(The Macellum of Classical Puteoli, now know as Pozzuoli. It isn’t always just launching aircraft and stumbling around ashore on cruise. Sometimes you have to experience culture. In February of 1990 we happened to be in Naples and I hooked up with my Pal, The Judge, who exposed me to some high culture and local affairs. Pozzuoli is sort of an eerie place. In the early 1980s the city experienced hundreds of tremors which reached a peak in 1983, damaging 8,000 buildings in the city center and dislocating 36,000 people, many permanently. The events raised the sea bottom, rendering the Bay of Pozzuoli too shallow for large craft. Join Vic in Naples for a cultural adventure).
We were at the Naval Support Activity outside of Naples when The Judge pulled up in the battered red Fiat he uses as a low-profile security and transportation device. He was heading up the Naval Legal Support Office for the Theater and was living in a gated compound on the Amalfi Coast. He invited me down to take a break from shipboard lunacy while we were in port Naples I threw my bag in the back and noted that the car had lost the external mirrors. It did not seem to bother The Judge, and off we flew toward greater Pozzouli.
First stop was the Buffalo Cheese Ranch. I don’t know when I have even tasted better Mozzarella Cheese, but Rick swerved into a roadside market that had a large buffalo on the front. The Judge claimed they made the stuff there, and at times out in this neck of the woods you could see the water buffalo standing by the roadside, looking at the traffic go by with stolid oriental acceptance.
The Signore behind the counter piled about a half kilo of mozzarella on top of a fresh little baguette of bread, wrapped it up and handed me my lunch. I had a suspicion this visit was going to be OK.
The Judge had an ambitious touring agenda mapped out. The first thing we were going to do was get me situated showered and changed and then we were going to head off to Baia, the home of the classical Roman ruins of Baia. Then through what the ancients believed was the entrance to Hades at Lago di Avorno, then back to classical Puteoli to see the third largest surviving Ampitheatre from Roman times..
Then drinks and dinner.
It was an ambitious plan, but one which we attacked with gusto. The Judge’s wife Judy had a class to attend and so we started down the agenda as a flight of two.
First to the Casa Judge; the complications of an Italian shower and then British beers and a subsequent road trip to the magnificent ruins of Baia. I carry the cooler. There is a roadside attraction: an excavated Roman Bath, or Thermae. I asked the Judge why they had built a bath out here in the middle of nothing, and he gestured at the gentle terrace of the slope. I hit me suddenly that this had been a completely developed neighborhood and was thunderstruck. Under every bush, under every modern building old Rome is still there.
You see the masonry protruding from newer walls, and the odd heroic fragment like the Temple of Venus or the colossal half-dome that still towers over the modern city. On the underside of an arch you find the plaster still intact, the faun and the satyr still as fresh as they were a century ago when the rich lounged in these baths and drank wine and felt for the comely thigh of the noble lady beside them.
The stairs and chambers and intricate tunnels that link it all together, and outside the Scavi you see the lumps beneath the vegetation that say there is more and more and more. The guidebook says that in the days of the Empire men who owned-provinces could barely afford an acre in Baia.
The air is clear and you can see Capri and across the Bay of Naples looms Vesuvius. It is a gorgeous and special day and The Judge says we should take the road to Hell.
Or Hades, anyway. I ask if the trees along the road are Good Intentions.
We drive to the Lago di Averno to see the mouth of Hades but can’t quite find it. The Lago is not at all superstitious; it was a Naval Base at one time during the Civil War and Agrippa commissioned a huge tunnel to be dug from the fortification at Cumae under the valley and through the ridge to this base.
At the end of the lake is a massive structure in nearly complete decay. It lies at the end of a rutted dirt road. It towers over the underbrush; two mighty windows remain in a quarter of a great dome. The walls are perhaps ten feet thick and mighty portions are strewn across the floor of what the Judge says is the Temple of Apollo.
The complex of buildings that once comprised the place is equally massive. I want to explore but the Judge knows he is risking having the car broken into and I content myself with touching one of the piers of the mighty fallen building. Trees sprout from cracks in the flooring and bushes grow from the tops of the shattered walls. The ruins have thrown me into some sort of trance. The Old Ones are there; they must be. How can this all coexist with the current inhabitants?
When was the last service in this mighty hall? Do the Old Ones sleep deep, or do they still walk these crumbled corridors?
Then on to the third largest remaining amphitheater of the classic age. It is in downtown Pozzuoli and in some ways more a treat than the Coliseum in Rome. Here you can see the pits for lifting the beasts simultaneously to fight the poor sods convicted to the arena and get the feeling of the 35,000 shouting for their blood. Perhaps tailgating after the chariot ride over from Baiae.
Enough is enough for today. We return to the Casa and drink and chat in the kitchen until Judy returns from class. Her back is out and she tries a series of innovative positions on the couch with a heating pad to relieve the discomfort.
The Judge decided to change the mood, announcing that it is time to go get Road Chicken and Pizza and off we go again. He drops me at a little glass-fronted shop with an enormous stainless steel rotisserie that features about eighty chickens being skewered by a little Italian man. There is a hungry crowd of about twenty civilians waiting for the chickens, which are cooked over hickory and stuffed with Basil and Garlic and the smell is outrageously good.
