, intended to be a covered walk with large openings with a magnificent panorama of the gulf below. Traces of precious stucco can be seen on the brick structure of the central pillars.
More information: Visit Naples
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.
Founded by two parallel staircases is the sector or Temple of Sosandra from the name of the statue found in 1953 and now located in the National Museum of Naples.
The complexity of this
sector on four terraces does not allow its intended use to be identified
but it was either a spa, a villa, a hospitalia, a sort of hotel for
visitors to the nearby spa, or even a meeting place of Nero for the entertainment of sailors of the nearby Classis Misenensis, the Miseno fleet.
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| Joseph at Il Tempio di Venere, the Temple of Venus |
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 open to the sea and 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 there 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.
More information: Timeless Italy
Completely submerged by the waters is the nymphaeum of Emperor Claudius whose sculptures have been transferred to the town's archaeological museum, the Museo Archeologico dei Campi Flegrei or Phlegraean Fields Archaeological Museum which also contains other items excavated on the site.
The public and private baths of Baiae were filled with warm mineral water directed to their pools from underground hot 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 saunas. 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.
Baiae was supplied with fresh drinking water from a branch of the Aqua Augusta aqueduct, a cross-section of which can be seen nearby.
More information: Smithsonian
The world survived the fall of the Roman empire and will no doubt
outlast our own so much more splendid civilisation.
James Buchan
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