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Jeff
Matthews 2002-2012
entry Mar 2007
Everything is related to
Naples
(There are 4 items below.) Secret
Tunnels! —or—
"Quick, your
majesty! Into the sewer!" "I'll see you in the tunnel!"
On
February 19, 1853, King
Ferdinand II of Bourbon, signed a decree
that gave to architect Errico Alvino the
task of building an underground passageway
from the west under Mt. Echia
(Pizzofalcone) to connect with Piazza Vittoria
at the royal palace. (Thus, the tunnel would
bore beneath the cliff upon which stood the
acropolis of the original Greek city of Parthenope, well
before "Neapolis"—Naples.) This was not meant
for pleasurable strolls in the Bat Cave for
the royal family or anything of such a social
nature. The tunnel was strictly military: it
was meant to bring in troops to protect the
Royal Palace, if necessary; these troops were
garrisoned on the other side of Pizzofalcone
near Piazza Vittoria at via Pace (now via
Domenico Morelli) in quarters at Ferrantina
square and at San
Pasquale di Chiaia. The tunnel would
also provide an escape route for the royal
family. (What would happen if the troops
running in ran into the kings and queens
running out? I don't know.) The
work was started immediately and then
interrupted in 1855 for technical reasons as
well as the fact the revolutionary turmoil was
moving faster than the people with shovels.
The entire kingdom was about to be engulfed in
a war to resist Garibaldi and subsequent
incorporation into a united Italy—a war that
the Bourbons ultimately lost.
In
spite of the advantages of pre-dug cavities in
the area, 1855 builders started running into
enormous difficulties due to the large number
of cisterns and aqueducts still in use at the
time below the surface, things that you could
not simply dig through without interrupting
(or even destroying) the water supply of tens
of thousands of inhabitants in the area. The
tunnelers in the 1850s also ran into the same
problems as have their colleagues throughout
the centuries in Naples (even today!): to wit,
the changing nature of the material you are
trying to tunnel through. It is all volcanic,
but when you cross the boundary from solid
tuff into a less densely packed strata of
pyroclastic material, the sides and ceiling
are more likely to cave in; thus, as the
tunnel progress from west to east, it narrows
and gets lower since the workers had to spend
more time shoring up potential danger spots
rather than making the whole length uniformly
wide and high. (This
item has more on recent problems of
tunneling in Naples.) The
tunnel was left in an unfinished state—that
is, without an exit near the royal palace,
until 1939, when the Fascist government
decided to convert it into an air raid shelter
(see item #3, below) The entrance was on the
north side of Piazza
Plebiscito from the building that now
houses the Naples prefecture. After the war,
the entrance was covered and forgotten about
until 1968, when local urban spelunker
Clemente Esposito uncovered it. The numbers
are impressive: the original Bourbon tunnel
plus the earlier Spanish quarries plus the
aqueducts converted to air raid shelters
(possible only after the new Naples aqueduct
in the late 1800s had made them no longer
necessary ) come out to 10,000 square meters
(that is, 10 sq. km or six square miles). Until the 1970s
the underground area was used as a "Municipal
Deposit." What that really meant was a place
to dump the enormous amounts of wartime
rubble. This includes not just the bricks of
bombed-out buildings, but cars, motorcycles,
old refrigerators, statues, and, generally
speaking, accumulated broken bits and pieces
of centuries of Naples. An exhibition about
the tunnel was put on at the Castel dell'Ovo a number
of years ago. One awaits further news of some
final disposition of this latest addition to
what Neapolitans now call "the other city," by
which they mean the 700 (!)
quarries and many miles of ancient
passageways beneath the surface.
#2 update: Mar 14, 2010  I'm not sure what
the big deal is about discovering chunks of
those Fascist Marble Statues
(FMS!—overly-ripped goons of Art Deco Futurism
who more or less all resemble the robot Gort
in The Day
the Earth Stood Still (except not as
limber). Yet, the papers are fussing about the
statues, apparently dumped into the Bourbon
Tunnel as the Allies closed in on Naples
in 1943 and Fascists swiftly morphed into
anti-Fascists. (I guess the mayor couldn't
very well hide those things in his closet.)
