Napoli Sotterranea: Naples underground and Greek tunnels

When you walk along Spaccanapoli or through piazza San Gaetano, you’re on streets built over thousands of years of history. Forty metres down there is quite literally another city: tunnels dug by the Greeks in the 4th century BC, enlarged by the Romans, used as aqueducts in the Middle Ages, turned into storage in the 1800s and finally used as air-raid shelters in the Second World War.

Greek origins: Neapolis and the tunnels

Naples began as a Greek colony, Neapolis, the new city, around 470 BC. The Greeks needed stone to build walls and roads. They started quarrying Neapolitan yellow tuff, a light but strong volcanic stone, creating underground galleries that over time became the backbone of the city’s water supply.

The Roman era: the aqueduct

The Romans turned the Greek tunnels into a sophisticated water system serving the whole city. The Augustan aqueduct, built in the 1st century BC, carried water from the Serino springs to the underground cisterns of Naples. The system stayed in use until 1885, when a cholera epidemic pushed the authorities to build a new, modern aqueduct.

“Naples is a city in layers. You can’t understand the present unless you know everything underneath it, literally.”

The Second World War: air-raid shelters

Between 1940 and 1944 Naples was one of the most heavily bombed cities in Italy. The galleries became a refuge for civilians during air raids, with thousands of people at a time sheltering in the tuff cavities. They lived there for weeks: sleeping on wooden bunks, cooking on makeshift stoves, setting up small theatres and chapels.

How to visit Napoli Sotterranea

Visiting Napoli Sotterranea is more than a tourist tour: it’s a way to understand what makes this city what it is. The resilience, the knack for adapting, the layers of culture. It all makes more sense when you walk where the Greeks walked 2,500 years ago.