{"id":500,"date":"2016-06-19T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-06-19T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/catacombedinapoli.it\/news\/the-sunday-times-travel-alle-catacombe-di-napoli\/"},"modified":"2024-08-19T10:49:04","modified_gmt":"2024-08-19T10:49:04","slug":"the-sunday-times-travel-alle-catacombe-di-napoli","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/catacombedinapoli.it\/it\/news-rione-sanita-napoli\/the-sunday-times-travel-alle-catacombe-di-napoli\/","title":{"rendered":"The Sunday Times Travel alle catacombe di Napoli"},"content":{"rendered":"

Siamo sul prestigioso The Sunday Times Travel Si parla di Napoli, del Rione Sanit\u00e0 e di Pompei.<\/h3>\n


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SKELETON COAST
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A remarkable tomb in Naples is revealing its grisly secrets, while across the bay in Pompeii, six newly restored houses have opened to the public. Mia Aimaro Ogden goes ghost-hunting. <\/h3>\n
O<\/span>ne of the strangest, mostimportant and downright creepiest sightsin Naples is revealing its macabre secrets. You\u2019ll find the 4th-century Catacombs of San Gaudioso below the flamboyant 17th-century church of Santa Maria della Sanita \u2014 and, thanks to its restoration, it\u2019s a trip into the underworld you shouldn\u2019t miss. If you\u2019re visiting this part of Italy, it would seem a shame not to make the short journey around the Bay of Naples to Pompeii, especially as six houses have just reopened there, part of a \u00a376m restoration programme. I\u2019m on a trip to see both \u2014 in the company of Francesca Del Vecchio, a local guide and art historian. \u201cLook at this church,\u201d she says when our taxi pulls up at Santa Maria. \u201cLike the Neapolitans themselves, it\u2019s excessive, expressive \u2014 though what it conceals is even more important.\u201d <\/div>\n
Last year, it received a \u00a3395,000 grant to restore its early-Christian catacombs, as well as the 17th-century Dominican crypt above. The latter isn\u2019t due to open to the public until the autumn, but Del Vecchio sneaks us behind the scenes. At the back of the basilica, below an elaborate staircase, an episode of Time Team is unfolding under the watchful eye of their Tony Robinson, Adele Pezzillo. She\u2019s part of a co-operative called La Paranza, which is bringing life back to the neighbourhood. <\/div>\n
For Del Vecchio, the most exciting discoveries emerging from the darkness are the dynamic frescoes of Bernardino Fera, a master of Neapolitan art, born in 1667. The tufa walls of the crypt were painted over by lesser artists several times, but flashes of crimson, blue and yellow offer tantalising glimpses of Fera\u2019s martyrs meeting a ghastly end. Each is more grisly than the last. <\/div>\n
\u201cThe women were mostly murdered because they refused to marry pagans,\u201d Del Vecchio says. \u201cEugenia here had to flee to a monastery, disguised as a monk, but a woman fell in love with her, there was a trial, and she was killed. Benedetta was simply beheaded. It\u2019s thrilling to see them for the first time.\u201d <\/div>\n
These lost women act as the guardians of the eerie tombs on which the church was built: the Catacombs of San Gaudioso. Over the past few months, the art on their walls has been delicately restored and the mould creep controlled. They\u2019re now fully open to the public. Despite the work, the slippery staircase is running with damp and sprouting moss. <\/div>\n
Septimius Celius Gaudiosus was a North African bishop whose remains were laid here in AD453. His body is long gone, but he\u2019s left behind a fabulous spectacle: the Galleria dei Nobili, where the high-born of 17th-century Naples paid a small fortune for their bones to lie with the ancients in spooky illustrated tombs. Life-size skeletons in perky poses are painted on vast tufa slabs, each holding the tools of his former trade: lawyers, judges, writers and the artist himself, Giovanni Balducci, who refused a fee so he, too, could be entombed here. <\/div>\n
The modesty of the skeletons belonging to dead women is preserved with frescoed skirts below their naked ribcage. And at the top of each bony neck is a hole in the wall \u2014 holding the owner\u2019s skull. I shiver in the gloom. Even in death, this grisly gang is laughing at us. \u201cIt happened to me yesterday; it will happen to you tomorrow,\u201d one epitaph declares. It\u2019s a relief to get back out into the sunlight. <\/div>\n
POMPEII\u2019S STORY is also hardly short on death, but today it\u2019s full of life. On the streets around the six newly restored houses, the crowds are five deep. These domus opened in December. Some had been closed for decades; others had all but fallen down. A state of emergency was declared in the crumbling city in 2008. Del Vecchio has sharp elbows, and prods her way to the front of the queue before you can say \u201cMary Beard\u201d. <\/div>\n
Now, I\u2019m no Cambridge classicist, but even I can see that the Cryptoporticus house is both an important insight into the life of a Roman city and a jolly nice bit of interior decoration. The glorious frescoes in Pompeiian red and the shrine to Mercury immediately go on my Instagram feed. The Roman graffiti is fun, too. But how did guests in the summer dining room manage to eat, lying down, on those sloping benches? \u201cNo wonder they were always vomiting,\u201d Del Vecchio says. <\/div>\n
The House of Paquius Proculus has a gorgeous mosaic floor, an elegant porticoed garden and a set of lead water pipes no different from those in any Victorian bathroom. At the entrance, I pick up a loose tile from the intricate pattern on the ground and ask the guard what to do with it. \u201cJust hide it in a hole in the wall,\u201d she tells me. \u201cIt will be a surprise for someone in 100 years.\u201d In Stephanus\u2019s fullery, the elegant marble basins for trampling the laundry in urine \u2014 it softens the fabric \u2014 provide amusement for schoolkids. The jagged door of the House of the Ephebus, which was barred against the lava in AD79, is a moving reminder of human frailty. <\/div>\n
And that\u2019s what Pompeii is all about: the minutiae of daily life, cut short. And that\u2019s why the restored domus are so fascinating. They\u2019re the details of a story that will always break your heart.<\/div>\n

Signori e Signore, siamo sul prestigioso The Sunday Times Travel Si parla di Napoli, del Rione Sanit\u00e0 e di Pompei<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":501,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,118],"tags":[54,51],"class_list":["post-500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-catacombe-di-aapoli","category-news-rione-sanita-napoli","tag-catacombe-di-napoli","tag-press"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/catacombedinapoli.it\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/catacombedinapoli.it\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/catacombedinapoli.it\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catacombedinapoli.it\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catacombedinapoli.it\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=500"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/catacombedinapoli.it\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catacombedinapoli.it\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/catacombedinapoli.it\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catacombedinapoli.it\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catacombedinapoli.it\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}