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Campi Flegrei. Burning Earth

By (author) Luigi Spina, Contributions by Fabio Pagano

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Campi Flegrei, near Naples, is a seismically active landscape that attracts, stimulates, and challenges. It seduces the soul, engages perception, and demands to be interpreted rather than merely registered. People have chosen to live amongst these unique geological and volcanic features, weaving the fabric of human occupation and taming a land in perpetual transformation, one of the harshest yet most enchanting environments. Mankind has matched its own impermanence against the earthâ€™s inevitable and unrestrained convulsions, in the process hewing out some of the most glorious examples of human endeavour, such as Cumae, the oldest Greek colony in the Western Mediterranean, the bustling Roman port of Puteoli, and the â€œdolce vitaâ€ savoured in the baths and villas dotted around the Bay of Baiae. Luigi Spina has been exploring this land since 2020, delving into the complex, stratified geography. Key landmarks include places of memory (archaeological sites, monuments, landscapes), which, like true benchmarks of perception, outline the path towards an understanding of a world that links nature, ancient ruins, and the overwhelming presence of mankind. Balanced between mimicry and contradiction, the Campi Flegrei landscape is now blanketed by a dense urban sprawl, where the ancient and the contemporary coexist in a kind of precarious equilibrium, generating a complex socio-cultural state of affairs that is challenging to govern. Spina explores and photographs places such as the Dragonara Cave, the Piscina Mirabilis, the Theatre of Misenum, the Flavian Amphitheatre at Puteoli, the Temple of Apollo on the shores of Lake Avernus, and the Temples of Venus and Diana, as he wanders through the hills above Baiae, finally heading towards Cumae.