Catacombs of San Gennaro and San Gaudioso

Three Naples cards with the San Gennaro catacombs, and the booking

Three of the Naples Pass and Naples city passes we sell include the San Gennaro tour, though not San Gaudioso. With any of them you book your tour: on the Museum Card and the Museums & Underground Card by email with the catacombs, at prenotazioni@catacombedinapoli.it, and on the Naples City Card when you book the bundle.

The 7-day Campania Artecard and the 365 Gold get you a discount at either catacomb rather than an included tour, and the 365 Lite doesn’t cover them.

Catacombs of San Gennaro tickets: a guided tour in English or Italian

Card or ticket, you only see the catacombs with a guide, on tours of about an hour for up to 30 people, in English or Italian, and you always have to book. Our ticket, at €13, gets you a place: choose the language and the time at checkout and be at the ticket office 15 minutes early, where you swap the voucher for a paper ticket. You can cancel or move it up to 24 hours before.

The tour ends in the basilica of San Gennaro Extra Moenia, outside the catacombs, and that’s included too. Children aged 6 to 17 pay €6, students and over-65s €9, and under-6s and visitors with disabilities go free.

The second catacomb, San Gaudioso, has its own guided tour, at €13, also in English or Italian, starting inside the church of Santa Maria della Sanità; be there 20 minutes before. San Gennaro is the one for the early paintings, the mosaics and the saint’s tomb, San Gaudioso the one for the skulls and the painted bodies. A ticket for one stays valid for 12 months at the other, so ask how to book that second tour when you collect your paper ticket.

Both are run by La Paranza, the cooperative that young people from the Sanità set up in 2006 with their parish priest, Don Antonio Loffredo. They began with San Gaudioso, and in 2008 a grant from the Fondazione CON IL SUD let them open San Gennaro too. That year about 8,000 people came; by 2014 it was 80,000, and the cooperative now employs more than 50 people. It says the ticket money pays for restoration, training and an orchestra, among other projects in the neighbourhood.

Catacombs of San Gennaro opening hours, parking and the ticket offices

There’s free parking at San Gennaro. You collect your paper ticket at the office of the catacomb you’re visiting: Via Capodimonte 13, beside the basilica of the Incoronata Madre del Buon Consiglio, for San Gennaro, and Via Sanità 123, at the church of Santa Maria della Sanità, for San Gaudioso.

What you see in the Catacombs of San Gennaro

The San Gennaro catacomb began in the 2nd century, probably as a noble family’s tomb given to the Christians, and was enlarged in the 4th, when Sant’Agrippino, the city’s first patron saint, was buried here. In the upper vestibule, the oldest paintings date from the early 3rd century, done in the style of Pompeii’s frescoes. Nearby, in the Crypt of the Bishops, 5th-century mosaics show bishops of the time, among them Quodvultdeus, bishop of Carthage.

Further in are frescoes of the 5th and 6th centuries and the small burial chamber that held San Gennaro’s tomb. His body arrived here in the 5th century and stayed until 831, when the Lombard prince Sicone I carried it off to Benevento; it came back to Naples in 1497 and now lies in the cathedral, where his blood is kept in the Chapel of the Treasure.

The lower vestibule has a ceiling up to 6 metres high, with the baptismal font of Bishop Paul II, from the 8th century. Beyond it is the basilica of Sant’Agrippino: a single nave with a bishop’s chair cut from the tuff.

You come out at the basilica of San Gennaro Extra Moenia, a 5th-century church with three naves, which was closed for 41 years until 2008.

San Gaudioso, where skulls sit above painted bodies

San Gaudioso, the second-largest catacomb in Naples, is entered from under the high altar of Santa Maria della Sanità, down to a crypt restored in 2017. Gaudioso was a bishop from Abitina, in today’s Tunisia, whom the Vandals set adrift in a boat without sails or oars, and he was buried here between 451 and 453.

Its frescoes and mosaics of the 5th and 6th centuries show a fish, a lamb and a vine, and the Madonna della Sanità, which the cooperative calls the oldest image of Mary in Campania. A Byzantine Madonna of the 9th century turned up in 1991.

Then come the scolatoi, from the 17th century. Nobles and churchmen were left in niches to drain and dry, then the skull was set into the wall and the body painted below it in fresco, dressed in the clothes and holding the tools of their trade. That’s where the Neapolitan curse “Puozze sculà”, may you drain, comes from.

The bus up to the Catacombs of San Gennaro

The catacombs of San Gennaro are at Via Capodimonte 13, a short bus ride up from the Archaeological Museum, so start at the museum’s metro station.

Walking up from Museo takes about 20 minutes. San Gaudioso is about 600 metres from San Gennaro, down in the Sanità at Via Sanità 123.