Baia Archaeological Museum, Aragonese Castle

About this place

By reputation Baiae was the most luxurious and most scandalous resort in the Roman world. Emperors and republican grandees built their villas and hot baths along this shore, and enough gossip came out of it that Seneca put his disapproval in writing. Then bradyseism, the slow breathing of the volcanic ground beneath the Phlegraean Fields, dropped the land and let the sea take half the town. What survived above water is now displayed in the Archaeological Museum of the Phlegraean Fields, inside an Aragonese castle perched on a rocky headland above the Gulf of Pozzuoli, roughly 25km west of Naples. The collection is small but genuinely rare. Its centrepiece is the sacellum of the Augustales, lifted from Miseno and reassembled with its columns and statues, a shrine of the imperial cult served by the Augustales priests, its rebuilt facade carrying statues of the Flavian family. Beside it stand the sculptures from the nymphaeum of Punta Epitaffio, the banqueting hall built under Claudius that now lies under seven metres of water; the statues were raised from the seabed and set out here in something close to their original arrangement. The room most visitors walk past too quickly is the plaster gallery: fragments of casts taken directly from the most celebrated Greek sculptures of the classical and Hellenistic ages, around sixty of them on show from a collection running to hundreds, used by Roman workshops in the first and second centuries AD as models for their marble copies. It is, in effect, a two-thousand-year-old copying factory. The castle is half the ticket. Ramparts, courtyards and sloping terraces open onto a wide sweep of the Gulf of Pozzuoli with Ischia and Procida on the horizon, and the air up here is salty and clean in a way central Naples never is. Give the terraces real time rather than treating them as the walk between galleries; this place was built to watch the sea, not to house exhibits. Be realistic about getting here. The castle sits on a height that has to be climbed, and public transport means the Cumana line from Montesanto, then a local bus, then a walk along a narrow road with almost no pavement; a car or taxi buys back an hour and a lot of patience. Do not turn up without a ticket already on your phone, as the on-site ticket window no longer sells to the public. Labelling inside is thin and mostly Italian, so read up beforehand or bring a guide. In exchange you get a museum far quieter than the headline sights of central Naples even at the height of summer, which is rare in this corner of Campania. The steps and slopes make it hard work with a pushchair or with older relatives, and halal options in Bacoli are very limited, so plan lunch in Naples or stick to seafood and vegetarian dishes at the harbour restaurants.