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Hercules, thou shouldst be living at this hour.  Well before the construction of
the New City (“Neapolis”) in the fifth century B.C.,
Greeks built the original settlement of Parthenope on
what is now called Pizzofalcone or Mt. Echia. It is the
height that overlooks the small island of Megaride
(where the Castel dell’Ovo now
stands). At the time—in the seventh century B.C.—that
height commanded a view of the entire coast; the cliff
was pristine and washed by the sea and there were no
neighbors—the perfect place to put
an acropolis and town.Today, of course, even the mythical powers of Hercules would be hard-pressed to perform a thirteenth labor of clearing away 2,500 years of urbanization, including, but not limited to (as my lawyer friends like to say), the Nunziatella military academy, a dozen or so churches, and a long row of modern hotels that now totally obstruct the ancient view of the sea—indeed, the ancient view of the cliff from (!) the sea. So if Hercules can come forward in time—or back or sideways or whatever he does—I really want to see things the way they used to look. A print from the 1700s, when the cavern
was used for rope-making.  In order to build the town on top, the Greeks
quarried the tufaceous rock directly beneath them in the hill itself,
producing a man-made cavern 60 meters by 30 meters, and 25 meters
high. For centuries the space was a mithraion (from
whence the later Latin mithraeum), a chamber dedicated to the
Greek version of the cult of Mithra, their own syncretistic blend based
on the Persian (Zoroastrian) religion dedicated to the deity Mithra.
Later, Mithraism
spread throughout the Roman Empire and was a rival to Christianity
until banned by the edict of Theodosius I in 394
A.D. The mithraion
was typically a natural or man-made cavern, meant to
be dark and mysterious; there were benches for
participants, an altar, and the vast ceiling surfaces were often adorned with signs of the
zodiac. There
are still examples of such chambers throughout Europe,
some of which, over
the ages, have been converted to crypts beneath Christian places of
worship. The mithraion
of Parthenope was a large and important one among
the settlements of Magna Grecia,
one which welcomed
worshippers from throughout the Mediterranean and even
from Persia, itself. Today, the cavern of Mithra
is a parking structure. You can still see the many ladder-like hand and
footholds dug into the walls over the centuries by workmen as
they scurried up and down to dig out and fix up. The current owners
have put in an extra ramp and floor for parking such that you now have a
two-tier parking garage. The cavern is supported by eleven giant,
arched columns built in 1800 and maintained since then.
This reflects the older concern (since the time of the Spanish in the
1500s) that you can’t keep taking out rock from below your house and
putting it on top of your house for another floor. Mt. Echia rests on
many thousands of cubic meters of nothing.Entrance to the cavern is from the small street of Santa Maria a Cappella Vecchia at Piazza dei Martiri; you walk along the side of the large Feltrinelli book shop, past the old residence of Admiral Nelson (and Lady Hamilton), turning in on the left and following the P for “parking” arrows. You really can’t miss it. It’s that big. (It is marked as #2 on the map on this page.) Also see Proud to be a Troglodyte! Beneath Mt. Echia Caves The Bourbon Tunnel Beneath the Oldest Basilica The Big Money Pit The Roman Amphitheater in downtown Naples to portal for Underground Naples See also these articles about the Greeks in Naples portal for architecture & urban planning to portal for archaeology to main index |
