Hidden Cities: Travels to the Secret Corners of the World's Great Metropolises; A Memoir of Urban Exploration

by Gates, Moses

  Naples has an amazing amount of flow. The chaos isn’t chaos at all, not once you figure out a few things. You can walk out into the middle of traffic blindfolded in the center of town and you’ll be fine. Cars will slow down, the scooters will swerve around you, nobody will even honk at you. Eye contact isn’t necessary: the drivers know you’re there and always have one foot on the brake. But you’ve got to keep moving. No hesitating for a small break in traffic, or taking a tentative step out into the street; it breaks the flow of the city.

  The best thing about this flow is that there’s no anger involved. Honking is used to say “You might not be able to see me, but I’m here,” not “Screw you, buddy!” or “Hurry up, asshole!” If you walk out in front of a car and the guy has to slow down, that’s just the normal flow of things. Nothing to get upset over, not a personal insult, nothing to think about past the moment. Traffic is crazier than it is in most cities in the Western world, but there’s no road rage. There isn’t the pent-up anger you find in a lot of places in the United States that sometimes comes out in everyday activities like driving. And there isn’t that sense of testosterone-fueled competition and defensiveness simmering on the streets and lingering below the surface of every mundane social encounter. Which I think is why, despite having several people tell me Naples is a dangerous place, I feel more at ease there than in other, supposedly “safe” cities back in the United States.

  This ease started on the subway ride over to my hostel in the center of town. I was sitting in the far right-hand seat of a four-seat bench. The doors opened and a father and his son, who looked to be about seven or eight years old, got on. The father sat on the left side, and the son in the middle. Without a trace of self-consciousness, and despite not being crowded, the kid leaned his head against my shoulder and put his elbow on my leg. The father, I think because he noticed I was reading a book in English, eventually apologized and pulled the kid over to him, giving him a big hug and holding his hand the rest of the trip.

  This scene turned out to be perfectly normal in southern Italy. To a large extent, I think it explains that lack of macho territorial energy that is so prevalent in countries with a more Anglo-Saxon heritage. I have no way of proving it, but it just seems to make sense to me that kids who grow up hugging their dads are generally much more chill. Naples is crowded, chaotic, energetic, and might be dangerous, although I never experience it. But it’s not mean.

  The reason I’m in Naples, though, isn’t to figure out how to cross the street or marvel at the wonderful familial relationships. I’m here to explore the sottosuolo, the vast and varied underground of the city. I meet up with Steve and five other people upon my arrival in the city. There are two Australians from the Cave Clan, Guru and Nivelo, who’s the main planner of the trip, and also three Americans: Gabe and Ashley, two college students from the Twin Cities, and Jim. Jim’s an engineer currently living in Iowa whose interest in underground mazes and labyrinths borders on obsession. And Naples is just the place for him to scratch that itch.

  Naples has one of the most extensive and varied undergrounds in the world. The city is a port surrounded by hills. Because of the proximity of Mount Vesuvius, large veins of yellow tufa, a durable, light, volcanic rock that is easily mined, run beneath the whole area. The hills surrounding the old port of Naples, as well as the central city itself, are riddled with huge bottle-shaped tufa quarries, often hundreds of feet high.

  Over the centuries, many of these quarries have been converted for other uses, including storage or even parking garages. In addition to the quarries, the easily worked tufa was also used to excavate burial chambers by the original Greek settlers, and later, early Christians honeycombed the hills above the city with their catacombs. The Romans dug huge tunnels hundreds of feet long through the hills. Pedestrian traffic, as well as fully loaded military wagons and carts belonging to royalty, used these passageways as shortcuts from the city to the sea—shortcuts that were also useful for a quick escape should the need arise. At the entrance to one of these tunnels is said to be the tomb of the poet Virgil, author of the Aeneid.

  TUFA QUARRIES, NAPLES.

