Macellum of Pozzuoli

Is it worth the trip?

Not as a trip of its own while it is closed. It is in the middle of town, about 400 m from the Flavian Amphitheatre, so if you are in Pozzuoli for the amphitheatre or Rione Terra, walk past and see what the view from the edge gives you. If it reopens, it is worth a proper visit: Italian Wikipedia counts it among the grandest and most intact Roman markets, because the sea that covered it spared it the worst of the stripping. It has opened for one-off special events, such as an evening for the European Heritage Days in 2024 (Ministry of Culture), so check the park’s page before you go.

Getting there

The Macellum is at Via Serapide 13 in central Pozzuoli. The operator’s directions are the Cumana railway from Napoli Montesanto to Pozzuoli station, or by car the Naples ring road (Tangenziale) to the Pozzuoli/Arco Felice exit. OpenStreetMap maps bus stops on Via Sacchini about 70 m away and a paid car park about 120 m away.

No ticket is on sale while the site is closed. The 2024 special opening cost a symbolic €1, bought online only through Musei Italiani (Ministry of Culture). The operator lists the site as not accessible to visitors with reduced mobility (Parco Archeologico dei Campi Flegrei, read 24 October 2026; check before travelling).

The market

The market was built between the late first and early second century AD and restored under the Severan emperors in the third (en.wikipedia). The operator dates it to the late Flavian period from a partly preserved dedicatory inscription, and a lead water pipe inscribed with the name of Septimius Severus points to Severan rebuilding of the hall and the tholos. Recent study suggests the tholos itself was added in the third century (the operator).

The courtyard was surrounded by porticoes of grey granite columns, at least two storeys high on the long sides, with Corinthian capitals carved with shells holding dolphins (the operator). The shops opened alternately onto the courtyard and onto the outside: the inner ones were faced with coloured marble, the outer ones plastered and painted. The main entrance faced the sea and lined up across the tholos with an apsed hall on the far side, where three niches held statues for the imperial cult and the gods who protected the market (the operator; en.wikipedia). The tholos stood more than a metre above the courtyard floor on four stairways, surrounded by sixteen columns of pink African marble around an octagonal fountain (the operator). Two large latrines in the corners of the far side were finished so lavishly that the excavators first took the rooms for public baths (the operator).

Marine borings date the start of the building’s sinking to the end of the fourth century AD, the same time the market was abandoned. In the next century, partly buried, it became a small cemetery (the operator).

The “Temple of Serapis” and the birth of a geological idea

King Charles of Naples had the site dug between 1750 and 1756, after the tops of the great cipollino columns were seen poking out of a field known as the “vineyard of the three columns” (en.wikipedia; the operator). It lay under many metres of marine deposits (the operator). A statue of the Egyptian god Serapis turned up in 1750, so the building was taken for his temple (it.wikipedia). The statue is now in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, with a plaster cast in the Campi Flegrei museum at Baia (the operator). The whole building was exposed between 1806 and 1818, and it was Charles Dubois, in 1907, who identified it as a market (en.wikipedia).

Long before that, the columns had become a puzzle for geologists. The band of mollusc borings showed that they had stood upright while the land sank below the sea and then rose again. Charles Babbage surveyed the ruin in 1828, and Charles Lyell put an illustration of the columns on the frontispiece of his Principles of Geology in 1830 to argue for slow, steady changes in the earth’s crust (en.wikipedia). The movement is now called bradyseism. The land rose about 1.7 m between 1969 and 1973 and almost 2 m between 1982 and 1994. Fears of an earthquake or an eruption led to the temporary evacuation of the city (en.wikipedia). That rise has left the building out of the water (fr.wikipedia), although water still stood over its floor in 2013, as a 2013 photograph on this page shows.