Halloween in Naples 2026: Fontanelle, catacombs, underground

This year Halloween falls on a Saturday and All Saints' Day (Ognissanti) on a Sunday, so you get a full long weekend, and Monday 2 November is the Day of the Dead. Halloween reached Naples late and settled on top of something much older: a city that talks to its dead, adopts them and brings them sweets. To spend 31 October here you don't need a costume. You need a sweatshirt, because you'll be going underground, and a couple of bookings made in good time.

Below are the places where this story really shows, with opening times taken from the official sites. Most of the 2026 themed events are announced in mid-October: where you need to check, we'll say so.

Saturday 31 October: under the city, even after dark

The underground is the most sensible place to spend Halloween in Naples, because down there the fear isn't fake: Greek quarries, cisterns, shelters where people slept through the bombs. Napoli Sotterranea starts from Piazza San Gaetano 69, on via dei Tribunali, with tours in Italian and English every hour, 10am-6pm. You go down among the Greco-Roman aqueduct and the wartime shelters. The evening tour runs only on Thursdays at 9pm, by booking and with at least ten people: if you arrive on Thursday 29, give it a try.

On the other side of the centre is the Galleria Borbonica, the tunnel the king had dug under Chiaia: cisterns, air-raid shelters and vintage cars and motorbikes left down there since the war. In recent years, on 30 and 31 October, the Galleria has run a Halloween night on rafts across the underground water table, with evening slots and places that go fast. For 2026 it hasn't been announced yet: keep an eye on their website from early October. The regular tours run as usual in the meantime.

Tours with actors in the lanes and parties in bars change every year and are announced in the two weeks before. The place to gather is still Piazza Bellini, which is packed on a Saturday night anyway.

The Fontanelle and the anime pezzentelle

If one place explains why Halloween in Naples isn't an imported holiday, it's the Cimitero delle Fontanelle, at via Fontanelle 80, in the Rione Sanità neighbourhood. It's a tuff quarry of about 3,000 square metres where, for centuries, the bones of epidemic victims and of the poor with no grave ended up. This is where the cult of the anime pezzentelle, the "poor souls", was born: a family would choose a nameless skull, clean it, build it a little house of wood or marble and pray to it. In return the soul, from purgatory, was meant to send a favour, sometimes a dream with the lottery numbers.

Since 18 April 2026 the cemetery has been open again on a permanent basis, run by the La Paranza cooperative together with the city council. It's open 10am-6pm, last entry 5.15pm, closed on Wednesdays, and online booking is always required. It's open on Saturday 31 and Sunday 1; on Mondays and Fridays there's also an hour, 9am-10am, that's free and reserved for prayer only. On Monday 2 November, the Day of the Dead, that hour shows you the cult as it still lives today.

Sunday 1 November: the catacombs of San Gennaro and San Gaudioso

A quarter of an hour's walk from the Fontanelle are the Catacombs of San Gennaro, two levels of underground basilicas with frescoes more than a thousand years old and the mosaics of the Crypt of the Bishops, and the Catacombs of San Gaudioso, beneath the Basilica of Santa Maria della Sanità. At San Gaudioso, in the 17th century, nobles had themselves buried with their skull set into the wall and their body painted below it: it's the closest thing to a Halloween image you'll find in a church.

One ticket covers both catacombs and the basilica. Watch the holiday opening hours: San Gennaro opens only 10am-1pm on Sundays and public holidays, San Gaudioso every day 10am-5pm. So on Sunday 1 start with San Gennaro in the morning and leave San Gaudioso for the afternoon. Here you'll find the guided tour of the Catacombs of San Gennaro, in Italian or English.

Munaciello and bella 'mbriana: the other tenants

Every Neapolitan home, they say, has two tenants who don't pay rent. The bella 'mbriana is the good spirit, an elegant lady who protects whoever lives there: you greet her when you come in. The munaciello is more complicated. He's a little monk who moves things around, makes your keys vanish and now and then leaves a coin. Matilde Serao, in her Leggende napoletane (Neapolitan Legends), has him born of a 15th-century love affair that ended badly; the more down-to-earth explanation links him to the pozzari, the men who cleaned the cisterns and could climb into houses at night through the wells. If you go down into Napoli Sotterranea, you'll see those wells.

Legends are best told on foot. On via dei Tribunali stands the church of Purgatorio ad Arco, with bronze skulls on the facade and, underneath, the hypogeum where people venerate the skull of Lucia, wearing a bridal veil. It's one of the stops on the walk origins, cults and legends of the old centre with an archaeologist, two and a half hours from the Greek walls to the Duomo.

Monday 2 November: the dead and the torrone

On 2 November Naples goes to the cemetery at Poggioreale, among flowers and chatter. At home a sweet appears that exists only in these days: torrone dei morti, 'o murticiello. It has nothing to do with Christmas nougat. It's soft, made of chocolate with hazelnuts, and often shaped like a little coffin: the tavùto. Tradition says the dead come back on the night between the 1st and the 2nd, and the sweet is there to sweeten their journey.

From late October, pastry shop windows fill up with torroncini in dozens of flavours, from classic to pistachio, gianduia and coffee, sold whole or by the slice. Ask for the soft chocolate one with hazelnuts: that's the traditional one.

For the long weekend, the version that works: Saturday 31 underground by day and the old centre at night, Sunday 1 the Sanità with its catacombs and the Fontanelle, Monday 2 a torrone and a walk around town. On the map of Naples you can see how close these places are: from the Sanità to Piazza San Gaetano is barely half an hour on foot. Halloween events, as they're announced, go into things to do in Naples, with the long weekend's dates and the experiences you can book on those days.