NAPOLI SOTTERRANEA E CENTRO STORICO

Underground Naples

The first artifacts of underground excavations date back to about 5,000 years ago, almost at the end of the prehistoric era. Later, in the third century BC, the Greeks opened the first underground quarries to obtain the blocks of tuff needed to build the walls and temples of their Neapolis and dug in numerous rooms to create a series of funerary hypogea. The impressive development of the underground network began in Roman times: the Romans in fact in the Augustan period endowed the city with road tunnels and above all a complex aqueduct network, fed by underground ducts coming from the Serino springs, 70 km away from the center of Naples. Other branches of the Augustan age aqueduct arrived as far as Miseno, to feed the Piscina mirabilis, which was the water reserve of the Roman fleet. Wide that little that allowed the passage of a man, the aqueduct burrows branched out in all directions, with the aim of feeding fountains and houses located in different areas of the upper city. At times, on the walls, there are still traces of the hydraulic plaster, used by the engineers of antiquity to waterproof the tunnels. At the beginning of the 16th century the old aqueduct and the many pluvial cisterns could no longer satisfy the city's need for water which had spread like wildfire and so the wealthy Neapolitan nobleman Cesare Carmignano built a new aqueduct. It was only at the beginning of the twentieth century that it stopped digging underground for water supply and abandoned a network of tunnels and cisterns of over 2,000,000 m², spread throughout the city. The undergrounds were then used during the Second World War as air-raid shelters to protect themselves from the disastrous bombings that hit the city. The cavities were lit and arranged to accommodate dozens of people who hurried to the sound of the siren to descend the stairs that went deep. Remains of furniture, graffiti and various objects in excellent condition still testify to the great fear of the bombings and the numerous periods of the day lived in the shelters, revealing a cross section of important and at the same time tragic life of the city's history.