Parco archeologico di Cuma

The hillside of Cuma holds the first Greek colony of the western Mediterranean, founded by Euboeans in the eighth century BC. Its acropolis guards the Cave of the Sibyl, twin temple terraces turned early Christian churches, and a Roman forum below — layered testimony to nearly three millennia.

Why it matters

Cumae is where Greek Italy begins. The archaeological park's own narrative describes the polis founded here by Euboean groups — who had first established a trading emporium at Pithecusae on Ischia in the first half of the eighth century BC — as the first Greek colony not only of Magna Graecia but of the entire western Mediterranean. Basic elements of Greek culture, the alphabet among them, spread into Italy from this city, which makes the site foundational for literacy in the Latin West. The state excavations of the early twentieth century, directed by Amedeo Maiuri, brought the principal acropolis monuments back to light, the park itself took shape in 1927, and today roughly fifty hectares of public ground preserve the acropolis, stretches of the lower city and its monumental necropolis. Finds from the excavations are kept in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples and partly displayed at the Museo Archeologico dei Campi Flegrei in the castle of Baia.

What to notice

The surviving monuments are concentrated on the acropolis. At its foot is the Antro della Sibilla, a trapezoidal tuff gallery. The Byzantine tower forms part of the acropolis's monumental gate, rebuilt when the height became a fortified castrum during the Greco-Gothic War. The acropolis overlooks Ischia, Procida, Lake Fusaro, Torregaveta and the Miseno promontory. The lower terrace keeps a sanctuary with a temple raised at the end of the sixth century BC, restructured in the Augustan age and later converted into a church with a fourth-century baptismal font; the upper terrace's temple, traditionally labelled Jupiter's and today assigned by the park to Apollo, was likewise reworked in the Roman period and became a church between the fourth and sixth centuries, housing relics of San Massimo and Santa Giuliana. Two sanctuaries became two churches — the conversion of Cumae is legible in masonry.

Context and history

Greek Cumae overlaid an existing Oscan settlement, whose burial groups the excavations brought to light. Fortified with an acropolis and a lower town on the plain, the city grew rich through the seventh century BC, commanding territory from the Licola plain to Miseno and trading with Oscan and Etruscan centres inland. In 524 BC an alliance of Italic peoples and the Etruscans of Capua attacked and was defeated — bones of horses found near the earliest walls may belong to that battle — and the victorious general Aristodemus made himself tyrant. The Samnites took the city in 421 BC, and Greek and Oscan ways blended; in 334 BC Rome granted it citizenship without the vote, and under Augustus, who chose Cumae as a strategic base in the civil wars and funded restorations modelled on Rome, it became a fully Roman town. Agrippa's nearby Portus Iulius left its mark in the Crypta Romana, the gallery joining the forum to the sea. Christianisation turned the acropolis temples into paleo-Christian basilicas, the Greek-Gothic War fortified them into a citadel, and in 1207 a Neapolitan army destroyed the city for good, scattering its people.