The other Naples: the underground one

In Naples there is no road, no corner which is not qualifying for a witness to its past greatness and its perennial vitality. The city is an authentic cultural landscape, a territory inhabited by a people who made their homeland, who has lived and drew their livelihoods. An area that has cultural value as a whole, where the story is told not only by the most important monuments, but where cathedrals are in competition with rich people'shouses , the big roads with diverticula less busy.
However, Napoli also hides a parallel city, underground, almost like a negative of the upperground, dug by man for thousands of years. In the city geology and topography are interwoven with the archeology, the history and with legends of classical Mediterranean. This because in Naples the interaction between underground and man had a particular course, the visible form of architecture in town is the surfacing of a secret and gloomy city. Miles of magnificent caves, deep wells, extraordinary catacombs are located in every direction through intertwined at different levels. They aren't natural caves but places built for strength to lift. " Not one stone after another has been superimposed, but a stone after another was removed with simple and rudimentary tools , pick after pick.
From at least 4000 years, carved into the rock to extract stones or build swimming pools and water systems, to track military roads and tunnels and underground tombs and shrines, the underground ways of Naples are in close relationship with its urban development. Naples, has been said, has grown in size, but, as is detailed in the likeness of his own bowels, he took the substantial material, texture "soft and spongy, the color" yellow and red ", the shape of a space "complex". It was built at the same time the house and the cave.
Digging, going down the earth seems to have been the only real way to live a divine reality otherwise imagined. The caves are a Naples real memory, a symbolic correspondence with distant reality. An underground tour, a visit to the caves, the caves catacombs becomes a return to origins.

A LITTLE OF HISTORY

Naples is a complex of underground tunnels and caves dug into the tuff placed underground in Naples, there are mainly different types of environments and classical architecture, Greek and Roman.
Grown on the limestones, on pozzolana and on the rocks created by ancient volcanic eruptions of the Campi Flegrei, Naples has always exploited the stones of its hills and valleys to grow up.
Ten, twenty, thirty feet below, a visit to the underground offers elements and suggestions to understand how Naples has evolved, and how the hidden work of generations of Neapolitans have made possible the development of the city as we know today. The first articles of underground excavations date back about 5000 years ago, almost to the end of the prehistoric age. Later, in the third century BC, the Greeks opened the first underground caves for obtaining the necessary blocks of limestones needed to build walls and temples of their Neapolis and dug many environments to create a series of underground burial. This applies, for example, for the Greek quarry found by the speleologist Enzo Albertini, excavated, about 40 meters below the cemetery of Santa Maria of crying. But the development of the massive network of underground began in Roman times.
But with the advent of Angioini, in 1266, the city experienced a great urban expansion which obviously corresponded to an increase in the extraction of limestone from underground to build new buildings, confirming a peculiarity of Naples: is generated from their bowels, where buildings rise immediately above the quarry that supplied building materials.
A decisive influence on the fate of the Naples underground was attributed, to some edicts , between 1588 and 1615, forbidding the introduction into the town of construction materials, to prevent the uncontrolled expansion of Naples. Citizens, to avoid penalties and satisfy the need for urban expansion, thought well to extract the tuff below the city, taking advantage of existing wells, expanding shells for drinking water and obtaining new ones. This type of extraction, which took place from top to bottom, requiring special techniques to ensure stability and avoid collapse of the underground side.
To a visitor today, it is not easy to move trought the maze of underground stretch beneath almost the entire city area. Never abandoned and forgotten, the early aqueducts of the origins were used again, changed, enlarged, and adapted to new uses. On the walls of limestones, you can still read the signs of the picks, and the long work of man underground.
Great engineers and planners, the Romans in the Augustan age endowed the city of road tunnel (cave Cocceio and cave Sejanus), and especially a complex network of aqueducts, pipes fed by underground springs from the Serin source, 70 km far from the center of Naples. Other branches of the Augustan aqueduct came up to Miseno to feed the Piscina Mirabilis, which was the water reserve of the Roman fleet.
Large just enough to allow the passage of a man, aqueduct tunnels branch off in all directions, with the function of feeding fountains and houses located in different areas of the city above. At times, on the walls, there are still traces of plaster hydraulic, used by engineers of antiquity to waterproof tunnels.
In the early 1600 the old aqueduct and lots of rain tanks were unable to meet the water needs of a city now extremely extensive and this is the reason on how the wealthy noble Neapolitan Carmignano built a new aqueduct.
It was only the beginning of 1900 that stopped digging underground to supply water and surrendered the network of tunnels and tanks of more than 2 million square meters, spread across all the city.
During the Second World War the Underground changed their face: they were lit up and became (because of the bombs that fell on the surface) once again an integral part of city life. Remains of furniture, traces the life of fifty years ago helps us understand how in Naples, more than any other city in Italy, the underworld has always been part of everyday life, as in good as in bad.

Napoli sotterranea 2

There are two main entrances to underground Naples:
Via S. Anna di Palazzo near the Spanish Quarters, where after descending for about 40 meters you arrive at a refuge of approximately 3,200 square feet, used especially during the Second World War, suitable for more than 4000 people.
The electrical system of the time, toilets "adapted" (the old tanks are due to become a shelter), are highlighted by several graffiti bearing witness to the past life in the shelters during the sad period. Some graffiti depicting the heads of state of the axis Berlin-Rome-Tokyo, with other women at the time, soldiers, aircraft, golf and football schedules, as well as stories and anecdotes of people actually lived like that famous pair of lovers in a shelter married contribute to the colorful and picturesque tour.
Piazza San Gaetano near the Basilica of San Paolo Maggiore, a descent of 140 steps and 40 meters below the road surface leading to an underground tour that combines the drama of the last world war, going back to the splendor of antiquity 'Roman.
Indeed, it is the ancient Roman aqueduct, taking the water from the source of Serino, through a network of cisterns and tunnels carved out of the limestones able to distribute the water so widespread throughout the city, bringing to every building above.
Burrows that barely allow the passage of an individual, give the emotion and the suggestion from being crossed, line, lit only by candlelight.

THE BORBOUNS UNDERGROUND OF NAPLES

In late 2008, was rediscovered another major underground route, and this, in the first half of the nineteenth century.
In the nineteenth century, the Bourbons created this long underground section linking to the Plebiscite Square to Piazza della Vittoria, to constitute a possible way out (by sea) to the royal family and to reach the Victoria Barracks in Street Morelli. The path was abandoned in the next century, and then be reused as a bomb shelter in World War II, later became a veritable warehouse of old cars.

WHERE GO DOWN TO THE UNDERGROUND OF NAPLES?

There are various sites to visit the "guts" of Naples. Among all organizations , we suggestd the tour organized by the cultural organization Insolitaguida: "Napoli sott e n'gopp ", which takes visitors from a district of Naples rich of art and history but not so famous to the oldest evidence of underground Naples! For more informatio click here