Cuma. Fondazione di una città stato insulare. L’identità marittima e multiculturale della polis oscurata dal ‘ribaltamento’ romano./ Cuma. The foundation of an insular city-state Maritime and multicultural identities of the polis have been darkened by the Roman “changing”

The concrete and conceptual dialectic between the Greek city-state and the Roman city-territory is the first key to interpretation which has been raised through this reflection. By using logical and analogical cognitive tools of the Architecture, we aim to comprehend the several meanings which stand in the archaeological landscape of Cuma. We notice that the Roman development of urban areas around the Averno and Pozzuoli, has not only darkened the Greek essence of the site, now only perceived through the Acropolis and the beauty of the phlegrean landscape, but also created a historical filter which has obscured, throughout the centuries, the geographical dimension and the maritime identity of the most ancient Greek polis of the West. It still prevents the correct interpretation. The intuition of this analytic approach led to a landscape, semantic and analogical reading that reinterprets the geography of spaces, places and relics. It links them all through their systematic and perceptive structure of ‘forms’ which have been identified as well as fixed, myths and symbols throughout the ages. Considering the latest finds, which assign an older founding date to Cuma and the archaic topography which has been proved by geological investigations carried out along the lowest part of the Acropolis, empirical data, theoretical contributions and ancient attestations have been elaborated and contextualized into the current reality. Distinct and conflictual structural matrixes of the two different ideas of the city are now highlighted and joined in the interconnections with later cities (contemporary city is also included): on one side, the sea, the island, the limits and the geographical rooms of the Greek Cuma; on the other, the relation between monuments and the infrastructural system of the Roman Cuma. We can outline new hypothesis about the foundation and the composite identity of a original insular polis.These make Cuma one of the greatest and most ancient examples of the Greek city-states. Assuming Aldo Rossi’s interpretation of city-state, the analogical comparison with Athens clears up the enlarged polycentric dimension of Cuma and the relation of reciprocal complementarity between the important ‘synoecisms’ which, specifically, converge into aware and planned acts of ‘highest foundation’ and ‘kitsis’. All this leads us to reinterpret Tito Livio’s passage (‘… primo in insulas Aenariam et Pithecusas egressi, deinde in continentem ausi sedes transferre’) especially the idea of ‘sedes’ (also considered as capital city). The meaning of the foundation of Cuma goes beyond the mere creation of an urban settlement, it identifies the consecration, through the eksistics, of the new insular city-state , outpost of the Magna Graecia, by both unitary and composed Greek community which landed , in different times, to Procida, Ischia, Miseno, which at a certain point ‘dares’ moving its sacred structures to the continent. Summarizing, the angle of the interpretation that we have proposed involves: 1) The fact that through the foundation of Cuma the whole phlegran archipelago has been delimited as polis including , right then, the peninsula of Cuma-Miseno connected to the mainland through the ‘istmo di pochi stadi’ of Caldera di Montegrillo; 2) The fact that Cuma, Pithecusa, Procida, Miseno are parts of the same city-state but wish a different planned and synoecistic meaning, related to both the political structure and the landscape-evocative dimension of the polis; 3) The fact that the intrinsic polycentrism, determined by the insular fragmentation of the city-state , increases the value of its natural ‘zoning’ and the integration of the already multicultural Euboea community with locals and people of different origins.