It is said that Naples was founded by the sirens, whose songs lured sailors to their death, in fact the very ones whom Odysseus so narrowly escaped. It is also said that outside this city in the Phlegrean Fields is where he outwitted the one-eyed cyclops. This is the city with the legend of Niccolo Pesce who was said have webbed hands and feet, so adept he was in the sea. And there is Pulcinella, the masked prankster of Neapolitan lore whose figurines hang from hundreds of stores around the city. But all these characters and tales of fantasy aside, Naples holds in its belly, a little known passageway that lets you travel back by more than two thousand years.
About fifty meters under Naples lies a labyrinth of man-made tunnels and caves, long and vast, almost a small city underneath Naples above. In places, they are three times the height of man and many times as wide. And these have a history that would hold the interest of both the engineer and the historian, a realist and an escapist alike. These tunnels were at first aqueducts, and then subsequently stone quarries, sewers, landfills and bomb shelters. And thankfully for me, presently they are used as as a little known tourist attraction.
More than four hundred years before Caesar crossed the Rubicon, Greek settlers in the area that is now Napoli decided to cave out these aqueducts under the ground, both to collect rainwater in cisterns and to bring water from afar. And this ancient engineering wonder begins here. Leave aside the immense labour that would have gone into excavating the tunnels. The rocks of the ground, and thus the walls of the cave are made of a porous volcanic stone "Tuff". And to keep the walls from absorbing water, the walls were covered in a water-proof plaster that is in places intact to this day. Wells extended down to the cisterns, which were the source of potable water for the entire city for many many centuries.They also had the foresight to construct access wells for maintenance crew to descend and sidewalls for them to stand on while they cleaned the debris from the water.
As time passed, in the late middle ages from 1200-1500 A.D., these caves served another purpose when a ban was imposed on importing construction material into the city. They provided the stone needed for construction of the city above it. The surprising thing is the fact that to construct the city above, one would quarry stone from right beneath their feet. Sounds like hacking off the tree branch you are sitting on, and yet despite this hollow foundation, the city seems to have stood the test of time. The stone was quarried using a procedure I have often read about and yet one that never ceases to amaze me in its simplicity. Wooden spikes were driven along grains in the rock and were wetted with water. The wood expanded and the rock split along these fault lines making it easy to quarry them in large chunks to suit construction needs. The stone was then lifted out through chutes running up to the surface. Around the 1800s or so, unfortunately there was a spread of Cholera in the city and infected waters from the sewers seeped in through the porous stone, contaminating the water. And so finally, after 2000 years, the water system was finally abandoned. The dark caverns lay ignored until darker times called once more for their need.
It was the early years of the 1940s when bombs rained in from the skies, the people were forced to seek shelter beneath the ground. For the city that had the unfortunate reputation of being the most bombed in Italy, the ancient Greeks came to rescue. The Sotterranea were turned into bomb shelters. Most of the access wells were closed with just a few left open for air, fingers crossed in the hope that a bomb wouldn't fall through it. The depth beneath the ground forced the elderly, the children and all those who could not descend quickly in emergencies to convert the tunnels into temporary living quarters. Tonnes of cooking utensils and children's toys from the time were recovered in recent excavations. But people inside survived, even as a church above was razed to the ground. And in years to pass, with the horrors of war forgotten, the Sotterranea were turned into landfill sites for waste from construction activities.
Climbing up a level, yet beneath modern ground, one comes to the old Roman buildings. A theater in fact. And bizzarely, the sections of the building are used today as basements and wine cellars by the more modern (and yet still pretty old) buildings constructed on top of them. Knocking on someone's door and descending the stairs into their cellar, one descends into Roman history, replete with the walls of the era. With a constant threat of war over centuries, in the quest to keep all construction within the city walls, Naples rose vertically building over older structures. They did not then know that in centuries time, these old structures would be searched for eagerly by glassy eyed people known as archaeologists.
And the ancient interest in engineering is once again revealed in these walls, which are constructed with a crisscross of horizontally lined bricks and diamond shaped stones. The pattern, I was told, was earthquake resistant, and succeeded in distributing the stress from shocks, so as not to crack. While I do not know of its accuracy, it's hard to argue when you see the behemoth Colosseum still standing while modern buildings tumble within a decade.
Fortunately the tunnels were cleared in the 1980s and turned into a semi-museum which it remains to date. But in the beginning, I told you it was a site to interest the realist and escapist alike and have yet to narrate the most curious facet of these caves. Being deep beneath the ground, and being so vast and probably specific to the climate of the region, the temperature inside the caves remains at a pleasant 15-20 °C, regardless of the weather outside. And the humidity is always high, near 90%. It does not matter in there if it is a boiling 35 °C as it was on the day of my visit or nearing zero as it is in winters. This combination gave rise to an interesting experiment. It was demonstrated that plants can survive in here with no need of being watered as long as there is light, for they absorb water from the humidity in the air. Potted plants illuminated by UV lamps survived for months untouched by human hand. And this raised a question in my mind. Could there not be more life as we go deeper? Might not the fantastic subterranean world of Jules Verne be then real? :)
