Here we are again, on a gray and rainy All Saints' Day, as the long weekend dedicated to the commemoration of the dead is about to begin. So, to stay on the subject, we decided to go and see how the ancient Romans created funeral monuments in the Pozzuoli area and to what extent they are visible to us today. Two reference websites are:
http://www.campiflegrei.it/desktop/Le%20Necropoli.html and https://quartosociale.wordpress.com/la-storia-di-quarto/26/. The photos were taken between July and September 2018. The following text is taken from the book Campi Flegrei by the writer and journalist Attilio Wanderlingh, author of numerous books on the history of Naples as well as founder of the Intra Moenia publishing house and the literary café of the same name: [...] the extreme residences of the Puteolani were located on the edges of the main Roman connecting roads and above all along the current Via Campana which in Roman times was that Via Consularis which started from the Flavian Amphitheater and reached Capua. The most significant archaeological remains are found in via Celle, via San Vito, at the bottom of Fraia near the bridge of the ring road, in the archaeological park of the ancient via Antiniana that connected Puteoli with Neapolis. The text continues with further information on the burial methods and rituals of the ancient Romans; Undoubtedly encouraged to visit these sites, we must stop here for the moment, because the necropolises that we have been able to find so far, despite the poor road signs, are closed to the public and it is not known when they will be reopened. Let's start from the first necropolis in the territory of the municipality of Pozzuoli, the necropolis of via Celle, the only one marked with a road sign and the most infested with wild vegetation:
The other Puteolan site we have seen is the necropolis of via San Vito, on which it seems that restoration and safety works have been carried out quite recently; however this site is also closed to the public:
Even the mausoleum of this necropolis cannot be visited, as it is inside a private property; from some eighteenth-century descriptions we know that the internal sepulchral chamber was richly decorated with stucco:
We conclude for now with the only structure of those we have traced located in the territory of the municipality of Quarto. This is the funerary complex of via Brindisi, of which from the outside of the fence you can see the so-called Fescina, a mausoleum with a pyramidal spire roof with a hexagonal plan:
We have published this post in the Denied Walks category because these necropolises are inaccessible for everyone, not just for the physically disabled. It is a real shame this closure, because these sites are all at street level and therefore could be made accessible for us with very little adaptation work. We hope with this intervention to stir things up a bit...