A beautiful marble floor has been discovered on the seabed where the sunken city of Baiae now rests. This ancient settlement was once a luxurious holiday spot for the elite, now known as the “Las Vegas” of Rome, but over time it was eventually lost to the sea.
Baiae was located in the Gulf of Naples, close to where the famous remains of the city of Pompeii stand. Over the years, archaeologists have recovered various ancient relics from the submerged city, which now includes a multicolored marble floor that is currently being restored.
According to the Facebook page of the Archaeological Park of the Phlegraean Fields, the floor consists of thousands of marble slabs, made up of hundreds of different shapes, which were gathered to create incredible geometric patterns.
It forms part of the “opus sectile”, a mosaic work composed of various colored materials such as marble, shell, mother-of-pearl, and glass, which are cut into specific shapes and inlaid to create different designs and patterns. This type of mosaic differs from the common type (tessellated mosaics), which are characterized by patterns being formed by many smaller cubes of stone or glass.
The pattern of this rich mosaic was probably created from repurposed stones that were used in walls or other floors.
Image courtesy of Edoardo Ruspantini
The opus sectile recovered at Baiae was once the floor of a reception room for villa that would have been owned by a high-status individual in the city during the third century CE. The design would have been extremely expensive for the owner, who seems to have used recovered materials (taken from other floors or walls) to complete the design. It consists of multiple sharpened squares, each surrounded by inscribed circles.
Creating a mosaic like this was expensive, so this may explain why the owner relied on stone that had already been used for other purposes.
Image courtesy of Edoardo Ruspantini
Baiae was an exceptionally fashionable resort that attracted the richest and brightest of Rome’s elite, including Julius Caeser, Nero, Cicero, and Hadrian. It boasted luxury villas set along a beautiful coastline. It was also visited for its rejuvenating hot springs bubbled up from volcanic vents below, which supposedly had healing properties. But over time, the city became more famous for its hedonistic appeal.
Seneca, the famous Stoic philosopher, bemoaned the city, describing it as a “place to be avoided” due to vice and sin. People wandered the beach in various states of drunkenness and “riotous reveling” disturbed the peace he otherwise sought.
In the end, Baiae met its demise due to historical and geological processes. As the Roman Empire started to collapse, it was attacked by various invaders and was later raided by Muslim armies in the eighth century CE. Then, in the 16th century, the city dropped below sea level due to volcanic activity within the wider Phlegraean Fields (a super volcano), on which it sat.
However, underwater archaeologists have been working hard to recover and restore many aspects of this submerged city, offering us a view of the complex world it used to be part of.
