After our self guided tour of Il Duomo gave us sufficient time to admire the many different artistic talents that went into creating such a magnificent place, Emily and I couldn’t hold back our curiosity about the Underground Naples thing. We checked on the map to double check that we were still close and found that we were indeed. The walk to the start of the tour was short—maybe two blocks. But the start of the tour was hidden, sort of. There was a sign that said something about Napoli Sotterranea tickets so Emily went to go check it out. Turns out that place just directed us to the actual entrance, which was around the side of another church (big surprise) and tucked in this little corner that wasn’t even noticeable from the street.
We got our tickets for an English speaking tour and were given some extremely interesting pamphlets that gave us some history of what we were about to see. We chatted for a few more minutes with our tour guide, Alex (Alessandro), and a few of the other tour-takers. Then, the fun began.
First of all, I have to tell you right now that Alex was by far the best tour guide of all time. I love tours and I’ve been on a lot of them during my travels in the US (thank you, Lakeside), and not only was he funny, informative, and generally entertaining, he was downright animated. I’m serious! He acted things out and had wild gestures and expressions. But he wasn’t doing it to be goofy or anything; he was just genuinely that kind of person. He was a complete extrovert and it made the tour a blast! :)
First we went around to the other side of the church and followed the narrow street for almost a block. Then, we entered this little teeny, tiny home. It was on the street level and the Neapolitan word this kind of traditional house is basso. So we entered the basso and we told that based on ancient records and historical documents, archaeologists knew that old cities like Naples never expanded outside their city walls. Therefore, as they grew and built new things or were conquered and the new ruling party built new things, the old things were just built over if they weren’t destroyed. Such was the case with this house.
Archaeologists knew, based on Greek and Roman records and documents, that there had been a large theatre here at one point. The family that had lived in this house had a typical entrance to a cellar from inside their house. Little did they know that what they had thought was just a cellar was really one of the backstage rooms to one of the largest most important Roman theaters of the first century A.D.
The family was paid such a large amount of money to sell the house to archaeologists that they took only their clothes before leaving. The house was still furnished as it was, complete with a picture of Mussolini on the wall. As Alex said, “You want to know how much money they got for their house? Let me tell you like this--they heard the amount and left so fast it was like a cartoon. The door was still spinning!”
Anyway, this theater seated 8,000 people but because of costs, only a few of the backstage rooms have been uncovered. Because there are large buildings built over this and because it’s in one of the oldest most important parts in the city, the costs to uncover and open up the whole theater would be astronomical. There would be too many people to relocate. Those costs alone would be staggering. Then there would be the costs to tear down all of the buildings that are standing on top of the theater. That process would include closing streets and would be painstaking so as not to damage any of the theater. Then there would be the excavation costs. Plus, there is not even a reasonable estimate of how long something like would take if, by a series of earth-shattering miracles, the money could be raised.
It was really fantastic to see such a place! Again, the tufa stone (And yes, it’s tufa, not tufla like I’ve been writing all along. Oops! I re-read the pamphlet as I was packing it away with other souvenirs.) was used in sections of the walls and pillars so that when there were earthquakes the shock would be absorbed by this porous stone and the structure would not crumble.
The thing that impressed me most about the theater though was that the Emperor Nero himself performed there on three separate occasions. All of these instances were well-documented, as were many other performances there as well. Even though Nero was the Roman emperor, he never performed in Rome because he preferred the arts scene in Naples over Rome despite that Naples was almost a Greek city.
Oh, I just love history when I can learn about it firsthand! I could picture everything in its glory as it was being described and I could only try to imagine what it must have been like for the people who sat through Nero’s performance even though there was a pretty nasty earthquake. What kept them from getting hysterical? Nero because he said that it was just the gods applauding his performance. Ha! What an ego! What was going through the people’s minds that they believed this enough to stay? lol This is no joke. The incident was recorded by one of Nero’s personal scribes.