It is me versus the Paesanos to get our Chicken and it is quite a wait and jockeying match to get ours but we do. Nothing counts in the contest for these birds but loudness and position and it all works out. This hard working bunch also bakes Sunday bread, and Rick assures me we will be back in the morning to sample the freshest. Loaded with ham and artichoke pizzas and two Road Chickens we return for a fabulous dinner that no one had to cook.
I wash my sheets in the machine downstairs and we watch a VHS reprise of the 15th anniversary of Saturday Night Live. Into a giant double bed by 2345 and dreamland in PozWallyWorld.
In the morning we are up by 0844 to jog briskly through town and out to the country where we pick up a Roman Via still intact after 2,000 years. We follow it past the wellｩpreserved Necropolis (City of the Dead) and return to the Casa in time to hustle out for fresh bread and steaming mugs of the Judge’s custom Expresso/Brazilian blend coffee. Then pack the cooler, because it is off to Classical Cumae of Magna Grecia, and Agrippa and the Roman Civil Wars.
We wind along the narrow roads past the Baia peninsula and suddenly come to a cut in the tall ridge. It is bridged by a massive archway that narrows the road to a single lane of ancient Roman paving. We pass through and see Cumae’s hill a kilometer off over the fields.
We examine the great walls; the Via Sacra; the Temples of Apollo and Jupiter and magnificent views both North and South. Coming down the hill again we enter the cave of the Sibyl and site of the oracles mentioned in Virgil. Wandering through the huge carved tunnels until we discover to our wonder and amazement the giant Galleria of Agrippa. We peer down into the open skylight into a vast subterranean highway thirty feet across and one hundred feet high, perfectly preserved and as though the masons had only stepped out to lunch. I have never seen anything the like of this and the attraction to scramble over the fence and find the entrance is almost overwhelming.
Good sense gets the better of us and we have a picnic lunch in the parking lot. We offer a tip to the elderly Capo who has watched the car. We ask him where the tunnel comes out and he explains it is very profundo- deep- and leads to Lago di Averno. You can’t find it, he says with a grimace, because the Germans blew up the other end in the War. Funny how you can’t get away from those rascally Germans, particularly in this year of the reunion of the DDR and the FRG.
We share our repast with the old man, which he enjoys but disparages the wine, which the Judge explains was purchased at the recommendation of the Colonel of the Caribinieri.
The old man is unimpressed.
Lunch complete, it is time to get the tourist back to the ship and the Schiff’s back to their busy affairs. We motor back to NSA and they drop me at the gate. They would have driven me back to the Fleet Landing, you understand, but there has been a day of great experiment in Naples. They have banned private automobiles in the City today to see what the effect might be like.
Riding back on one of the Navy contract Eurobuses, the effect is eerie and startling, as though someone had exploded neutron weapons on the city and killed all the people and left the buildings quite untouched. There was a garbage strike in progress, which I understand is a routine occurrence, so there were papers blowing everywhere and the net effect was like the concluding scenes to the film “On the Beach.”
To liven things up, our driver finds another bus and they road-race through the empty streets. The usual forty-five minute trip back to Fleet Landing takes about fifteen minutes. This experiment could have something going for it. I have never seen Naples free of the cloud of exhaust fumes.
Back to the ship, where no one has missed me. The Deputy has taken Toad and CAGMO and gone on a road trip to Salerno, Amalfi and Sorrento. Lutt-man, Mark and Moose are getting restive and bored. It is starting to rain and it is getting dark. It is clearly the right time to go over to the pier and have a pressed ham and cheese sandwich from the cart and a green grenade- a 155ml bottle of icy-cold Heinekens. Or four.
Things are changing in the Navy. Women have now been assigned to afloat units. We see the amazing spectacle as two logistic support ships are in port- Mount Baker and Yosemite- and they have hundreds of women assigned to the ship’s company.
The parade is most entertaining. One girl goes by muttering into a pocket tape recorder, no doubt documenting the low moral standards of the Fleet. Another girl walks by with shaven scalp and dippity-doo spikes on top. Yet another is wearing a Harley-Davidson shirt and is heard to observe: “What’s a matter with my F++king shirt? I F++king like・F++king Harleys!”
You can’t take the Fleet out of the gal, I suppose. We head back to the ship in the rain and the gangway falls off the water taxi and it is generally a fun night……
……because other things are happening which will enter the lore of this Med Cruise. Ensign Murph returns from the AFSOUTH Club and leaps from the seawall down to the embarkation brow of the O Boat. He gets a little gear down to port, overｩcorrects, then slowly and majestically pirouettes into Naples Harbor.
He is taken immediately to Sick Bay and given many powerful injections to battle the imminent infections. Doc Riley observes he should be required to wear a float coat with the uniform at all times.
A kid playing full contact touch football gets knocked out cold and has to be medevaced to the Air Force Hospital in Germany.
One of the famous 105th Attack and Twilight Pursuit pilots gets thrown out of the Florida Club not once but three times. After some discussion of the issue of his conduct with the Carabinieri, he attacks one and winds up with rifle butts helping him to see the error of his ways. It is the understanding of the Wing as a whole that Pete won’t have to worry about Liberty for the remainder of the cruise.
Sixty days to go.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
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