Baiaen harbor; and against the side of its sheltering hills, once lay the city of villas.  To that sheltered hill, emperors, consuls, poets, and warriors, crowded from the capital, in quest of repose, and to breathe the pure air of a spot in which pestilence has since made its abode.  The earth is still covered with the remains of their magnificence, and ruins of temples and baths are scattered freely among the olives and fig-trees of the peasant.  A fainter bluff limits the north-eastern boundary of the little bay.  On it, once, stood the dwellings of emperors.  There Caesar sought retirement, and the warm springs on its side are yet called the baths of the bloody Nero.  That small conical hill, which, as you see, possesses a greener and fresher look than the adjoining land, is a cone ejected by the caldron beneath, but two brief centuries since.  It occupies, in part, the site of the ancient Lucrine lake.  All that remains of that famous receptacle of the epicure, is the small and shallow sheet at its base, which is separated from the sea by a mere thread of sand.  More in the rear, and surrounded by dreary hills, lie the waters of Avernus.  On their banks still stand the ruins of a temple, in which rites were celebrated to the infernal deities.  The grotto of the Sybil pierces that ridge on the left, and the Cumaean passage is nearly in its rear.  The town, which is seen a mile to the right, is Pozzuoli—­a port of the ancients, and a spot now visited for its temples of Jupiter and Neptune, its mouldering amphitheatre, and its half-buried tombs.  Here Caligula attempted his ambitious bridge; and while crossing thence to Baiae, the vile Nero had the life of his own mother assailed.  It was there, too, that holy Paul came to land, when journeying a prisoner to Rome.  The small but high island, nearly in its front, is Nisida, the place to which Marcus Brutus retired after the deed at the foot of Pompey’s statue, where he possessed a villa, and whence he and Cassius sailed to meet the shade and the vengeance of the murdered Caesar, at Philippi.  Then comes a crowd of sites more known in the middle ages; though just below that mountain, in the back-ground, is the famous subterranean road of which Strabo and Seneca are said to speak, and through which the peasant still daily drives his ass to the markets of the modern city.  At its entrance is the reputed tomb of Virgil, and then commences an amphitheatre of white and terraced dwellings.  This is noisy Napoli itself, crowned with its rocky castle of St. Elmo!  The vast plain, to the right, is that which held the enervating Capua and so many other cities on its bosom.  To this succeeds the insulated mountain of the volcano, with its summit torn in triple tops.  ’Tis said that villas and villages, towns and cities, lie buried beneath the vineyards and palaces which crowd its base.  The ancient and unhappy city of Pompeii stood on that luckless plain, which, following the shores of the bay, comes next; and then we take up the line of the mountain promontory, which forms the Sorrentine side of the water!”