Anyway, after our encounter in what has to be the oldest place I’ve ever been, we went back to where we started and split the group. See, Alex had been explaining all of this in Italian, Neapolitan Italian, English, and French because there was one lady in the group who spoke French and didn’t know Italian or English. Lucky for her, Alex happened to know French. So anyway, back at the starting point, the French lady left. She just wanted to see the theater part of the tour. The rest of us split into an English tour and an Italian tour. Alex stayed with the English group.
We proceeded to go down underground once again. This time we were headed into the Greek-Roman aqueducts. The history of these aqueducts begins with the Greeks. They carved out the tufa stone to use in building the city walls and temples and then creating underground caves to be used as graves called hypogea. There are even some graffiti markings and symbols carved in the stone walls of these quarries that match the graffiti markings and symbols on blocks that were used to hold up some of landmark buildings that are still standing. Wow!!!
When the Roman Empire took over Naples, they continued digging quarries but also decided to connect the quarries by digging out tunnels. They also created a 400km long aqueduct. But in 1629 the aqueduct had to be expanded because the city was growing. A Neapolitan nobleman solved the problem by designing a new aqueduct that was built.
After the stone was carved out, huge cisterns remained to house the water. Well holes to these cisterns were left open in public places as well as at the private homes of some of the elite. This system of aqueducts and cisterns was used until 1884 when they had to be closed because a cholera epidemic spread through the area. The porous tufa stone allowed the disease to spread though and infect the entire water supply.
However, this was not the end of usage of the massive underground space. During WWII, Naples was heavily bombed and the aqueducts were used as air-raid shelters. As such a shelter, the aqueducts protected just over 3,000 people at a time during.
It was so awesome to see all of this while hearing about it. It was amazing because you could see the marks in the stone walls where the chisels had been used to cut out bricks. And you could see along the sides where the armies of WWII had built cement benches so people could take turns sitting. They even had pictures of Naples during WWII up on some of the walls in the aqueducts. They also had other WWII items down there for display.
Though the aqueducts are lit with electric lights for the tours now, there was one long very narrow passage where we had to use candlelight to guide our path. It was 80m long but 7m high. At some points though, Alex warned us we would have to “walk like an Egyptian” (and of course Mr. Animated had to demonstrate. :) lol). We did indeed have to walk sideways, like an Egyptian, to get through sections of it. But it took us to a small Greek cistern and then to a very large Roman cistern that are filled with water (by a hose). It was awesome!
Emily and I were at the back of the group while we were going through the candle light part of the tour. Emily was behind me and all of a sudden I heard her say, “I don’t like being at the end.” I was confused so I asked, “Why?” To which she replied, “Because there’s no one behind me!” Haha! I hadn’t realized that but she most definitely had when she looked back and saw pitch black. She was a brave soul!
At the very end of the tour we ended up in a little room. It turns out that it was the wine cellar of a church. It was where the nuns made and stored the communion wine. They even had an area of porcelain circles in the wall to provide the right ventilation and temperature control. We learned that because the tufa stone is so porous, as the wine sat in the bottles to ferment, the air flow and small pressure changes are enough to actually make the wine naturally sparkling. There was also a small cistern down here where the nuns got their water. Pretty interesting!
We went up about 1,000 steps and were in a little shop next to where we’d started the tour outside. We were able to sample some of the wine made there and we toasted in 4 different languages. English and Italian, of course, then Emily and I had to toast in Albanian, and there was a nice guy in our group from Japan, so we toasted in Japanese, too. :) The wine was very tasty so I had to buy a bottle to bring back with me. What a great souvenir! Plus, I bought a candle holder like the ones we’d used for our candle light part of the tour. They were all ceramic and were hand-painted by a local artist. It was cool because none of them were the same. So I definitely found myself unique reminders of my trip to Naples! Yay! :)
After all this excitement, we were starving! It was close to 3:00 by now and we hadn’t eaten lunch yet! So we walked a short ways down the street and found a place that looked cute so we went in. The menu was all on a little chalkboard and was all Italian. Emily asked what I was going to get, and I told her. And then I asked what she was getting. She said, “I’m just going to try something new because I like anything!” This didn’t surprise me because she’s not a picky eater at all, and it’s fun to try new things in a new place. Just after she said that, the waiter came and took our order. When he brought out the food, he sat an octopus salad down in front of Emily. As soon as he left, she said, “I don’t like this!” Haha! I couldn’t help it. I laughed out loud, on the spot. Emily didn’t think it was that funny. But the one thing that she doesn’t really like ended up being what she ordered. We had no clue what it would be! I told her to order something else and I’d split the cost of the octopus salad with her because I was curious and wanted to try it since I’d never tried octopus before.
