Phlegraean Fields - Cultural Importance

Cultural Importance

Campi Flegrei has had strategical and cultural importance.

• The area was known to the Greeks, who had a colony nearby at Cumae.
• The beach of Miliscola, in Bacoli, was the Roman military academy headquarters.
• Lake Avernus was believed to be the entrance to the underworld, and is portrayed as such in the Aeneid of Virgil. During the civil war between Octavian and Antony, Agrippa tried to turn the lake into a military port, the Portus Julius.
• Cumae was the first Greek colony on the mainland of Italy (Magna Graecia) and is perhaps most famous as the seat of the Cumaean Sibyl.
• Baiae, now lying underwater, was a fashionable coastal resort and was the site of summer villas of Julius Caesar, Nero, and Hadrian (who died there).
• A Flavian Amphitheatre (Amphitheatrum Flavium), the third largest Italian amphitheatre after the Colosseum and the Capuan Amphitheatre.
• The Via Appia passed through the comune of Quarto, entirely built on an extinguished crater.
• Europe's youngest mountain, Monte Nuovo is here. The WWF oasis lies beside the enormous Astroni crater.
• The tombs of Agrippina the Elder and Scipio Africanus are here as well.
• At Baiae, a Bacoli district the most ancient hot spring complex was built for the richest Romans. It included the largest ancient dome in the world before the construction of the Roman Pantheon.
• Patrick Moore used to cite Campi Flegrei as an example of why the impact craters on the Moon must be of volcanic origin, which was thought to be the case until the 1960s.
• A Campanian ignimbrite super-eruption around 40,000 years ago has been hypothesised as having contributed to the demise of the Neanderthal, based on evidence from Mezmaiskaya cave in the Caucasus Mountains of southern Russia