I Campi Flegrei. Il paesaggio e la metafora/The Phlegrean Fields: The Landscape and the mataphor

Within the area of the landscape representation, the Phlegrean Fields have attracted a special attention because of the close integration between nature and archaeology. Their most true image is their underground figure, linked to the presence of the myth. In the Middle Ages the image of the Phlegrean Fields was linked to spas, while dur¬ing the Renaissance the rich repertoire of ruins existing between Pozzuoli and Cuma offered the opportunity to investigate two aspects of the antiquarian research: on the one hand, the reflection on the ideal forms, on centrality of architectural works, the mathematical foundation of harmonious proportions and, secondly, the survey on the more technical and construction aspects of the Roman architectural culture. During the sixteenth century, the sudden appearance of the Monte Nuovo aroused the interest of artists and travelers, confirming the image of a landscape always underconstruction, of a place that you can never fix in a definitive portrait. Artists, Italian and foreign geographers and travelers of modern pilgrimage resume those vestiges of ancient memories in environments where it is clear the intention to grasp the idea of the landscape. If in the sixteenth century, the visit to the Phlegrean Fields was one of the key mo¬ments for the foreigner artist who traveled to Italy, it is from the seventeenth century that the phenomenon assumes the character of a real institution. But with the age of the Enlightenment, in the mirror of the Grand Tour and the related archaeologi¬cal discoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum, the representation of the Phlegrean Fields evolves towards a renewed cultural dimension. In this perspective, the iconography interprets landscape, nature and archaeology in a picturesque key and then in a “scientific” production of topographic maps of the mid-eighteenth century. With the beginning of the nineteenth century, continues the fortunate iconography of the Phlegrean Fields, but the picturesque views are flanked and then replaced by the romantic images that soon thin out creating new and more pragmatic rep¬resentations required by the nascent bourgeois tourism, ready to make return the representation of Phlegrean Fields in the stereotype of the souvenir. As regularly happens in the romantic imagerie, even for Phlegrean Fields, the nine¬teenth-century drawings would soon directed the first photographic production, within a slow process and in line with the synchronous cultural patterns of the land¬scape representation.