La rocca del Rione Terra, surrounded by the sea on three sides and difficult to access, is the place where the Roman colony of Puteoli was established in 194 BC. The regular modern urban layout is testimony to the ancient city’s plan, organized according to an orthogonal axis system with two main roads: traditionally, the colony’s decumanus maximus is identified with Via Duomo, where the ancient paving is still preserved beneath the modern road; the cardo maximus is identified instead with Via del Vescovado. For the Republican age, few traces have been uncovered: some sections of the city walls, which followed a route conditioned by the tuff bank’s course, and some rooms with polygonal tuff walls and barrel vaults made from tuff blocks, found beneath the Episcopio. Along the 194 BC decumanus, numerous buildings, granaries (horrea), and shops (tabernae) rebuilt in opus reticulatum during the Augustan age have been identified; their upper level is occupied by a thermal complex with opus sectile floors, while the foundations consist of large cisterns dug into the hill’s tuff bank. The buildings are connected to the road by a portico formed by opus latericium pillars on piperno base blocks, datable between the Neronian and Flavian periods. Along the same street, on the North side, before reaching the city temple, there is a public building, whose original function is unknown, which was adapted in the late antique age as a pistrinum (mill and bakery), containing leucitic stone millstones still found in situ. On the South side of the same decumanus, at the semi-underground level, there is a large complex consisting of four adjacent cryptoporticoes oriented North/South, rectangular in plan with barrel vaults, dating to the early decades of the 2nd century BC; in the Augustan age, a fifth cryptoporticus with an orthogonal layout to the others, oriented East/West and parallel to the decumanus maximus, was added. From this area comes the sculptural furnishings of “opera nobilia,” which formed a sort of museum path intended to embellish the Augustan acropolis complex and is now exhibited, together with other artifacts, at the Archaeological Museum of the Phlegraean Fields in Baia.
Information about Rione Terra
Via Sedile di Porta
80078 Pozzuoli (Naples)
081/19936286 – 19936287; 081.5266007 (Office for the Archaeological Heritage of Pozzuoli)
sar-cam.pozzuoli@beniculturali.it
https://sbanap.campaniabeniculturali.it
Source: MIBACT
