Cities under tlie Sea 



Changes in sea and land levels have altered the 

 coast line of Amalfi, south of the Bay of 

 Naples, many times. In the early Middle Ages 

 part of the town built on the coast sank into 

 the sea. Around the fifteenth century the 

 land began to rise, but since that time 

 it has started to sink again. 



To judge from the earliest reports of Aristotle and Pausanias, 

 the destruction of Helike aroused widespread interest, and people 

 came from many miles away to see the city beneath the waves. 

 Spyridon Marinatos, a Greek archaeologist, has carried out the 

 most recent study of the area, but he has failed to locate any of the 

 mud-covered ruins. Apart from Helike, some of the most inter- 

 esting ruins of sunken cities, which can be seen by any archaeologi- 

 cally-minded tourist, are along the shores of Italy. 



In the first half of the nineteenth century Guiseppe de Fazio, 

 an engineer, studied the remains of several Roman ports in the Bay 

 of Naples. Working with sponge divers who knew the area well, 

 he found the submerged remnants of quays, breakwaters, and 

 bollards at Misenum and Po2zuoli. Recognizing them for what 

 they were, he realized that there must have been a drastic change in 

 sea level after Roman times. Since de Fazio's day many of the 

 coastal towns of Italy have grown so extensively that the ancient 

 ports which he described have been destroyed by modern con- 

 struction, and the water is sometimes so polluted that free-diving 

 work in it is impossible. 



Between 1901 and 1903 the Bay of Naples was again surveyed 

 for ruins, this time by Robert Theodore Giinther, an Oxford don. 

 (Giinther explains that he was able to carry out this work because 

 of the inordinate length of vacations at Oxford.) The fishermen in 

 the Bay of Naples, in the habit of raking for shellfish irr the cracks 

 and hollows of the submerged buildings, were a great help to 

 Giinther. By much wading and using a glass-bottomed bucket to 

 observe the floor of the Bay, he mapped the ruins for many miles 

 along the shore. 



Stretching from Naples to the weird rock that guards the head- 

 land of the Scoglio di Virgilio, just to the west of Posilipo, today 

 there is a cliff that forms a series of little headlands and bays, each 

 backed by a beach. But the coast did not look Uke this to the 

 Romans. The sea then was sixteen feet lower, and at the foot of the 

 cliffs ran a great highway, bordered by luxurious villas. The quar- 

 ries from which the Romans obtained stone for these buildings are 

 now partly submerged caves which thunder and roar as the storm 

 waves crash into their dark mouths. 



The buildings of southern Posilipo were in three principal 

 regions, which Giinther called Gaiola, Marechiano, and Roseberry. 

 The islands of Gaiola were joined by an arch of rock as late as the 

 beginning of the nineteenth century, but it then collapsed and 

 blocked the passage beneath. In Roman days these islands formed 

 a promontory jutting a quarter of a mile beyond the present shore. 

 Around a small hill on the promontory stood splendid villas, 

 colonnaded temples, and little pavilions by the sea — Uke those 

 painted on many of the walls in Pompeii. In the lee of the promon- 

 tory was a row of massive concrete piers rising brown out of the 

 blue water - the breakwater of the harbor - and on the heights 

 above were the theater and the temples. 



Seaward of the islands today there are concrete foundations in 

 an area that would have been underwater even in the Roman 

 period. These were once summer villas or paviUons built right in 

 the sea and supported by raised foundations, as seen in the pictures 

 from Herculaneum. Surrounded with covered galleries and orna- 

 mented with statues, at Gaiola they were so close to the water, and 



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