Every design for Pozzuoli

Pozzuoli is known for living on top of an active volcano. The city lies inside the Campi Flegrei, the "burning fields", a vast caldera on the gulf that bears its name, and the ground here rises and falls with the pressure beneath it. When it lifted sharply in the nineteen-eighties, the harbour had to be moved further out.

There is a strange, familiar comfort in that restlessness for people who live here: the sulphur smell drifting from the Solfatara, the steam, the shoreline that never quite stays put. Life carries on regardless, around the harbour and in the lanes of the Rione Terra. History is everywhere you turn. Greek exiles from Samos founded the city, and as Roman Puteoli it was once the main commercial port of Rome, where grain ships from Alexandria unloaded. The ruins of the Macellum Tempio di Serapide belong to that Roman city, as does the Stadio di Antonino Pio.

Then there is the Anfiteatro Flavio, the great Roman arena that every local could find blindfolded. That is Pozzuoli on a shirt: an ancient arena, a living volcano and a town that simply gets on with it.