NAPLES, BAY OF

Italian Golfo Di Napoli, Latin Sinus Cumanus, semicircular inlet of the Tyrrhenian Sea (an arm of the Mediterranean Sea), southwest of the city of Naples, southern Italy. It is 10 miles (16 km) wide and extends southeastward for 20 miles (32 km) from Cape Miseno to Campanella Point. The bay is noted for its scenic beauty, which is enhanced by the steep, mainly volcanic hills surrounding it (including the still-active Mount Vesuvius). The major port is Naples; other coastal towns along the bay are Pozzuoli, Torre Annunziata, Castellammare di Stabia, and Sorrento. Along the bay shore are the extensive ruins of the ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. At the bay's entrance are the islands of Ischia, Procida, and Capri. The Gulf of Pozzuoli is a northwest inlet. History The early period Naples was founded about 600 BC as Neapolis (New City), close to the more ancient Palaepolis, which had itself absorbed the name of the siren Parthenope. Both towns originated as Greek settlements, extensions almost certainly of Greek colonies established, during the 7th and 6th centuries BC, on the nearby island of Pithecusa (now Ischia) and at Cumae on the adjacent mainland, where remarkable Greek ruins may be visited today. Ancient Neapolis, as Gibbon says, long cherished the language and manners of a Grecian colony; and the choice of Virgil had ennobled this elegant retreat, which attracted the lovers of repose and study from the noise, the smoke, and the laborious opulence of Rome. Horace (here paraphrased by Gibbon), Virgil, and the Neapolitan poet Statius are among numerous classical writers who attest the Hellenism of Naples. The Greek language was preserved throughout the city's first millennium, surviving submission, in the 4th century BC, to the dominion of Rome. Under the empire, Naples and its environs served as a centre of Greek culture and erudition and as a pleasure resort for a succession of emperors and wealthy Romans, whose coastal villas extended from Misenum on the Gulf of Pozzuoli (the ancient Puteoli) to the Sorrentine peninsula. The amenity of these dwellings, depicted in recovered Vesuvian frescoes, is confirmed in such remains as Tiberius' Villa Jovis on Capri, the villa of Oplontis at Torre Annunziata, and the ruins of Villa Pausilypon, which gave its Greek namemeaning a pause from careto the headland of Posillipo. Near Herculaneum, the buried private establishment known as the Villa of the Papyri yielded, in the mid-18th century, a treasure of antique sculpture and a group of papyrus scrolls presumed to belong to an ancient library. These scrolls, many of them deciphered, are conserved in the National Library at Naples. The villa was never uncovered, and its 18th-century tunnels of approach were reopened only in 1987. A floor plan drawn up in the 18th century was the basis for the J. Paul Getty Museum at Malibu, Calif., U.S. In Roman times Naples was adorned with temples and baths and with arenas similar to those surviving at Pozzuoli and Pompeii. Principal Roman roads connected the city to the capital, and aqueducts supplied fresh water. The gulfs of Naples and Pozzuoli were linked by galleries pierced through the yellow tufa of lower Posillipo. Of these, an evocative example may be visited at Mergellina, at the Crypta Neapolitana, beside the Roman tumulus long venerated as the Tomb of Virgil, in tribute to the Mantuan poet who celebrated the Neapolitan ambience in the sixth book of his Aeneid and composed the Georgics there between 37 and 30 BC. In AD 79 the great eruption of Vesuvius buried the seaside towns of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae, engulfing also many villas confidently constructed on the slopes of a mountain that had not erupted for more than seven centuries. A contemporary account of this event survives in two letters addressed to the historian Tacitus by Pliny the Younger, who describes the doomed attempt of his uncle, the polymathic elder Pliny, to rescue survivors by sea. More than 16 centuries later, in 1738, systematic excavation of the buried towns was inaugurated at Herculaneum, under the aegis of the Neapolitan Bourbonsinitiating discoveries that would profoundly influence Western aesthetic and scientific concepts and transform our knowledge of the ancient world. Early tribulations of Christians at Naples are exemplified in the martyrdom of the city's patron, St. Januarius. The Catacombs of St. Januarius, on the Capodimonte slope, antedate in their earliest section the saint's legendary decapitation in AD 305 and are extremely interesting historically and for paleo-Christian decoration. Other early Christian sites include the baptistery incorporated in the Duomo, the ancient apse at the nearby church of San Giorgio Maggiore, and the Catacombs of San Gaudioso below the great church of Santa Maria della Sanit in one of the city's most colourful districts. During the decline of the Roman Empire, Naples suffered with all the Italian Peninsula, and, having espoused the Gothic cause, drew, in 536, the vengeance of the