  © Gabe Emerson

  And as with most ancient Mediterranean cities, much of Naples is built on the ruins of what came before. So any digging is going to unearth the remnants of the previous settlements. We can even see it in action. A few subway stations are being constructed using the cut-and-cover method, where the street is dug up, a shallow ditch is excavated, tracks are laid, and the street replaced above it. We take a peek down into one of these. Gazing ten feet down takes us back about two thousand years as we see the diamond-shaped opus reticulatum brickwork of the Roman Empire.

  Add to this ancient underground the modern underground networks—steam tunnels, subways, sewers, and storm drains—all of which have been built through and around two separate ancient aqueduct systems, one Roman, one Greek. Water from these ancient aqueducts was diverted to huge underground cisterns beneath the villas and palaces above, providing them with fresh drinking water. During World War II, Mussolini’s civil defense corps converted hundreds of these various cavities beneath the city into air-raid shelters. Well shafts were converted into spiral stairwells, leading down into the hollow spaces below. Tens of thousands of Neapolitan residents survived the Allied bombardment in the shelters. After the war, these shelters were converted to yet another use: repositories of the discarded rubble from the construction and excavation during the huge postwar building boom. It’s only since the 1970s that efforts by the local urban speleologists have spurred interest in the reexcavation and documentation of the underground of Naples. Meeting some of the pioneers in this exploration, survey, and mapping is what enabled the group’s first expedition.

  The head of this excavation and documentation effort is colloquially known as “the Don.” The day before I get to Naples, the Don and our contact from Napoli Underground, Fulvio, took our group on an extensive journey through the ruins of one of these ancient aqueduct and cistern systems. When I arrive and see the pictures of body-belays into enormous abandoned caverns, I immediately regret my decision to spend the day before with my cousin, who lives in a small town a couple hours north. The other underground network I had visited extensively, Paris’s, had been documented and stabilized during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Seeing that process in action in another city was a rare chance that I’ve missed. Still, we have a week left in Naples. We know there’s a lot to find. But Naples is not a city that gives up its secrets to outsiders easily.

  THIRTEEN

  New York is a Jewish City. It’s an everyday thing. It’s in the shrug the Korean grocer gives you, the casual colloquialisms of the Haitian cabdriver, the joking comment made by the Dominican guy whom you ask for directions on Ninth Avenue. For someone who grew up in a Jewish household, fitting in in New York is the easiest, most comfortable thing in the world. Who you are is in the air, in the streets, in the fabric of the city.

  It’s easy for me to feel this character, because it’s the character I know intimately. But the Jewish character of New York is only one part of it. Numerous immigrants from every corner of the globe have made New York home, and each has contributed something indelible to its landscape. Few of these groups have come in greater numbers, or been there longer, or contributed more to the cultural landscape, than the Jews of Eastern Europe. But one group that has is the Southern Italians. And one of the main sources of this Southern Italian immigration has been the city of Naples. Before arriving there, I wondered how much of the character of the city I see every day in New York and just don’t notice. I wondered how much of this character I would be able to recognize in Naples, not having grown up in an Italian-American household.

  The easiest part, of course, is the food. Pretty much everything you think of as “Italian food” in the United States is specifically Neapolitan cuisine. The best example of this is pizza. Gennaro Lombardi brought the
stuff from Naples to Little Italy around the turn of the twentieth century, establishing Lombardi’s pizzeria, which is still on the corner of Spring and Mott streets over one hundred years later. And Little Italy should in reality be called Little Naples. The area of Lower Manhattan centered on Mulberry Street was a specific Neapolitan neighborhood. You can still see evidence of this Neapolitan heritage today every September during the Feast of San Gennaro—the patron saint of Naples.

  But it turns out there’s much more to it than just food and festival. In Naples, I notice I can see shadows of New York in the faces of the old men, in the gestures and body language of the citizens, and especially in the way people talk with their hands. Naples has almost an entire language based on hand gestures. Our hostel manager, an Australian named Jenny, tells us this comes from the hilly terrain, as people couldn’t simply walk down the block to see a neighbor. Combine this with the inevitable noise that comes from a densely populated city, and sign language shorthand becomes the best and most efficient way to communicate with your neighbors across the valley.

