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Pozzuoli, town and episcopal see, Campania regione, southern Italy. It occupies a promontory that projects into the Gulf of Pozzuoli (an inlet of the Bay of Naples), just west of Naples. Pozzuoli, Italy. The town was founded about 529 bce by Greek emigrants who called it Dicaearchia (City of Justice). Captured by Rome in the Samnite wars, it ...
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An innovative program sees prison inmates giving tours of this Italian city’s Roman archaeology, baroque art, and waterside charms.
The Tempio-Duomo in Pozzuoli, Italy, is a Catholic church built amid the ruins of a Roman temple. It’s one of many historic sites in the small city on the outskirts of Naples.
Few Italian cities can compare with Naples. No wonder neighboring Pozzuoli has long been overshadowed by its bombastic, culture-drenched bigger sibling.
But the port city—a 30-minute train ride west of Naples—is one of southern Italy’s oldest settlements. Modern Pozzuoli—where Sophia Loren grew up—blends with the Roman settlement Puteoli at every turn. The road into town wheels around the amphitheater, the Rione Terra neighborhood has Roman streets still paving the clifftop, and stray cats inhabit an ancient necropolis.
Now, Pozzuoli has launched an innovative new tourism initiative: a collaboration between the local Catholic church and local jails. It has reopened one of the most fascinating sites in the southern Campania region—thanks to the inmates, who are running a visitor program.
Tourists can now visit the newly reopened “Tempio-Duomo,” or “temple-cathedral” of Pozzuoli, constructed by the Romans as a clifftop temple, then turned into a church. A sacred space for over 2,000 years, it has long been a forward-looking place. In the 1600s, Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi created three altarpieces here—the first woman ever commissioned to make art for a Christian church.
The Puteoli Sacra initiative started in 2021 as a way to combine art, history, and social inclusion. Inmates from Pozzuoli’s female jail and a nearby juvenile detention facility staff the complex, in some cases leading tours around the church. Its nave is still a Roman temple, giving way to a baroque apse stuffed with artworks by Neapolitan artists such as Massimo Stanzione, Giovanni Lanfranco and, of course, Gentileschi.
Her three paintings are currently on display in the adjoining museum (there are life-size reproductions in the church), where you can see her brushwork up close and learn about the site’s boundary-pushing past—and present.
(Discover why painter Artemisia Gentileschi shocked the world.)
The initial phase of the project—concluding in 2024—budgeted for 10 recruits over three years, with several more completing training, gaining skills they’ll take with them to other jobs when they leave prison. “We choose people who want a reset, a second chance,” says Danilo Venditto, coordinator of the Puteoli Sacra educational center.
These people include 25-year-old Sara (no last name for privacy), who’s now a multilingual tour guide. In her spare time, she’s studying archaeology, art history, and heritage sciences with University of Naples Ferdinando II university—and she paints.
“I always hated art,” she says. “But then in prison I was bored, I felt closed in, and I started to paint. I realized I liked history, so I changed my studies—and when Gennaro Pagano [director of the Centro Educativo Diocesano Regina Pacis foundation, the diocese charity which runs the program] told us about the project, I immediately wanted to do it.”
Pozzuoli is part of Campi Flegrei, an area built over an active “supervolcano.” The town’s entire cliffside district, Rione Terra, was abandoned in 1970, and damaged further by a major earthquake in 1980.
In 2003, the Campania region announced a competition to rebuild the cathedral. The winning design, by Milanese architect Marco Dezzi Bardeschi, wrapped walls of glass around the Roman columns and recreated the original vaulted ceiling, while sloping the floor down towards what remained of the baroque church—creating a meditative stroll through time and religion.
(Learn why this volcano in the Bay of Naples is convulsing.)
In 2014, the city started offering tours of Rione Terra, whose still visible Roman streets make it an open-air museum.
The Campi Flegrei area holds a trove of ancient sites. Cumae, three miles west of Pozzuoli, was the first Greek settlement on the Italian mainland, founded in the eighth century B.C. Baiae, between the two, was a Roman party town—you can still visit vast spa complexes and take boat rides above now submerged villas. The Romans believed Lake Avernus, a volcanic crater lake, was the gateway to the underworld.
“It’s a cradle of ancient civilizations and of their mythology,” says Anna Grossi, a guide at the Tempio-Duomo and mentor to younger people like Sara. “And it has everything: beauty, art, history, good food and a warm welcome. It’s not a mere add-on to Naples.”
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The ancient Macellum of Pozzuoli was a market building, erroneously identified as a Serapeum when a statue of Serapis was discovered. Pozzuoli began as the Greek colony of Dicaearchia (Greek: Δικαιαρχία) founded in about 531 BC in Magna Graecia with the consent of nearby Cumae when refugees from Samos escaped from the tyranny of Polycrates.
Pozzuoli (pōt-tswô´lē), Latin Puteoli, city (1991 pop. 75,142), Campania, S Italy, on the Gulf of Pozzuoli, an arm of the Bay of Naples. It is a port and an industrial and tourist center. Manufactures include machinery, textiles, and metals. Pozzuoli was founded (6th cent. BC) by Greek exiles from Sámos and was later a wealthy Roman seaport.
Jul 25, 2022 · The answer is Pozzuoli, the city where Sophia Loren was born, found in the Phlegraean Fields, a land full of myth! Here history and legend blend in an open- air archaeological museum among the largest and most relevant in Italy. Founded by the Greeks, Pozzuoli is found in front of the isles of Ischia and Procida but its current name, given by ...
Mar 22, 2018 · Pozzuoli. Pozzuoli is a coastal town at the northwestern end of the Gulf of Naples, in the Phlegrean Fields area, an area of high volcanic activity. From the port of the modern city, leave the boats for the islands of Ischia and Procida. In 531 BC, Greeks from the island of Samos (in the Aegean Sea), together with people from the nearby Greek ...
Puteoli (the Latin name referred to the bad odours of sulphur vapours) was a Roman colony established in 194 BC that became a large emporium for the Alexandrian grain ships. The apostle Paul is traditionally said to have landed here on his way to Rome, 170 miles away. Here he stayed for seven days (Acts 28:13, 14) and with his companions began ...
