Naples's Secret Places

Built between 1887 and 1890 as the centerpiece of a major slum-clearance project, Galleria Umberto I replaced a warren of decaying alleys with a cross-shaped arcade under an 18-meter glass-and-iron dome — a direct architectural cousin of Milan's more famous Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II.

The floor still bears its original zodiac signs and compass-rose mosaic, and the historic Salone Margherita café inside once hosted Naples's belle époque variety shows; today it's a genuine mixed-use passage of shops, cafés, and offices rather than a museum piece behind glass.

It sits directly across from the Teatro San Carlo opera house and a block from Piazza del Plebiscito, yet stays noticeably quieter than the crowds circulating outside — many visitors glance in through the entrance arch and keep walking.

Tucked into the base of the Posillipo hill beside Mergellina station, this small park holds a Roman-era columbarium tomb that tradition — not verified archaeology — has long identified as Virgil's burial place, alongside the genuine, documented grave of 19th-century poet Giacomo Leopardi.

The park's third major feature, the Crypta Neapolitana, is a Roman tunnel from the 1st century BC that once connected Naples to Pozzuoli, its walls carrying traces of medieval frescoes still visible today.

Despite sitting right beside one of the city's busiest transit hubs, the park itself is small, shaded, and rarely crowded — a five-minute detour that most people heading to or from Mergellina never make.

Carved into a former tuff quarry in the Rione Sanità district, the Fontanelle became a mass burial site during 17th- and 18th-century plague and cholera outbreaks, when the city's own cemeteries overflowed — the cave's vast, cathedral-like chambers hold tens of thousands of anonymous bones stacked in careful rows.

Out of this grew the uniquely Neapolitan 'cult of the skulls' (culto delle anime pezzentelle): locals would informally adopt an anonymous skull, clean it, give it a name, and pray for its soul in exchange for hoped-for favors — a folk practice the Church periodically tried to suppress but never fully extinguished.

Managed today by a cooperative of young people from the Sanità neighborhood itself, a visit combines genuine local history with an atmosphere unlike anywhere else in Naples — vast, cool, dim chambers of bone stretching back into the tuff.