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Heart of the Phlegraean Fields, in the middle of the marvellous gulf which stretches between the promontories of Posillipo and Miseno, Pozzuoli played a fundamental role in the history of this land which characterized civilizations and still now offers a large collection of scientific phenomena and an unmistakable landscape.
Occupied by the people of Cumae in their expansionistic thrust along the arch of that gulf, which they called "crater of Cumae", Pozzuoli represented one of the hinges of the naval power of Cumae, one of the keys of its strategy on the sea.
Groups coming from the Greek island Samos landed in Pozzuoli around 528-529 B.C. and founded on the acropolis the colony Dicearchia.
Dicearchia means "right government" or "of the right people", and this in order to stress that in Samos, which they abandoned, a despotic government had the superiority.
The devastating invasion of the Samnites in Cumae swept away in 420 B.C. also the territory of the noble and ancient polis of the Magna Greece. So under the strokes of the Samnites Dicearchia fell and passed under the domination of the great rival of the Hellenic world, Capua.
Pozzuoli paid harshly, as the rest of the Phlegraean zone, Hannibal's invasion.
When the legionaries of Rome went to the fortress to reinforce and keep it away from the claws of the great Carthaginian leader, they had the chance to ascertain the extreme indigence in which it was during the Second Punic War.
It was in 215 B.C. that – for a decision of the Senate of Rome – Dicearchia (then become Puteoli) was occupied by Quinto Fabio, who established there a military garrison.
In 194 B.C., the ancient Dicearchia (dicaiarchia) of the Greeks coming from Samos was adorned with the Roman name, from which it derives the present eponymous. It became a colony.
The learned philologist Terenzio Varrone, who in the proximities of Baia owned a villa, has no doubts in affirming that the name Puteoli comes "a puteis", that is "from pozzi" (wells) and Puteoli is a plural diminutive (puteolus, puteoli). Varrone refers to the plenty of cold and hot waters. He does not even neglect to mention the stink of sulphur and alum exhaled both by the Forum Vulcani (the Solfatara), and by the many splits which are present in the fumarolic soil. According to Strabone the Roman Potioloi can be explained only referring to its many small wells and to its mineral waters too.
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