Ipogeo dei Cristallini

Ipogeo dei Cristallini tickets: audio guide or guided visit

We sell both ways down: the entry with an audio guide, at €12, and the guided visit, at €18. Only ten people go down at a time and the number of visitors each day is capped, so it’s worth booking ahead. Neither ticket can be refunded or moved to another time, so pick one you’re sure of.

The guided visit gives you a person to ask, in four languages, and a quarter of an hour longer underground. No city card includes the Ipogeo, so it’s a ticket to buy on its own.

When the Ipogeo is open, and what to wear down there

Visits run from Tuesday to Sunday, in time slots from 10:00 to 15:00, and the Ipogeo is closed on Mondays. Its own site gives no last entry or holiday closures, so go by the times offered when you book.

The way down is a small, steep and narrow staircase, and the Ipogeo warns of architectural barriers: if you use a wheelchair or have trouble with stairs, ring them on +39 344 0725752 before you book. Down in the tombs it’s cold and damp, so bring a jacket and a hat, and leave animals, food and drink outside.

Inside the four Greek tombs under Via dei Cristallini

The entrance is at Via dei Cristallini 133, inside the palazzo of the di Donato family, and the staircase takes you down into the tuff, the volcanic stone of the hill. There are four tombs side by side, each with its own entrance and two chambers, one above the other: a vestibule for the funeral rites, then stairs down to the burial chamber.

The painters made the walls imitate architecture and expensive furniture. The dead were laid on stone couches carved as klinai, the couches Greeks reclined on at a banquet, with the mattresses and cushions painted on. The restorers of Italy’s Istituto Centrale per il Restauro have identified the pigments: Egyptian blue, cinnabar and red lakes.

Tomb C is the best preserved: it has garlands, the head of Medusa in the gable at the back, Dionysus, the god of wine, with Ariadne, and an offering dish, a jug and two candelabra. Tomb A is badly damaged, with only one of its eight reliefs left; tomb B has amphorae, urns, altars and frescoes; and tomb D was reworked in Roman times, with niches for burials and a Latin inscription.

How a baron found the tombs in 1889

In the 4th century BC the Greeks of Neapolis, the city that became Naples, buried their dead here, in the Vergini area outside the walls. In 1889 Baron Giovanni di Donato, digging under his family’s palazzo for water or stone, broke into the first tomb, and the digging went on until 1896 and found four.

The tombs stayed closed to the public for more than a century, looked after by the di Donato family and later by the Martuscelli family. Restoration began on 23 September 2020, with the Soprintendenza and the Istituto Centrale per il Restauro, and on 1 July 2022 the tombs opened to the public for the first time since their discovery; the restoration is still going on.

Getting to the Ipogeo in the Rione Sanità

Cavour, on metro line 2, is the nearest station, a few hundred metres away, and line 2 links it to the central station; Museo, on line 1, is a little farther. If you come by car, there’s parking at Vico Arena della Sanità 10.

The Sanità has two more places where Naples buried its dead underground, the Christian Catacombs of San Gennaro and the Fontanelle Cemetery, an ossuary in an old quarry. The Ipogeo’s own site links the three, from the Greek tombs to the catacombs to the ossuary.