Well, I’ve tried octopus now. The weirdest part was looking at it as it went into my mouth. You could see the tentacle and where the suction things should be. It’s not skinned or anything, just cooked as is because it’s all just fleshy. The flavor was actually pretty good. The texture of the meat was kind of like crab to me because it was chewier than other seafood, but not quite as chewy as something like clams. The flavor was its own though, and I liked it. The texture of the tentacles was weird though because you could feel the bumps from where the suction parts were. That was the only kind of bad part. Otherwise, it was an interesting experience, and obviously, it didn’t harm me because I’m here to tell about it! :)
After that, we spent the rest of the day walking around snapping photos left and right of more statues and fountains and awesome buildings. All day long I was continuously impressed with the architecture! Not once was I disappointed with a building I saw. I just had to be careful to only take pictures of the ones I really liked. Hee hee!
We did stop for a coffee break and I got a real chocolate. Not a hot chocolate. I mean real melted chocolate in a cup. Yum, yum! Now that’s my kind of hot chocolate! :) It was very good and provided the energy we needed to continue walking and window shopping and picture-taking.
We didn’t feel like doing anything special for supper since we went to a local place for lunch so we just went to Burger King. Haha! Aren’t we adventurous? lol Actually, it was practically next door to our hostel, it was a reasonable price, and Emily wanted a sundae and I wanted a burger so we went inside and had it our way. ;)
After that, we went back to the hostel and just relaxed. We were tired! Two days of all day walking with more to coming the next morning! So after checking email and facebook, doing word searches, and reading, we hit the hay to rest up for another big day.
I’ll stop here before I begin the next day’s adventures. The next day was our last day in Naples as we had to start the journey back to Albania. Rest assured that it is not the end of the excitement. Oh, no! Not at all! The first thing on our agenda for the next day was the National Archaeological Museum. :)
We got our tickets for an English speaking tour and were given some extremely interesting pamphlets that gave us some history of what we were about to see. We chatted for a few more minutes with our tour guide, Alex (Alessandro), and a few of the other tour-takers. Then, the fun began.
First of all, I have to tell you right now that Alex was by far the best tour guide of all time. I love tours and I’ve been on a lot of them during my travels in the US (thank you, Lakeside), and not only was he funny, informative, and generally entertaining, he was downright animated. I’m serious! He acted things out and had wild gestures and expressions. But he wasn’t doing it to be goofy or anything; he was just genuinely that kind of person. He was a complete extrovert and it made the tour a blast! :)
First we went around to the other side of the church and followed the narrow street for almost a block. Then, we entered this little teeny, tiny home. It was on the street level and the Neapolitan word this kind of traditional house is basso. So we entered the basso and we told that based on ancient records and historical documents, archaeologists knew that old cities like Naples never expanded outside their city walls. Therefore, as they grew and built new things or were conquered and the new ruling party built new things, the old things were just built over if they weren’t destroyed. Such was the case with this house.
Archaeologists knew, based on Greek and Roman records and documents, that there had been a large theatre here at one point. The family that had lived in this house had a typical entrance to a cellar from inside their house. Little did they know that what they had thought was just a cellar was really one of the backstage rooms to one of the largest most important Roman theaters of the first century A.D.
The family was paid such a large amount of money to sell the house to archaeologists that they took only their clothes before leaving. The house was still furnished as it was, complete with a picture of Mussolini on the wall. As Alex said, “You want to know how much money they got for their house? Let me tell you like this--they heard the amount and left so fast it was like a cartoon. The door was still spinning!”