  I can also see New York in the flow of the city, in the general atmosphere. I wonder how much the jaywalking culture in New York comes from Naples. I can’t know for sure, but I suspect the Lower Manhattan of fifty years ago bore a startling resemblance to the Naples of today.

  I wonder how much there is that I miss. Probably a lot. But I can see the soul of Naples in New York. I may not know the specifics, I may not be able to articulate the similarities with any eloquence, but as sure as I can tell you New York is a Jewish city, I can tell you that it’s there.

  • • •

  And there is one more New York trait that I suspect, and hope, is a residue from its Neapolitan heritage. Which is that even in our current age of terrorism paranoia, people in my city are really, really good about not sticking their noses in other people’s business. A lot of other Americans think this is rude: after all, if you saw a person, say, sobbing her eyes out on the subway, wouldn’t you ask what’s wrong and try to comfort her? But doing so would be considered a breach of the careful etiquette New Yorkers have developed for these situations. That lady doesn’t have anywhere else to cry at the moment. She’s got to get to work, and that involves taking the subway with a bunch of strangers. So the strangers give her that personal bubble she’d have in another city, where she’d grab a few minutes of catharsis in her car before reapplying her makeup and heading into work to face the day. In a city so crowded, where privacy is always at a premium, a respect for privacy is taken as the default position, given priority over other tranches of proper etiquette. This isn’t to say we can’t be comforting and friendly, just that we need a cue—the lost-looking tourist to inquire about directions, the crying woman on the subway to ask for a tissue—before we do so.

  This default setting of minding your own business extends itself to a lot of facets of life in New York, and gives us some advantages when it comes to our more illicit activities. I’ve been seen by strangers coming out of manholes, subway tunnels, even descending from suspension bridges. In almost all instances, the people have followed the tried-and-true New York practice of simply continuing along their way while studiously avoiding eye contact. The longest exchange I’ve ever had with a stranger in these circumstances was coming down from my first time on top of the Williamsburg Bridge, when an aging hippie riding a bike down the path asked us, “You go all the way to the top?” After hearing our affirmation, he replied, “Fuck yeah!” and biked off.

  Trying to get the lay of the land in Naples, we ask Jenny what might happen if we’re seen coming out of a manhole in the middle of the night by your average passersby. My suspicions are confirmed.

  “Oh, no. This isn’t a dobbing kind of culture at all,” she tells us, using the Australian slang for “snitching.” “People mind their own here.” Seeing as Naples is the home of the Camorra, one of the most feared and powerful organized crime syndicates in the world, this isn’t too hard to believe. But this could also work to our disadvantage: Naples is not the kind of city that’s about to let a bunch of arrogant outsiders who’ve just rolled into town in on its secrets. Still, we decide to see if we can have a few adventures on our own.

  • • •

  Jim has a topographical map. He’s very excited about this. The rest of the group is kind of beat, leaving Jim to go comb the hills of Naples alone in the middle of the night, looking for tunnel entrances. I am not optimistic: I can’t imagine wandering around town looking for holes in the ground, especially in a city like this one, is going to yield much in the way of results. I go to sleep.

  I wake up the next morning, and the topo map is spread out on the hostel’s kitchen table, the gang crowded around it. Somehow, Jim actually found something, an abandoned building with a small network of quarries below it. Heartened by the fact that there is apparently stuff out there to discover, we make more of an effort. We schlep out to the northern outskirts of the city and manage to find an entrance to a drain that we follow for a while. Later on, some of the group pops manholes until they find a network of utility tunnels near downtown. We hear about an old abandoned industrial park from the 1960s and spend a few hours checking that out. A couple of small barriers jumped, scaffolding climbed, and “Employees Only” doors opened lead to some lovely views from the old castle downtown. Interesting, but only a scratch on the surface of what Naples has to offer.

