NAPOLI UNDERGROUND: The charm of the city parallel study
Forty feet deep beneath the shouting and characteristic streets of the historic center of Naples, is a world apart, for a very unexplored, isolated in his quiet, yet thousands of years closely linked with urban activities' the womb of Naples, which itself was born. Visiting it means making a trip back in time two thousand and four hundred anni.Ogni long time, since the founding of Neapolis to the bombs of World War II, has left its mark on the walls of yellow tufa stone with which the city of Naples lies underground costruita.Nel a labyrinth of tunnels, cisterns and cavities forming a real city that was taken, in the negative, the city surface.
Descend with us into the bowels of the city to discover the history and mysteries.
History A Neapolitan proverb says, "Me stáj purtann vic p 'and vicariell," referring to those who want to take a thorny subject in another direction. Still, the alleys and vicarielli speaks of this said, seem to be inspired by the shape of the city's underground, consists predominantly of narrow tunnels where they can enter only a few people at volta.I passages on which stands the city of Naples have a ' The first changes ancient origin morphology of the territory, brought by the Greeks since 470 BC, were dictated by water supply and the need to recover building materials to erect the buildings of Neapolis. In later centuries the expansion of the city led to the creation of a real waterworks that collect and distribute water through a series of tanks connected to a network of tunnels. During the Roman rule the aqueduct was extended and improved, but with the advent of Anjou, in 1266, the city had a large number of buildings which, of course, an increase of extraction of the tuff from the ground to build new buildings, confirming a peculiarity of Naples to be generated from their bowels. Only in 1885, after a terrible epidemic of cholera, was abandoned the use of the old water distribution system to adopt the new aqueduct, which is still in operation.
The final phase of underground was the second world war, when it offered refuge to the population to adapt the structures of the aqueduct to the needs of citizens. Were set up 369 shelters in all of Naples in cave shelters and 247 landslade. After the war, the lack of transportation, almost all the rubble were dumped into the ground, burying with them, even all the memories of that sad period. Until the end '60s has not spoken about the underground, although many continued to use the wells as a dumping ground. After 20 years of excavation and remediation, and thanks to the commitment and sacrifice of volunteers who, after work, descended into the bowels of Naples to unearth an artifact of that historic grandezzaun - it is still possible to see the page unprecedented in the history of Naples.
The legend of "Monaciello" Each house in the city of Naples, could draw water from the cistern below through a shaft to which he had access to the "pozzaro", a class of professionals, who moved deftly in these caves walking along narrow passages and climbing up the wells through the holes at a distance more or less regular.
These characters, real lords of the underworld had free access to all homes with wells and gave rise to anecdotes and legends still alive in the imagination like that of the Neapolitan "Monaciello, benign or malignant spirits that occupied most of the lady home that the water supply, and used the subway who knew, or appear to disappear under the cloak work in the shadows, resembled precisely the habit of Monaco.