Anyway, this theater seated 8,000 people but because of costs, only a few of the backstage rooms have been uncovered. Because there are large buildings built over this and because it’s in one of the oldest most important parts in the city, the costs to uncover and open up the whole theater would be astronomical. There would be too many people to relocate. Those costs alone would be staggering. Then there would be the costs to tear down all of the buildings that are standing on top of the theater. That process would include closing streets and would be painstaking so as not to damage any of the theater. Then there would be the excavation costs. Plus, there is not even a reasonable estimate of how long something like would take if, by a series of earth-shattering miracles, the money could be raised.
It was really fantastic to see such a place! Again, the tufa stone (And yes, it’s tufa, not tufla like I’ve been writing all along. Oops! I re-read the pamphlet as I was packing it away with other souvenirs.) was used in sections of the walls and pillars so that when there were earthquakes the shock would be absorbed by this porous stone and the structure would not crumble.
The thing that impressed me most about the theater though was that the Emperor Nero himself performed there on three separate occasions. All of these instances were well-documented, as were many other performances there as well. Even though Nero was the Roman emperor, he never performed in Rome because he preferred the arts scene in Naples over Rome despite that Naples was almost a Greek city.
Oh, I just love history when I can learn about it firsthand! I could picture everything in its glory as it was being described and I could only try to imagine what it must have been like for the people who sat through Nero’s performance even though there was a pretty nasty earthquake. What kept them from getting hysterical? Nero because he said that it was just the gods applauding his performance. Ha! What an ego! What was going through the people’s minds that they believed this enough to stay? lol This is no joke. The incident was recorded by one of Nero’s personal scribes.
Anyway, after our encounter in what has to be the oldest place I’ve ever been, we went back to where we started and split the group. See, Alex had been explaining all of this in Italian, Neapolitan Italian, English, and French because there was one lady in the group who spoke French and didn’t know Italian or English. Lucky for her, Alex happened to know French. So anyway, back at the starting point, the French lady left. She just wanted to see the theater part of the tour. The rest of us split into an English tour and an Italian tour. Alex stayed with the English group.
We proceeded to go down underground once again. This time we were headed into the Greek-Roman aqueducts. The history of these aqueducts begins with the Greeks. They carved out the tufa stone to use in building the city walls and temples and then creating underground caves to be used as graves called hypogea. There are even some graffiti markings and symbols carved in the stone walls of these quarries that match the graffiti markings and symbols on blocks that were used to hold up some of landmark buildings that are still standing. Wow!!!
When the Roman Empire took over Naples, they continued digging quarries but also decided to connect the quarries by digging out tunnels. They also created a 400km long aqueduct. But in 1629 the aqueduct had to be expanded because the city was growing. A Neapolitan nobleman solved the problem by designing a new aqueduct that was built.
After the stone was carved out, huge cisterns remained to house the water. Well holes to these cisterns were left open in public places as well as at the private homes of some of the elite. This system of aqueducts and cisterns was used until 1884 when they had to be closed because a cholera epidemic spread through the area. The porous tufa stone allowed the disease to spread though and infect the entire water supply.
However, this was not the end of usage of the massive underground space. During WWII, Naples was heavily bombed and the aqueducts were used as air-raid shelters. As such a shelter, the aqueducts protected just over 3,000 people at a time during.
It was so awesome to see all of this while hearing about it. It was amazing because you could see the marks in the stone walls where the chisels had been used to cut out bricks. And you could see along the sides where the armies of WWII had built cement benches so people could take turns sitting. They even had pictures of Naples during WWII up on some of the walls in the aqueducts. They also had other WWII items down there for display.
Though the aqueducts are lit with electric lights for the tours now, there was one long very narrow passage where we had to use candlelight to guide our path. It was 80m long but 7m high. At some points though, Alex warned us we would have to “walk like an Egyptian” (and of course Mr. Animated had to demonstrate. :) lol). We did indeed have to walk sideways, like an Egyptian, to get through sections of it. But it took us to a small Greek cistern and then to a very large Roman cistern that are filled with water (by a hose). It was awesome!
