Underground Naples, the city carved out of tuff

Beneath the streets of Naples lies another city, made of tunnels, cisterns, passages and vast quarries. It is the result of more than two thousand years of digging into Neapolitan yellow tuff, a volcanic rock that is soft to work and becomes strong once exposed to the air. Every house in the historic centre was, in a sense, built with stone taken from its own subsoil. This double face of the city, bright on the surface and dark below, has fed the imagination and beliefs of Neapolitans for centuries.

From the Greeks to the Romans

The Greek colonists who founded Neapolis in the fifth century BC were already quarrying tuff to raise walls and temples. The Romans expanded the system on a grand scale. In the Augustan age the Serino aqueduct, the Aqua Augusta, was built, carrying water from the springs of Irpinia to Naples and to the fleet at Misenum. From the main conduits smaller channels branched off to feed a network of cisterns dug beneath the houses.

The subsoil of the centre also preserves remains of public buildings. Beneath the church of San Lorenzo Maggiore streets and shops of the ancient city can be seen, while around Via dei Tribunali modern houses rest on the structures of the Roman theatre, where according to Suetonius and Tacitus even the emperor Nero performed. Further north, on the hills of Capodimonte, lie the catacombs of San Gennaro and San Gaudioso, early Christian cemeteries also carved into the tuff. In those underground corridors the Christian community buried its dead and venerated the martyrs, leaving frescoes and inscriptions that are among the oldest testimonies of the faith in Campania.

Water, wells and well-men

Throughout the early modern period the cisterns remained the city's main water reserve. In 1629 the Carmignano aqueduct came into use, joining the older Bolla aqueduct. Every palazzo had its well, and maintenance was entrusted to the pozzari, men used to moving through the tunnels by lowering themselves on ropes and footholds cut into the walls.

These very pozzari, able to appear suddenly inside houses through the wells, are considered by many folklorists one of the origins of the Munaciello, the Neapolitan household sprite. Their appearances, small thefts and unexpected gifts are thought to have turned into the tale of a mysterious being who lives beneath the city.

Shelters and memories of the twentieth century

The subsoil played a dramatic role during the Second World War. Naples was among the most heavily bombed cities in Italy, and the ancient cisterns were adapted as air-raid shelters, where thousands of people spent entire nights. Writings, drawings and objects from those days remain on the walls. The Bourbon Tunnel, commissioned by Ferdinand II and begun in 1853 to a design by Errico Alvino, was also used as a shelter.

Visiting underground Naples today means passing in a few hours through Greeks, Romans, Spanish viceroys and twentieth-century bombings. It is an archive in stone where documented history and legend live side by side, and where one understands why Neapolitans have always imagined the world below as a place inhabited by souls and presences.