"O Vatia, tu solus scis vive", "O Vatia, you alone know how to live": the exclamation with which his peers addressed him remained over centuries, when they met him in Rome, when they met him in Rome, evoking the long periods that the Isaurico loved to spend in his villa d'otium in the renowned Campanian sea.
Publio Servilio Vatia, who had vanquished the pirates of Cilicia and triumphed over the Isauri, a prominent member of the senate and a great friend of Cicerone, had chosen the coastal stretch in front of the thriving Cuma, overlooking the panorama of the islands to build his maritime villa. On the massive spur of yellow tuff southern limit of the sandy beach he had built the huge villa, carefully fortified and arranged on various floors, reaching the sea, where there were ponds for fish farming. There He welcomed the most prominent personalities of republican Rome of the first century BC. "A radiant villa for idleness", he defined it in one of his letters to Lucilio Seneca.
The beach, guarded by the yellow tuff rocks appears radiant in every season and preserve, together with the sea, what remains of the villa of Vatia. Today, a long pier juts out into the sea towards the islands, characterises the Cumano coast, a splendid walk in the sun even in winter. Ideal background for pictures and videos, with the spectacle of Ischia and Procida that becomes incomparable at the pink hour and at sunset, the pier divides the beach. On the left is the free beach, on the right is the equipped beach. Immediately behind, serving the beach, there is the station of the last stop of the Cumana railway.
That coastal stretch of ancient Cuma, in the territory of Monte di Procida, borrowed the name of Torregaveta from the defense tower against Saracen attacks built, together with other twin coastal towers, in 1532, by order of the viceroy don Pedro Alvarez de Toledo. Gàveta was perhaps the name of the area when the tower was built or, according to others, it derives from “àveta”, high, to indicate that that was the highest point along the coast.
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