The papers should really be fussing about the
place where they were found—the tunnel—because
this means that work is progressing towards
opening the thing to the public sooner or
later, another bit of underground Naples to
add to the already impressive list of tunnels,
caves and quarries of "the city beneath the
city." [Link to
portal for Underground Naples.]An organization called Borbonica sotterranea is pushing ahead with the clearing and cleaning up of the ex-Bourbon military tunnel beneath Mt. Echia. They have produced a good video of their efforts to date; the video is at this You Tube link. The hard-hatted gentleman's explanations are in Italian, but they more or less tell the same story as item#1, above. There are some interesting sidelights in the video, however, such as the addition of a row of late WWII latrines put in when the tunnel was used as a bomb shelter. Also, you can see the abandoned cars and other detritus dumped into the tunnel in the mid-1940s. The particular FMS that has the papers oohing-and-aahing seems to be what is left (photo, above) of the monument to Aurelio Padovani (1888-1926), an early Neapolitan Fascist trade unionist who participated in Mussolini's march on Rome in 1922. The monument to him had stood in the square in front of the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli (now the site of ongoing construction for a new metro station). #3 update: Mar 7, 2011  The papers have
announced the opening of the splendid new
Morelli parking structure; it is dug into the
side of Mt. Echia, a few yards from the west
exit of the Galleria
della Vittoria car tunnel one block
from the Villa
Comunale. The entrance to the structure
is totally inconspicuous; within, however, it
is a seven-story affair with 250 long-term
rental spaces and 230 hourly slots. More
impressive for our purposes, however, is that
the entire affair occupies the western
entrance to the old Bourbon Tunnel, which has
now been opened for public tours; thus,
another bit of the "city beneath the city" is
now accessible to tourists who fancy
themselves mole-people.There is a difference between being "beneath the city" at this site and elsewhere, say, in the downtown area of Naples. Here, you are really beneath the pre-Naples city of Parthenope that sat on the hill above you. The entire hill, as indicated in item #1, above, has a great many quarried out caves, perhaps the most famous of which is the Cavern of Mithra. That one, of course, is Greek, but most of the large quarried spaces beneath Mt. Echia are cisterns that drew on the Carmignano Aqueduct from the early 1600s. These are upside-down funnel-like structures dug deep down into the hill (details here), many of which were then incorporated into the Bourbon Tunnel in the 1850s. Those cisterns (and the tunnel, itself) were abandoned after the building of the new aqueduct in the 1880s; later, many of the cisterns were used as bomb shelters in WWII. The builders of the shelters used the Bourbon Tunnel for access and then tunneled off to the sides to find additional cisterns, and then tunneled further to the next one and the next, thus connecting them and giving a labyrinthian quality to the whole complex of shelters. Some of them are very large (one is nicknamed "The Cathedral"!), and some are small enough to make you intensely dislike being confined beneath a mountain. (Don't make me talk about the ant-hive corridors and connecting passageways!) Entrance, newly opened Bourbon Tunnel  Stairways into the
shelters from the surface were dug in WWII,
but there are older stairs as well. A guide
told me that during the process of exploring
and clearing the old cistern spaces to the
sides of the tunnel, they found a long, steep
stairway leading up and decided to follow it.
They found a closed door up at the top and
knocked! A dog on the other side went into a
frenzy of überbark since he had surely
never heard a knock from behind that door
before! Sooner or later, Fido's master came
and opened up. (He said "Who is it?" first, at
which point one of the fun-loving guys from Borbonica
sotterranea replied, "We have come
from the Underworld to take you!
Heh-heh-heh.") The urban spelunkers
found themselves in the basement of a
veterinary clinic up on a busy thoroughfare
atop the hill in the area known as
Pizzofalcone. The members of Borbonica
sotterranea have spent the last five
years to get as far as they have and the
results are impressive. For my tastes,
however, they spend a bit too much time doting
on their collection of old abandoned cars and
motor scooters; rather than clear them out,
the Borbonica
sotterranea has pushed them all over
to the side where they join the broken hunks
of marble mentioned in item #2 (above); it all
looks like a display of humorous installation
art; for example, one old and crushed Fiat has
been adorned with a scrawled reminder from the
attendant to "please leave the keys in the
ignition." (The sign was probably put there by
"Underworld Guy" from a few sentences ago. The
cars are even featured on the tickets for the
guided tours (photo, above). So, the entrance
is on via Morelli; there is a pedestrian
entrance that will lead you past the parking
structure to the back and to the gated
entrance to the tunnel. (If I have not been
obvious enough about it, don't go if you are
claustrophobic.)
To Hell & Back
or This is NOT the River Styx...this is NOT the
River Styx....
Crossing the Styx-
Gustave Doré (1861)
 That
is your mantra if you decide to go on this tour. And
the little guide in the hard-hat might not be Charon
taking you for your last boat ride, this one to Hell.