Roman commander Belisarius. In the division of the late empire the city remained, with some vacillation, under the Exarchate of Ravenna until the 8th century when, rebelling against the Eastern emperors, Naples established a form of republican government that secured embattled independence for more than three centuries. Succumbing at last to the Lombard power established at Capua and Benevento, Naples saw the Lombards dispossessed, in turn, by the Norman conquests that swept southern Italy in the 12th century. While including Naples in that turbulent subjugation, Normanand, subsequently, Swabiandominion elevated the metropolis to a regional and cultural capital, a position Naples would retain under diverse rulers until the 19th century. Although maintaining his court at Palermo, the Holy Roman emperor Frederick II fortified Naples, founded the university there in 1224, and nurtured, in a rebellious ambience, the city's intellectual life. Naples from the Angevins to the Risorgimento In 1266 establishment of the Angevin dynasty in Naples renewed the city's importanceformidably proclaimed by erection of the Castel Nuovo and the Sant'Elmo fortress. The Angevin kings and their Aragonese successors attracted to Naples great figures of Italian thought and literature and the northern architects and artists whose genius survives in many Gothic and Renaissance monuments. Under Alfonso V of Aragona monarch, in the words of the historian Jacob Burckhardt, brilliant in his whole existenceculture at Naples transcended warfare. In 1453 fugitives from the fall of Constantinople brought an infusion of Byzantine arts. The growth of Neapolitan political power is implicit in the visit of Lorenzo de'Medici, ruler of Florence, to the court of Ferdinand (Ferrante) I in 147980. In 1503 Naples entered the possession of the Spanish Habsburgs, whose viceroys presided with autocratic severity for more than two centuries. Great churches, convents, and private palaces from this period testify to a concentration of power against which an oppressed populace might periodically but ineffectually rebelas in the ill-fated revolt led by Masaniello (Tomaso Aniello) in 164748. This harsh viceregal power was terminated by Austrian conquest (1707). And, in 1734, Naples became, under the Spanish Bourbons, the capital of a large independent southern kingdom, Don Carlos (the future Charles III of Spain) assuming the old and all but impenetrable title of king of the Two Sicilies. Naples now burgeoned as a potent European capital, its implacable divisions of wealth and poverty thrown in relief by 18th-century illumination. It is significant that, despite the importance of preceding Neapolitan artists, it was only with the 18th century that Naples developed its own school of painting. Scholars and statesmen from that erasuch as Giambattista Vico, Pietro Giannone, Bernardo Tanucci, Ferdinando Galiani, and Gaetano Filangieriare of universal rather than exclusively Neapolitan distinction. Another period of prolific construction is commemorated in Bourbon public edificesincluding the royal palaces of Portici and Casertaand in private mansions. The Vesuvian littoral again became a site of busy communities and of the elegant Ville Vesuviane, today mostly in disrepair. The excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii attracted foreign visitors, while, in a climate of Neoclassicism and incipient Romanticism, artists, writers, and scholars arrived to experience the Neapolitan ambience. Depictions of the city and its surroundingsand of its presiding volcano, somewhat slighted by earlier paintersnow found their way around the world. At the court of Ferdinand IV (Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies) and his masterful queen, Maria Carolina, the cultivated British envoy Sir William Hamilton forged an Anglo-Neapolitan bond that lingers today. Maria Carolina's repressive tendencies were traumatically intensified by the execution in 1793 of her sister Marie Antoinette, queen of France. With the irruption of Napoleon into Italy (1798), the royal family withdrew in panic to Palermo aboard Admiral Horatio Nelson's British ships. The Neapolitan educated classes proclaimed a republic, while the Neapolitan poor, the lazzaroni, abandoned by their sovereign, remained vigorously if incomprehensibly monarchist. The nobly conceived Parthenopean Republic collapsed in a welter of blood. A punitive return by the Bourbons and the execution or exile of the republicans make the year 1799 a tragic epoch in the Neapolitan story. In 1805 the court fled anew to Palermo, and, until 1815, the Kingdom of Naples was ruled, with legislative reforms, by Napoleon's brother Joseph Bonaparte and, subsequently, by Joachim Murat. Following the fall of Napoleon, the Bourbons reentered Naples with Austrian assistance. However, the weakness and corruption of succeeding Bourbon monarchs and their ruthless suppression of progressive ideas set the scene for Giuseppe Garibaldi's triumphant entry into the city in 1860 and for absorption of Naples into the Kingdom of Italy.