Stereoscopic photograph by Alphonse Bernoud showing a view in Italy, 'Pozzuoli and the Temple of Jupiter (Tempio di Giove), Serapis'. French School, Italy, ca. late 1850s.

Stereoscopic photograph showing a view in Italy, 'Pozzuoli and the Temple of Jupiter (Tempio di Giove), Serapis'. Lettered with artist's name and address and inscribed with the number 273. Inscribed in ink on the back with the title.

The 2,000-year-old Roman temple was partially submerged after construction, and was subsequently excavated at various periods in history. It has been studied as an example of extreme subsidence.
King Charles of Naples had excavations carried out on this site between 1750 and 1756, exposing the three large cipollino marble columns which gave the site its name of the "three column vineyard". It attracted visits from antiquarians, among them William Hamilton whose Campi Phlegraei of 1776 showed a distant view of the buildings dry above sea level, and John Soane who "Went to the Temple of Jupiter Serapis" on 1 January 1779 and made rough sketches, as well as a plan of the complex, possibly copied from another drawing.
Between 1806 and 1818 further excavations exposed the whole of the "Serapeum" or "Temple of Serapis". The excavations lost stratigraphic information in the deposits which had buried the building, but the molluscs or Gastrochaenolites left by marine Lithophaga bivalves on the three remaining standing marble columns provided a good record of relative sea level variation.

The antiquarian Andrea di Jorio studied the ruins, and in 1817 published a guidebook to the Phlegraean Fields, with a map of the area which had many hot springs and volcanic craters as well as antiquarian sites including the supposed Temple. By this time the pavement was flooded by the sea, indicating a slight lowering of the land level. In 1820, he published a study of his Ricerche sul Tempio di Serapide, in Puzzuoli, including an illustration based on a drawing by John Izard Middleton showing the three columns with the bands affected by molluscs.

In 1819 Giovanni Battista Brocchi proposed that the columns below the bands had been protected from the molluscs by being buried in silt or volcanic ash. The first volume of Veränderungen der Erdoberfläche by Karl Ernst Adolf von Hoff, published in 1822, included an account of the ruins as demonstrating relative changes in land and sea level. Hoff's second volume of 1824 reviewed how earthquakes might have caused this, and mentioned Jorio's study. Hoff's account motivated Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to publish his own idea, coined when he visited the site in 1787. In Goethe's 1823 'Architektonisch-naturhistorisches Problem', he suggested that silt or ash had partially buried the columns and at the same time held back water forming a lagoon above sea level. Other naturalists thought this unlikely, as the fresh water lagoon would not have supported marine molluscs, and the sea was by then higher than at the time of Goethe's visit.

E.1409-1992