Naples Underground

Naples Underground on the Naples city cards

The Naples City Card includes the Napoli Sotterranea: it’s one of the underground visits you can pick, with the Spanish Quarters and the catacombs of San Gennaro. Of the Naples Pass and Naples city passes we sell, it’s the only one that does. The Naples Museum Card and the Museums & Underground Card include only the Neapolis Sotterrata under San Lorenzo, on the same square, and the Campania Artecard includes none of the underground visits.

Naples Underground tickets for the guided tour from Piazza San Gaetano

Card or ticket, the Napoli Sotterranea tour starts at Piazza San Gaetano and is run by the association of the same name. Its entrance, next to the church of San Paolo Maggiore on Via dei Tribunali, is marked with white and blue flags. Every visit is guided, in Italian or English, and you don’t have to book: the association guarantees you’ll get in, though the queue can take anything from 10 to 90 minutes.

The ticket we sell, at €18, skips that queue and includes the guided tour in English or Italian, which you pick when you book. Be there 15 minutes before your time. It can’t be cancelled.

Our ticket is for adults. Children up to 4 go free, and tickets for ages 5 to 10 (€10) and 11 to 17 (€15) are sold at the entrance.

Naples has three underground visits with near-identical names, and we sell all three. The two associations that run the Napoli Sotterranea and the Spanish Quarters tours each call their own route the official one, but they are separate places with separate tickets.

If you only have time for one, take the Napoli Sotterranea: cisterns that still hold water, a Roman theatre on the same ticket, English tours at least every two hours and no need to book. The Spanish Quarters tour suits people who’d rather be in a small group and don’t mind stairs, and San Lorenzo is the one for Roman streets, with nothing narrow.

What you see on the Napoli Sotterranea tour

Naples sits on tuff, a volcanic rock that’s easy to dig and strong once cut. The Greeks were the first to quarry it under the city, for the walls and temples of Neapolis, and the stairs take you down about 40 metres into their quarries.

Those caves became cisterns. Under Augustus, tunnels brought spring water from Serino, 70 kilometres away, and in 1629 a nobleman, Cesare Carmignano, had a new aqueduct built when the old one no longer kept up. Water ran through these cisterns until 1885. On the tour you pass stretches of the old aqueduct and tunnels from the Middle Ages, the Bourbon era and the 20th century.

The tight bit comes here, and it’s optional. A short passage, lit by a candle or your phone’s torch, leads to a Roman cistern that still holds water; those who’d rather not squeeze through wait about 10 minutes on benches outside.

During the Second World War the city’s caves sheltered about 40,000 people from the air raids, and a War Museum shows documents from June 1940 to September 1943. Further on you pass a seismic station called Arianna and a garden growing under lamps 35 metres below the street.

After the climb back up, the visit ends at the remains of the Roman theatre of Neapolis, known as Nero’s theatre, which you reach through a basso, one of the ground-floor homes of the old town, on Via Anticaglia. Inside you see part of the upper tier of seats and Bourbon water channels lined with blue tiles, all on the same ticket.

Naples Underground tour times, steps and access

The association runs tours every day, with no weekly closing day. English tours leave at least every two hours from 10:00 to 18:00, and the booking calendar shows departures every hour. The tour lasts about an hour underground and about 20 minutes in the theatre.

Those 136 steps go down and back up with handrails and no lift, so wheelchairs and walkers can’t make the visit, and pushchairs stay at the entrance. The association still says it suits older people. Wear flat shoes and leave food behind; a small bottle of water is fine, and so are photos.

Groups can be large, and some recent reviews mention a guide who was hard to hear, so stay close to yours.

Getting to Napoli Sotterranea in Piazza San Gaetano

Piazza San Gaetano is on Via dei Tribunali, in the middle of the old town, and the metro gets you within a short walk of it.

The old town is a limited traffic zone, so leave the car outside it. There’s paid parking in Via Duomo, Corso Umberto, Piazza Cavour and Via Costantinopoli, about five minutes’ walk away.

The Spanish Quarters and San Lorenzo: the other two underground visits

The Spanish Quarters tour is run by another association, L.A.E.S., from Vico Sant’Anna di Palazzo, five minutes’ walk from Via Toledo and Piazza del Plebiscito. Its shelter was found in 1979, after a fire, when the association’s founder remembered a walled-up staircase under a palazzo, and it held 4,000 people during the war. You also see cisterns of the 1629 aqueduct, though without the water you find at San Gaetano.

The tour goes down a long staircase, about 40 metres, with an optional squeeze through narrow tunnels that once carried water, and another way round for those who’d rather not. It’s 15 to 18 °C at 90 per cent humidity, so bring a layer. English tours run at 10:00, 12:00, 14:00 and 16:30, and the other times vary. Our ticket costs €18, with a children’s option for ages 7 to 12, and it can be cancelled up to 24 hours before.

Under San Lorenzo Maggiore, on the same square as the Napoli Sotterranea, the Neapolis Sotterrata takes you about 10 metres down to a Roman street laid on the Greek grid, with nine shops, a bakery and a dye works among them, and part of the macellum, the town market of the 1st century AD. The ticket costs €10 and also opens the 13th-century Gothic church, the chapter house and the museum, with an audio guide.

The Galleria Borbonica, a Bourbon tunnel entered near Piazza del Plebiscito, is a fourth underground place, with a page of its own.