Emily and I were at the back of the group while we were going through the candle light part of the tour. Emily was behind me and all of a sudden I heard her say, “I don’t like being at the end.” I was confused so I asked, “Why?” To which she replied, “Because there’s no one behind me!” Haha! I hadn’t realized that but she most definitely had when she looked back and saw pitch black. She was a brave soul!
At the very end of the tour we ended up in a little room. It turns out that it was the wine cellar of a church. It was where the nuns made and stored the communion wine. They even had an area of porcelain circles in the wall to provide the right ventilation and temperature control. We learned that because the tufa stone is so porous, as the wine sat in the bottles to ferment, the air flow and small pressure changes are enough to actually make the wine naturally sparkling. There was also a small cistern down here where the nuns got their water. Pretty interesting!
We went up about 1,000 steps and were in a little shop next to where we’d started the tour outside. We were able to sample some of the wine made there and we toasted in 4 different languages. English and Italian, of course, then Emily and I had to toast in Albanian, and there was a nice guy in our group from Japan, so we toasted in Japanese, too. :) The wine was very tasty so I had to buy a bottle to bring back with me. What a great souvenir! Plus, I bought a candle holder like the ones we’d used for our candle light part of the tour. They were all ceramic and were hand-painted by a local artist. It was cool because none of them were the same. So I definitely found myself unique reminders of my trip to Naples! Yay! :)
After all this excitement, we were starving! It was close to 3:00 by now and we hadn’t eaten lunch yet! So we walked a short ways down the street and found a place that looked cute so we went in. The menu was all on a little chalkboard and was all Italian. Emily asked what I was going to get, and I told her. And then I asked what she was getting. She said, “I’m just going to try something new because I like anything!” This didn’t surprise me because she’s not a picky eater at all, and it’s fun to try new things in a new place. Just after she said that, the waiter came and took our order. When he brought out the food, he sat an octopus salad down in front of Emily. As soon as he left, she said, “I don’t like this!” Haha! I couldn’t help it. I laughed out loud, on the spot. Emily didn’t think it was that funny. But the one thing that she doesn’t really like ended up being what she ordered. We had no clue what it would be! I told her to order something else and I’d split the cost of the octopus salad with her because I was curious and wanted to try it since I’d never tried octopus before.
Well, I’ve tried octopus now. The weirdest part was looking at it as it went into my mouth. You could see the tentacle and where the suction things should be. It’s not skinned or anything, just cooked as is because it’s all just fleshy. The flavor was actually pretty good. The texture of the meat was kind of like crab to me because it was chewier than other seafood, but not quite as chewy as something like clams. The flavor was its own though, and I liked it. The texture of the tentacles was weird though because you could feel the bumps from where the suction parts were. That was the only kind of bad part. Otherwise, it was an interesting experience, and obviously, it didn’t harm me because I’m here to tell about it! :)
After that, we spent the rest of the day walking around snapping photos left and right of more statues and fountains and awesome buildings. All day long I was continuously impressed with the architecture! Not once was I disappointed with a building I saw. I just had to be careful to only take pictures of the ones I really liked. Hee hee!
We did stop for a coffee break and I got a real chocolate. Not a hot chocolate. I mean real melted chocolate in a cup. Yum, yum! Now that’s my kind of hot chocolate! :) It was very good and provided the energy we needed to continue walking and window shopping and picture-taking.
We didn’t feel like doing anything special for supper since we went to a local place for lunch so we just went to Burger King. Haha! Aren’t we adventurous? lol Actually, it was practically next door to our hostel, it was a reasonable price, and Emily wanted a sundae and I wanted a burger so we went inside and had it our way. ;)
After that, we went back to the hostel and just relaxed. We were tired! Two days of all day walking with more to coming the next morning! So after checking email and facebook, doing word searches, and reading, we hit the hay to rest up for another big day.
I’ll stop here before I begin the next day’s adventures. The next day was our last day in Naples as we had to start the journey back to Albania. Rest assured that it is not the end of the excitement. Oh, no! Not at all! The first thing on our agenda for the next day was the National Archaeological Museum. :)
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