  Our experience in Naples is best summed up by our attempt to walk the ancient Roman pedestrian tunnels, known locally as grotte, through the mountains. There are two of them we know of. The first is the one by Virgil’s tomb, the second a bit farther west by the coast. We scout them out during the day and see a pretty climbable iron fence guarding the entrances. Jim, Steve, and I wait for nightfall to make our attempt on the first grotto. We get over the fence unseen, only to encounter another one right behind it. This one isn’t remotely climbable: it stretches about thirty feet to the very top of the tunnel, completely barring any and all access. We hop back over the first fence and decide to try the second grotto. This time the entrance isn’t so obvious. We wind through the hills of what seems to be a very rich residential part of town, the kind of neighborhood where you definitely don’t want to be caught accidentally wandering into someone’s backyard instead of an old Roman tunnel. Still, we eventually find what we think is the entrance. Over the fence we go—with the same result as the first tunnel: a ceiling-to-floor gate that makes it impossible to continue.

  The “extralegal” way, which is what we term our attempts at exploration without official sanction, isn’t a complete bust, but it’s close. In quite a new development for our motley crew of international urban adventurers, the straight and narrow will turn out to reveal more of the city. But of course it isn’t quite as much fun.

  FOURTEEN

  Indiana Jones!!! Da-da-da-daaaah!!!” The short, elderly, and extremely energetic guide is shouting this nonstop while nimbly racing through the two-foot-wide ancient Greek aqueduct tunnels one hundred feet underneath the city. Steve and I are the only two participants on this particular tour—offered by candlelight, Saturday mornings only, from an obscure address in the Spanish Quarter.

  The Spanish Quarter itself is one of the more interesting neighborhoods in Naples. Geographically, it lies directly west of the city center on a gently sloping hill. Its narrow and compact cobblestone streets form a grid, the only part of the street layout that comes even close to following a regular geometric pattern. Socially, it’s a densely populated working-class neighborhood, and somewhat eccentric. This is the area of town where you’re most likely to see a six-year-old riding backward on a Vespa motor scooter being driven by his nine-year-old sister, or be propositioned by one the femminielli, as members of the venerable Neapolitan transsexual community are called.

  Below the Spanish Quarter is even more interesting: it’s home to an extensive network of underground aqueducts and cisterns, many of which
were turned into air-raid shelters during the war, one of which we’re currently touring. Tours are in Italian only, other than “Look, look!” and “Ooh la la!”—two phrases our guide uses every couple of minutes. Steve wants to take pictures, which means it’s my job to pay attention to the guide and try to ask questions, serving to distract and delay him from rushing us along. This will give Steve the time to get the shots he wants. I’m doing pretty good at this job, combining the various things that are pointed out with a basic knowledge of Romance languages and the copious use of hand gestures from our guide to get a sense of the stories he’s trying to tell us.

  From what I gather, the house above where we entered was the house our guide and his brother had grown up in. During World War II, when they were children, they hid in the old cistern below that had been turned into an air-raid shelter. After the war, illegal dumping from construction filled in much of the old air-raid shelter and underground network. Later on, when they were adults, they reentered and reexcavated the former air-raid shelter and surrounding cisterns and tunnels, and started giving tours.

  “Illegal” is actually a strong word when used to describe the dumping of construction materials; again, “extralegal” is probably the better term. In a city like Naples, bureaucracy, building codes, and paperwork are basically taken as, well, one of the many different ways of doing things. And postwar building almost never followed this official way. We had already encountered an interesting example of this in our journey through one of the underground tunnels we had found on our own. From what we could tell, it was designed and meant for use exclusively as a storm drain. However, every once in a while we ran into small pipes—often only a few inches wide—discharging sewage into the drain. During the postwar building boom, if it was easier and cheaper to just connect nearby buildings’ sewage systems to this storm drain instead of an actual sewer, a way was found to make it happen.