The Tomb of Virgil & the Neapolitan Crypt

Across the street from the Mergellina train station is an historical park known as The Tomb of Virgil, the traditional last resting place of this immortal Roman poet, who spent  much of his life in the city of Naples. Legend says that the poet—also renowned as a sorcerer—called the adjacent tunnel into existence by his powers. (It may also have been Lucius Cocceus Auctus, the great Roman engineer who built the nearby Seiano Grotto and many of the fortifications of the Roman Imperial Port in Baia.) The tunnel is also called the Neapolitan Crypt. (Also see the entry on tunnels.)

Also, whether or not the author of The Aeneid is actually buried here, another, much more recent, poet is: the most famous of all Italian Romantics, Giacomo Leopardi, who died in Naples in 1837. From within the park, itself, you have a view of the entrance to the tunnel built by the Romans in the second century B.C. to connect Naples and Pozzuoli. The tunnel is also referred to as la cripta napoletana—The Neapolitan Crypt.

This is the tunnel, or ‘grotta,’ referred to in the name of this area of the city, Piedigrotta—"at the foot of the grotto". This tunnel was used on and off until well into the 19th century before being superseded by the two modern tunnels used by the traffic of today. 

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