Down under Naples

Naples was the fag end of my journey after 10 days of traipsing across Florence, Venice and Rome with a college buddy. And this was one place where I was cautioned about being mugged or robbed; petty crime being a way of life in Italy. But Naples took my breath away, despite holding on to my backpack (which I wore on my front) on to dear life.

Think Italy and you picture the canals of Venice, the imperialistic Rome, the holy Vatican, the

museums, churches of Florence and the vineyards of Tuscany. Not many venture deep to the south – to Naples. Yet this city is one of the most charming, most eclectic, culturally diverse and beautiful cities of Italy.

There’s so much to see and do in and around Naples; you could spend an entire week here and still not do it all. Be it churches, museums, parks, palaces, lakes; or strolling around the ancient city of Pompeii, climbing the Vesuvius volcano or taking a ferry to visit the chic island of Capri.

But what’s most fascinating is not what you see around Naples, it’s what’s deep below the city – an entire another city.

   

As you descend 40 metres deep below the surface under layers and layers of volcanic earth, one goes down in time, almost 2400 years. Here you find a different world, unexplored, isolated by time, but deeply connected with the world above – the underground city of ancient Naples.

 Excavations deep below the surface over the years have unearthed labyrinths of ancient Greco Roman times dating back to almost the 1^st century.  This hidden city beneath today’s city of Naples can be accessed from different places around the city. Some reveal ancient water aqueducts and sewer systems dating back 23 centuries; some lead to ancient dwellings with pottery shards that probably indicate a communal kitchen. One that is accessed through a trap door on the floor of current house on street level, apparently was the place where Nero famously played the fiddle during theatre performances.

The one I visited was a Greco-Roman ruin beneath the 18th-century cloister at San Lorenzo Maggiore. Descending a carefully constructed wooden staircase and almost 40 meters below street level, I found myself time travelling to an era centuries behind the present time. Entire streets and houses have been unearthed here and I found myself wandering and peering into the lives of a first-century A.D. Roman market, a barrel-vaulted shopping arcade, a domed oven of an ancient bakery and a communal laundry complete with tubs and drains.

The catacombs present a surreal synchronicity of eerie silence together with an almost cacophonic jumble of visual imageries – of ancient caves and Roman markets, early Christian burial sites of faded frescoes and colourful mosaics, layered with World War II air-raid shelters, which  some of these spaces were later converted to.

Surreal, compelling and utterly fascinating! It’s one thing to visit museums and see carefully preserved artefacts from ancient times behind thick glass enclosures, but to walk along what was once the street s of the bygone era and among the carefully unearthed and beautifully preserved lives of ancient civilisation is an experience that just cannot be missed.