ALTERATIONS OF COAST LINE. 



403 



side of the Bay of Naples, to the shore of the small Bay of Baia, a district which has 

 received the poetical name of the Phlegrasan Fields, and which Italian partiality has 

 called a piece of heaven fallen down upon earth. It was the favourite resort of the 

 Romans under the republic and the empire. Its abundant hot springs, its genial winterless 

 climate, its seclusion from the northern blasts, the eastern breeze blowing across the bay, 

 together with the delightful view these attractions drew the opulent Romans to Baia, 

 weary of the noise and bustle of the capital, for tranquillity and health. Silius, Martial, 

 and Statius have celebrated its beauties ; Cicero, Hortensius, Lucullus, Julius Cassar, 

 Augustus, and many of the succeeding emperors had villas on its shores ; the youthful 

 invalid Marcellus was removed hither to find a grave ; and here the men of letters 

 delighted in fixing the most famous scenes of Homeric fable identifying the Lucrine 

 lake with one or other of the lakes or rivers of Hades, and recognizing in the Avernus, 

 which formerly emitted exhalations, the theatre of the nekuia, that awful vision of the 

 dead which passed before Ulysses at the barriers of the earth. 



The whole coast of Baia is now comparatively a desert, with a few masserie or farms and 

 vineyards scattered on its hills, a consummation in which natural convulsions have co 

 operated largely with political reverses and social degeneracy. The most recent disturbance 

 of the Phlegraean Fields occurred in a night of September 1538, after twenty shocks of 

 earthquakes had been experienced in the neighbourhood of Pozzuoli within twenty -four 

 hours. That night, the inhabitants of Tripergoli, a small watering-place on the bank of 

 the Lucrine lake, witnessed the opening of an abyss between the town and its suburbs, 

 which speedily dislodged them from their houses, and destroyed their habitations by its 

 discharges of fiery stones. Dark smoke covered the spot four days, which unveiled a most 

 extraordinary scene of change when it cleared off. There is an eminence marked on the 

 map near the lake Avernus, the Monte Nuovo, which was then formed and still remains, 

 upwards of four hundred feet high and a mile and a half round. The town of Tripergoli 

 was demolished ; its suburbs had been engulfed in the earth ; the Lucrine lake was 

 crippled in its dimensions by the new mountain, and reduced to a shallow pool ; while the 

 lake Avernus ceased to throw out those exhalations which had led to its identification with 

 the Homeric nekuia. But by far the most extraordinary fact disclosed was the elevation 

 of the coast manifest by the retirement of the sea more than twenty feet from its former 



