I love the Bay of Naples and regard the area almost as the centre of civilisation. I've been there three or four times now. It has Vesuvius, Pompei, Herculaneum, Stabiae, Pliny the Elder, Naples with its amazing pizza and archeological museum, not to speak of St Gennaro's bones sticking out of an urn in the duomo, and the Campi Flegrei. The latter is the caldera that resulted from the Campanian Ignimbrite super-eruption 39000 years ago, the one that may have finally put paid to the Neanderthals. Vesuvius isn't actually part of that caldera. Every one of those places is an A1 stunner. One of the most intriguing places is the very workaday town of Pozzuoli. In the Roman macellum there are three columns that show evidence of erosion by marine molluscs from a time when the area was clearly inundated by the sea. These days the columns are way above sea level. The whole area is subject to the slow heaving and subsiding of the land (bradyseism) due to the movement of a large magma field not very far below the surface. In the early 1980s much of Pozzuoli underwent an uplift which raised the sea floor by two metres in a very short time. There was mucho panic and tens of thousands of people were evacuated. There was the fear that a huge super-eruption was imminent, but the crisis went away. We went to Pozzuoli in 2013 and walked up the hill from the Metropolitana station to the Solfatara crater (tragically, three people lost their lives there last month). It's the most lively place in the Campi Flegrei caldera, with sinister boiling mud pools and lots of hissing fumaroles. A thousand years ago there was a phreatic eruption (ground water interacting with magma), but it's been fairly quiet ever since. St Gennaro, him of the bones in the urn, was murdered there in the third century. Campi Flegrei is regarded as a potential supervolcano of the same ilk as Yellowstone. Go there before you die. Did the earth move for you?