Breakfast at the hotel was excellent: good croissants and fresh-squeezed blood-orange juice with cappuccino.  We were on the bus by 9:15 and off through the streets of Naples heading toward the north side of the bay near Pozzuoli to the Campi Flegrei: the Phlegrian Fields.  Our first stop was at Solfatara, one of more than 10 craters within the Campi Flegrei Caldera complex.  Solfatara was the Roman gate to Hades.  Dante’s Inferno also has its origins here.  It is a crater, about 50m deep and several hundred meters across.  Numerous fumaroles issue from the base of the wall but the activity is much less than in the past.  It amazes me that the city has expanded right up to the crater’s edge.  Most of the students expressed distaste for the sulfurous odor but to Elise and me, it brought back fond memories of our recent trips to the volcanoes of Hawaii and Iceland.

We drove around several other craters around Baia and Miseno.  The Romans had opened one crater to the sea and harbored their fleet.  Most of the area is totally built over.  I’ll bet the 1970 quakes scared a few people!

Disappointed with the urbanization of the caldera, we headed north to the Greek temple at Cumae or Cuma, on the west rim of one of the more rural craters.  The temple sits on basal surge deposits from one of the local hydromagmatic eruptions.  From a tunnel cut deep into the tuff, the Sybil would prophesize the future, similar to the Delphi Oracle in Greece.  I asked if any study had been done to see if any noxious gases issue from the fissures in the rock.  This may have been the birth of a research project that Anne, Bob, and I will someday undertake.

The temple, like most Greek temples in Italy, was rebuilt with a Roman flavor and finally destroyed and robbed at the beginning of the Christian era.  On the way out of the site I noticed some fumarolic alteration near the entrance to the Sybil’s tunnel.  Anne said she got a little woozy in there.  There may be some small amount of gas still leaking in there, such as was recently discovered at Delphi.

We headed back to the hotel at 4:00.  I sat out on the terrace and wrote and then napped for an hour.  I started to go out to dinner with Bob, Anne, Drew, Erin, and Will but somehow ended up drinking beer with some students and then going to a trattoria by the bus parking area.  It had good food and cheap wine: the academic traveler’s dream.  Back at the hotel, Joan called around midnight.  It was great to hear her voice.  I had been frustrated by all of my email and telephone attempts since returning to the hotel.  I finally went to bed about 1:15 and fell asleep immediately.