[This article comes from a good friend, Larry Ray, former and longtime resident of Naples and hard-core "Napoletanophile," especially whatever pertains to the mysterious "other city"--the caverns, tunnels, hypogea, quarries, and bat-caves that lurk beneath the city, just waiting to swallow you whole. He also has in this Around Naples Encyclopedia a page devoted to Remembering Naples. Additionally, he maintains his own website and is the English-language translator for the articles that appear on the site of Napoli Underground , which you are cordially invited to visit. The site is the work of scholarly spelunkers and sundry mole-people who, yea, even as we speak, are shedding new light on dark places.] The Cavern beneath via
Nicolardi—the Big Money Pit
(2010 update: below) by Larry Ray
First, a brief history of the
ancient underground quarry and the reason for all
the attention today. Tuff (from the Italian "tufo") is a
"type of rock consisting of consolidated volcanic
ash ejected from vents during a volcanic eruption."
The entire Naples area is a geothermal region
with deep veins of the tuff sandstone, called
"yellow tuff." It is an ideal building
material and a large percentage of the lovely
castles, villas and other ancient buildings in
Naples were built from it. The tuff is reached
through an access and removal shaft called the occhio di monte,
or "eye of the mountain". Through this shaft,
gigantic blocks of tuff were quarried and pulled up.
The resulting void was a bottle shaped cavity with
sloping shoulders which provided ample reinforcement
to prevent future cave-ins. The large access and
removal shaft was later covered over with planks of
wood, then layered with crushed tuff and soil. Out
of sight and out of mind. These huge quarried caverns
honeycomb Naples and its surrounding area and have
been interconnected with tunnels, galleries and
diversion channels from the ancient Greek aqueducts
and later aqueducts serving the city. In short the
entire city has huge caverns beneath it such the one
seen in the above photo. So why, after centuries,
have some suggested filling in the one near via
Nicolardi on the hills above the city? This week, an annual series of
civil defense earthquake drills have been conducted.
The most recent devastating 1980 earthquake is
still very clear in everyone's minds. It caused
severe structural damage and the displacement of
tens of thousands of victims whose homes were
uninhabitable after the quake. Temporary emergency
housing was improvised all over the city in large
open areas where small dwellings were devised,
including those from modular steel shipping
containers. One of the temporary settlement areas
was, as you may have already guessed, in an open
area off via Nicolardi—and one of the heavy steel
dwellings was placed over the ancient boarded up
"eye of the mountain" shaft. Fortunately no one was
at home when the modular home's weight was enough to
send it tumbling through the rotted boards and fill
material. It fell more than 38 meters, almost 125
feet, into the cavern below. Our webmaster, and senior
speleologist, Fulvio Salvi, more than 25 years ago
was then a junior speleologist working on the staff
of the City of Naples' "Department of the
Underground". It was generally known that a
quarry existed up on Capodimonte but it had never
been explored. So after the cave-in, Fulvio,
athletic and eager, was the first soul in several
centuries to enter the huge cavern. He descended
slowly down a slender steel cable...and descended...
and descended...into the pitch black void. He began
to spin, like an ice skater, faster and faster as he
descended to 100 feet, and still no bottom. He was
slowly able to check his rotation, and set foot on
the crumbled bottom at around 38 to 40 meters,
125-130 feet. He was later joined by the
most knowledgeable expert of the "sottosuolo"
(subsoil), engineer, Clemente Esposito, who helped
photograph, and who directed measurement, survey and
mapping of the huge quarry. A temporary steel cage
climbing shaft was later inserted to allow easier
access for subsequent exploration and evaluation. So, fast forward to the
present: Civil Defense officials, conferring with
today's department of the underground, somehow
recall the incident of 1980 with the temporary
container shelter falling into the quarry, and
discuss "fixing a potential problem." It may not be
unlike so many huge projects we are all familiar
with in our own countries, like grand bridges to
nowhere being built, or inexplicable million dollar
government structures being erected. You get
the idea. So, what has to be asked is:
"With an entire city built over these quarries that
have been down there for centuries, what
justification is there to spend ten million
dollars pumping concrete into a 187,000 square foot
void? Just to be "on the safe side?" Would the
government want to fill all of them at 10 million
dollars a pop? There have been numerous cave-ins on
a regular basis all over Naples year after year, and
they just get covered over and repaired. And the
cave in up on Capodimonte is not over a roadway or
populated area—the cave in of the old shaft opening
was, in fact, out in that open area which was used
as a temporary housing area 26 years ago. It has been suggested that pumping ten million dollars worth of concrete into an almost bottomless pit just to "be safe" would be just like attempting to drain the Bay of Naples to prevent the possibility of a tsunami destroying the area.
Caves &Tunnels & Holes
in the Ground, Plus: This recorded
interview (about 30 min.) with Larry Ray from Radio New
Zealand about the caves and quarries beneath
Naples. This version is on
the Napoli
Undergound
website.
Update of The Big Money Pit
(January 25, 2010) by Larry Ray Once Again, plans to pour 6.5
Million Euros into a huge hole in the ground in
Naples. to main index to portal for urban planning |
Only
in Naples, Italy, could a story this fantastic
actually be possible. The story came to our
attention when we noticed that our web site's
database was getting an unusually high number of
hits regarding a huge underground tuff quarry
(C0456) up on the Capodimonte hill above the
city. We soon learned that State TV channel.
Telegiornale 3. had run a somewhat fantastic story
about a proposed plan to fill the 5,000+ Square
meter cavity, some 38 meters below ground, with
mega-tons of concrete to "shore up" the cavity—at a
proposed cost of 8 million Euros, or 10 million US
dollars.