“If Pozzuoli has gone down in the world, still more so Baiae. It does not require any more sinking; it is low enough as it is, so low that some of its ancient villas and palaces can only be visited in a diving-bell. So dreary and deserted is the site, that at first glance the visitor feels mightily inclined to question the veracity of the historian, and to doubt whether Baiae—Baiae the gay, the fashionable, the dissolute, the beloved of emperors, statesmen and poets—ever existed. But when he is shown the enormous sub-structures lying under water, and the masses of solid masonry wherewith the surrounding hills are over-spread, incredulity gives place to amazement. What towns of lath and plaster are Brighton, Newport and Trouville, when compared with this ‘Rome by the sea,’ where the materials used for the foundations of a single villa would more than suffice for the construction of a dozen ‘genteel marine residences’ of the modern style! What would a Roman architect think of the card-board streets and squares, and the stucco crescents and terraces, of an English watering-place? of those ‘eligible family mansions’ wherein dancing is dangerous, and to venture on whose balconies is perilous in the extreme? Echo answers: ‘What!’ ”(13) Here on this desolate strip of sea-shore, now dominated by the Spanish viceroy’s frowning fortress on the hill above, the great and opulent of ancient Rome founded a city composed wholly of palaces. Here were no noisy market-places to annoy aristocratic nerves; no slums to afflict plutocratic nostrils; no families of the proletariat to disturb the refined senses of the jaded pleasure-seekers who retired hither in the winter months. A writer, from whom we have just quoted, makes comparison between Baiae and Brighton or Trouville; but in reality the fashionable American resort of Newport has more in common with the old classical watering-place than any modern European sea-side resort. The hot sulphur baths on the Lucrine shore formed of course only a shallow excuse for the annual migration of Roman fashionables to Baiae, where blue-blooded senators and pushing plutocrats indulged in fierce social struggles for individual pre-eminence. Yet certain of the natural warm springs had been enclosed in splendid buildings, and were used by the luxurious citizens, so that even to-day the Thermae of Nero (Stufe di Nerone) are pointed out by the local guides. “Quid Nerone pejus? Quid thermis melius Neronianis?” (what is worse than Nero? yet what more beneficent than his baths?) asks the poet Martial, whose name will ever be bound up with the tales of luxury and vice that are associated with this spot. Baiae in winter, Tibur (Tivoli) in summer, the two names stand for the beau-ideal of a Roman existence, the cynosure of every wealthy citizen.