Indeed, since my last visit (item #3, above) the
troglodytes of Borbonica
sotterranea have been hard at work burrowing
out their domain beneath Mt. Echia, the hill upon
which the original Greek city of Parthenope was
built—before there was a Naples.The most recent activity has involved bridging the spaces of the Bourbon Tunnel (described in the entries, above) to an adjacent and more recent space, this one a 400-meter tunnel started in the 1980s and meant to be part of the original Rapid Tram Line (RTL) which was to be ready by 1990 in time for the Naples matches of the World Cup that year (see this link). That flopped, both as soccer and engineering. Italy lost to Argentina in Naples, and the RTL tunnel was partially built but never completed. (The stretch of tunnel running in from near the stadium in Fuorigrotta has, however, since been incorporated into the new Line 6 coming into Naples from the west. That section is now up and running as far in as Mergellina.) From the downtown end of that RTL project, however, they started to tunnel beneath Piazza Plebiscito (the square in front of the Royal Palace). The idea was to head west and meet up with the line coming in. Assuming they didn't pass each other like moles in the night, there would then have been some grand Transcontinental Railway Moment; they would drive a golden spike, perhaps, and fans could then get out to the matches in Fuorigrotta. Could they do all that in just a few years? No. The whole project gave up the ghost, and the partially completed tunnel beneath Piazza Plebiscito was abandoned. When I said "bridging the spaces," that was only partially a metaphor. It isn't a bridge; it's a small barge—or a large raft. (There is standing room for about a dozen persons.) Lower sections of the Bourbon Tunnel already had water in them—not seawater, by the way; it's fresh water fed by the same subterranean sources that fed the old reservoir system (mentioned in the entries above). There was about a 40-meter-wide pool of water between the chambers of the Bourbon tunnel and the abandoned RTL tunnel, so Borbonica sotterranea built a shaky raft dock on both sides. That is the ride you can now take—not to hell, but rather to one hell of a waste of taxpayers' money.
The abandoned RTL tunnel
(photo© F. Salvi, NUG)  Make no
mistake, though. It can be spooky. As in Dante, you
"hurtle down to the end of all descent"—down through
one narrow tunnel after another. (I got stuck at one
point and, I assure you, the chorus whisper-chanting
behind me in ancient Greek, "C'mon, fat boy, move it along!" did
not help—although it does sound better in ancient
Greek). You wind up at water's edge and all you see is
nothing at the other end. Suddenly it's gloomy. It
might be Hades. Of course, it isn't (since everyone
knows that the real River Styx is at Lake Averno, a few miles
north of Naples.) It's just a very dark place; you
step off onto the raft, and here is where your
imagination kicks in. It's pitch black and for all you
know—which is zero—you may never come back. You are
then poled along to the far side by that mysterious
Charon impersonator. (One of your fellow-travelers has
a sense of humor that impels him to hold his little
flashlight beneath his chin and shine it up such that
his face takes on that grotesque "Hey, mommy. I'm a
monster"-look. I try to edge him closer to the side of
the raft.)You step off into a very large space well beneath Piazza Municipio. There is no exit at that end and, as far as I know, no plans to build one. The space is huge—an unused quarter-mile of modern subway tunnel with no future. It is not even to be used as part of the incoming #6 subway line, which is digging its own tunnel. Since the heavy lifting (or digging) has already been done, they should use the space for something—maybe an underground Museum of Boondoggles connected by satellite to countless other such sites around the world. Since there is no clear passage up to the top and out onto the welcoming wide-open spaces of Piazza Plebiscito (although the original construction workers must have had one), you turn around, walk back, hail a raft and trudge back the way you came, all the way beneath Mt. Echia, the hill of ancient Parthenope. It occurs to me that if this were Finnish mythology, you could do all that on the back of a swan. I am indebted to Clemente Esposito and his article "Il Tunnel Borbonico" on the website of Napoli Underground, by whose kind concession the photo of the tunnel in item #1 appears on this page. I thank (at least I think I do) Fulvio
Salvi of Napoli Underground for having shanghai'd me
onto the tour described in item #4 and for
constantly whispering in my ear: "The walls are not
closing in on you...not closing it on you...not... I repeat,
if you don't like the dark, water, tight spaces or
gloom (in whatever order), don't go. |
It
sounds like something out of Baroness Orczy's
Scarlet Pimpernel: the swish
and rustle of ballroom finery, swordplay and
the shouts of revolutionaries running through
the night, thrusting their flickering torches
into any cubby-hole that might shelter a
cowering nobleman; then, the storming of the
royal palace, at which point the king turns
the trick candelabrum lever in the library to
move the wall panel and flees into the secret
passage and away to a ship that takes him into
exile forever. Whew. Sob. It didn't turn out
that way in Naples, but I wish it had. That's
much better than 
The end of the tunnel at via
Domenico Morelli had the advantage of some
"starter" caves to work with. These had
actually been quarries used to provide blocks
of tuff rock for the many