Naples underground: tunnels and galleries of Napoli Sotterrata

Naples has two different identities, the one that shows and the one that hides. In today’s article, we talk about Napoli Sotterrata, with its tunnels and its galleries.

Some cities in the world enjoy a glorious past and a history rich with events and traditions, whose echos resound in the same way. Indeed one of them is Naples: behind the noise of the cars, the voices of the street vendors and the sounds of a now modern and progressive place, there is another city that still remains deeply linked to its past. We must consider at it as a place developed on two different levels: the upper one is where everyday life goes on, noisy and cheerfully; the second one is, on the contrary, silent and spectral but also incredibly precious.

The subsoil of Naples is a real surprise; in it, you can recognize an original face of the city and understand the events that marked its past. In fact, from the centuries before Christ until the Second World War, man had built and inhabited a dense network of tunnels and galleries, which can still be explored thanks to excursions and guided tours.

History of Naples and its caves

The cavities that today characterize the underground Naples were created for different purposes, and they changed according to the different historical periods, even if over time each cavity was then used again to satisfy a necessity, which was different from the original one. The history of Naples seems to have crossed each one of those underground coves, sometimes used and other times disused. The oldest artifacts found during underground excavations date back to around 5,000 years ago.

The Neapolitan substratum

The morphology of the Neapolitan territory partly inspired the creation of a city located underground. The Neapolitan subsoil is in fact composed of different materials, including tuff, produced from the accumulation of volcanic ash and generally known as Neapolitan tuff.The creation of those largest underground cavities can be traced back to the Greek period: the ancient civilization, aware of the great wealth of the subsoil, decided to extract some tuff to build the walls and the temples of the ancient Neapolis. Other cavities were instead used for the creation of funeral hypogea. However, the most flourishing development of that network of tunnels and galleries took place during the Augustan era, when the Romans decided to enrich the city with some road tunnels. Today Naples is a very rich city, also thanks to those precious traces of the past, which enhance its prestige and its flow of tourism.