Explore Pozzuoli—the lesser known marvel just outside of Naples

Few Italian cities can compare with Naples. No wonder neighboring Pozzuoli has long been overshadowed by its bombastic, culture-drenched bigger sibling. 

But the port city—a 30-minute train ride west of Naples—is one of southern Italy’s oldest settlements. Modern Pozzuoli—where Sophia Loren grew up—blends with the Roman settlement Puteoli at every turn. The road into town wheels around the amphitheater, the Rione Terra neighborhood has Roman streets still paving the clifftop, and stray cats inhabit an ancient necropolis. 

Now, Pozzuoli has launched an innovative new tourism initiative: a collaboration between the local Catholic church and local jails. It has reopened one of the most fascinating sites in the southern Campania region—thanks to the inmates, who are running a visitor program.

Tourists can now visit the newly reopened “Tempio-Duomo,” or “temple-cathedral” of Pozzuoli, constructed by the Romans as a clifftop temple, then turned into a church. A sacred space for over 2,000 years, it has long been a forward-looking place. In the 1600s, Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi created three altarpieces here—the first woman ever commissioned to make art for a Christian church.

After a fire destroyed much of the site in 1964, and seismic activity saw the entire cliffside abandoned six years later, the cathedral was finally rebuilt in 2014. It’s now a temple-church hybrid, fusing old and new religions into a ravishingly syncretic, modern place of worship.

Here’s how the project is injecting new life into this storied town.

How an ancient site helps modern women

The Puteoli Sacra initiative started in 2021 as a way to combine art, history, and social inclusion. Inmates from Pozzuoli’s female jail and a nearby juvenile detention facility staff the complex, in some cases leading tours around the church. Its nave is still a Roman temple, giving way to a baroque apse stuffed with artworks by Neapolitan artists such as Massimo Stanzione, Giovanni Lanfranco and, of course, Gentileschi. 

Her three paintings are currently on display in the adjoining museum (there are life-size reproductions in the church), where you can see her brushwork up close and learn about the site’s boundary-pushing past—and present.

(Discover why painter Artemisia Gentileschi shocked the world.)

The initial phase of the project—concluding in 2024—budgeted for 10 recruits over three years, with several more completing training, gaining skills they’ll take with them to other jobs when they leave prison. “We choose people who want a reset, a second chance,” says Danilo Venditto, coordinator of the Puteoli Sacra educational center.

These people include 25-year-old Sara (no last name for privacy), who’s now a multilingual tour guide. In her spare time, she’s studying archaeology, art history, and heritage sciences with University of Naples Ferdinando II university—and she paints.

“I always hated art,” she says. “But then in prison I was bored, I felt closed in, and I started to paint. I realized I liked history, so I changed my studies—and when Gennaro Pagano [director of the Centro Educativo Diocesano Regina Pacis foundation, the diocese charity which runs the program] told us about the project, I immediately wanted to do it.”

Today, take a tour with Sara and you won’t just learn about the history of the site; you’ll see it from her perspective. “Because she was a woman, she wasn’t considered an artist initially,” Sara says, pointing to Artemisia’s three paintings.

“She was treated as insignificant, not given work—as inmates are, when they come out.” Sara says her guiding work and Artemisia give her “a vision of the future” for when she someday leaves prison.

The city rebuilds

Pozzuoli is part of Campi Flegrei, an area built over an active “supervolcano.” The town’s entire cliffside district, Rione Terra, was abandoned in 1970, and damaged further by a major earthquake in 1980.

In 2003, the Campania region announced a competition to rebuild the cathedral. The winning design, by Milanese architect Marco Dezzi Bardeschi, wrapped walls of glass around the Roman columns and recreated the original vaulted ceiling, while sloping the floor down towards what remained of the baroque church—creating a meditative stroll through time and religion.

(Learn why this volcano in the Bay of Naples is convulsing.)

In 2014, the city started offering tours of Rione Terra, whose still visible Roman streets make it an open-air museum. 

The Campi Flegrei area holds a trove of ancient sites. Cumae, three miles west of Pozzuoli, was the first Greek settlement on the Italian mainland, founded in the eighth century B.C. Baiae, between the two, was a Roman party town—you can still visit vast spa complexes and take boat rides above now submerged villas. The Romans believed Lake Avernus, a volcanic crater lake, was the gateway to the underworld.

“It’s a cradle of ancient civilizations and of their mythology,” says Anna Grossi, a guide at the Tempio-Duomo and mentor to younger people like Sara. “And it has everything: beauty, art, history, good food and a warm welcome. It’s not a mere add-on to Naples.”