Naples; Sunday, 23 February, 2020

I had wanted to have a bit of a lie-in, but as I was wide awake by 8am I decided I might as well get up and head down to breakfast. This turned out to be a bad idea as it appeared that almost everyone else in the hotel was up early and there was a queue to get a table for breakfast and a queue to get any food, and a queue to wait for the food to be replenished. It was clear the staff weren’t coping particularly well with the rush.

By the time I’d finished breakfast the restaurant had pretty much emptied out and it was back to normal service, so I could have just waited a little bit. I headed back up to my room, packed and then headed down to check-out.

My main aim for the day was to actually visit the Underground Napoli sites that I hadn’t been able to visit earlier in the week, so I set off with the aim of making the midday tour. I had a bit of a wander through the streets of the old town as I had a bit of time to spare, and I remembered that they only advised people to turn up 10 minutes before the tour.

When I got to the tour departure point at 11:40 I was quite surprised at the size of the queue, and I did worry for a moment or two that I’d badly messed up, but then someone from the tour company was coming down the line separating out the English, French and Spanish speakers from the mass of Italian speakers for their respective tours.

On the dot of midday the English tour was invited to step forward to the cash desk and then we descended deep into the bowls of the city. The tour starts with the main descent, going down 38m into the former mine workings from where the original Greek New City or Neopolis was hewn from. The tour guide explained that after the spaces were created over several hundred years towards the end of the Greek period and into the Roman period, the massive spaces were then turned into giant cisterns to store water for the city. A job that they continued to do right up until the middle of the 19th century when a cholera outbreak tainted the waters so badly that the site had to be permanently closed and then, in keeping with all the stereotypes of Naples, they were turned into a rubbish dump for the next 70 years.

The tipping of rubbish finally stopped in the early 1940s, mostly because Naples was now a target for allied bombing (and once Italy swapped sides it then went on to be targeted by the Nazis), and the local populace needed a place to shelter, so the rubbish that was down there was cemented over to make new level floors and the space was then used as shelters.

The tour then heads on into the area of the cisterns and at points you have to squeeze through the narrow gaps in the rocks – some barely 50cm wide – and into the cisterns themselves. From there its then a hefty climb back up to street level and then a walk around the block to a small house which inside houses access to a tiny part of the original Roman Theatre of the city before the tour ends emerging back into one of the lanes of the old town.

By the time I completed the tour it was well into lunch time so I found a nice restaurant nearby and had a relaxing lunch sitting in the warm sun. After lunch I walked the short distance over to the monumental complex of San Lorenzo Maggiore, just to opposite side of the street from the entrance to the underground Naples tour. Under the church here there is a preserved part of the Roman city. This area was originally buried and damaged following flooding in the 5th Century, so it isn’t as old as the parts I’d seen this morning, but it looks more complete and building like. Unlike the Underground Naples you are able to wander round this site by yourself so I took the self-guided tour – though the large Italian language tour just ahead of me meant that for a large part of the walk round I was effectively moving at the pace of the tour group.

Back up at street level I had a quick look round the museum that’s attached to the complex, and includes some of the artefacts that were found there, but I had to cut my visit short a bit as I realised I needed to start making a move to get to the airport.

I headed back to the hotel to collect my luggage and then, rather than struggling over the rough paving and fighting my way onto a shuttle bus, I cheated and got the hotel to call me a taxi to the airport, arriving just as check-in was opening.