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The Cemetery of the 366 Trenches
 By
most accounts, Charles III of
Bourbon, who ruled the Kingdom of Naples from
1734 to 1759, was an "enlightened monarch." He didn't
just build opera houses and royal palaces. He set out,
for example, to construct the world's largest shelter
for the indigent, the mammoth Albergo dei
Poveri, a facility—a walled town,
virtually— that would house and educate 8,000 of the
kingdom's destitute at one time. That project never
got finished—not the least reason for which was that
Charles abdicated to return to Spain, leaving Naples
in the care of his half-wit son, Ferdinand. One
project, however that did get finished dealt with the
unpleasant task of what to do with the dead who
couldn't afford a burial. The nobility and otherwise
well-heeled, of course, had private chapels and burial
grounds within the city, but what of the poor, the
homeless, and the unknown stragglers in the big city
who just dropped dead every time there was a minor
outbreak of the plague or cholera or even from natural
causes? It fit in with
Charles' scheme of a "cycle of assistance" for the
indigent that a free, modern cemetery for the poor
should be built.
The design fell to Ferdinando Fuga
to fulfill this plan for a new cemetery, a very
advanced one for its day in that it was to be well
beyond the city walls. After Charles' departure for
Spain, Fuga got the approval of the new monarch,
Ferdinand IV, in 1762 for the construction of a
pauper's cemetery to be built not too distant from the
Albergo dei Poveri. The project was
based on Fuga's experience in planning the Santo Spirito cemetery in Rome. The
plan foresaw a square walled-in space on three sides
with a building bounding the fourth side, which would
house a chapel, custodian's quarters, a mortuary, and
the entrance to the premises. Fuga followed his layout
of the courtyard of the Albergo in
designing the grounds of the cemetery, even down to
the dimensions—80 meters on a side, paved with gray
trachyte stone.
 The project
called for the creation of 366 trenches, each mounted
by an arch and each trench marked by a day of the year
(to include the extra day in a leap year). The first
trench would receive those who died on January 1; the
second day, January 2, and so on throughout the year,
a scheme that gave the cemetery its unusual name. The
cemetery marks the first use of the Poggioreale section of
Naples—at the time, well outside the city—as the area
for municipal cemetery space. The cemetery served from
1762 to 1890; it is estimated that 2.5 million bodies
were interred during that time. The register that
recorded the burials, however, has been lost. The
grounds may be visited, but they are now in poor
repair; the premises are in the hands of the
arch-fraternity of Santa
Maria del Popolo.
The
entrance is from a small side street that angles off
from Corso Malta named via Fontanelle al
Trivio, originally marked on old maps simply as,
Strada che porta alle
Sepolture dette il Camposanto—the "road that
leads to the cemetery." The lower entrance to the
grounds is marked by an arch (top photo), and the
entrance to the cemetery, itself (photo, right),
displays marble plaques attesting to the work of
Ferdinando Fuga at the behest of Ferdinand IV.
Currently, the central courtyard (photo, right) bears
no trace, whatsoever, of the original trenches; it has
been planted or paved over. One hears that some sort
of "historical restoration" is planned, but that has
not yet been undertaken.
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