Buried Italy: Campania Felix
Get ready for an adventure beneath the surface of Italy. This is a journey for the curious and the bold — for those who want to climb down into the buried, submerged, and forgotten worlds of ancient Campania, and then come back up to eat and drink like the ancients who built them. Over seven unforgettable days we explore the volcanic landscape of the Phlegraean Fields and the Bay of Naples, where Greek colonists, Roman emperors, and the wrath of Vesuvius each left an entire world entombed beneath the next. We will walk Roman tunnels and Greek cisterns hidden beneath the streets of Naples, sail in glass-bottomed boats over a sunken city of emperors at Baia, stand on the shore of the crater lake the Romans swore was the doorway to the underworld, and step into cities frozen in time by the ash of 79 AD. And we will taste it all. We will raise glasses of Lacryma Christi on the very slopes of Vesuvius — the wine grown from the same volcanic soil that Pliny the Elder wrote about and that the Romans prized above almost any other. We will eat true Neapolitan pizza in the city that invented it, pull fresh mozzarella di bufala by hand on a working farm, and toast our final evening with an Aglianico, the noble red the ancient Greeks are believed to have carried to these shores nearly three thousand years ago. Throughout, the thread that ties our week together is the tension between what is buried and what is still gloriously alive — a journey that ends among Greek temples more complete than any still standing in Greece itself. And as always, expect a few surprises along the way.
