(Mis)adventures in Naples

Pictures of our adventures Naples can be found here.

I loved Naples - just walking around, getting a feel for the city was enough for me. But that wasn’t what we were there for - the seven of us were on a specific mission to explore the underground.

There’s always a couple ways to go about this - the legal way, or the “extralegal” way as I like to put it. Different cities have different cultures. In Paris, for instance, the extralegal way isn’t that extra. Police have a relationship with the people that do nutty stuff. They’re content to play a cat-and-mouse game with a 100-Euro fine being the biggest stick they’ve got. In return, the cataphiles can be counted on to report anything really bad down in the underground: structural dangers, smugglers, or anything else out of the normal course of things.

New York is different. Tolerance is less. There’s a few things you really don’t want to be caught doing, and a few others that will most likely result in a night in jail. But it’s necessary - there’s no other choice. There’s simply no way people can get permission for certain things nowadays, and the relative ease of doing them extralegally makes it a risk worth taking.

Naples is different from either one of the two. I could tell this was the kind of city that wasn’t about to let a bunch of arrogant outsiders who’d just rolled into town in on its secrets. Still, we decided to see if we could have a few adventures on our own.

Jim found something first - an abandoned building with a small network of quarries below it. Heartened by the fact that there was stuff out there we could find, we made more of an effort. One night we schlepped out to the northern outskirts of the city and managed to find an entrance to a drain that we followed for a while. Later on Gabe, Ashley, and Steve popped manholes until finding a network of utility tunnels near downtown. We heard about an old abandoned industrial park from the 1960s and spent a few hours checking that out. A couple of small barriers jumped, scaffolding climbed, and “employees only” doors opened led to some OK views from the old castle downtown. Somewhat 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 through the mountains. There’s two of them we knew of - the first by Virgil’s Tomb, the second a bit further West by the coast. We scouted them out during the day, and saw a pretty climbable iron fence surrounding the entrance to the grotto. Jim, Steve, and I waited for nightfall to make our attempt on the first grotto. We got over unseen, only to encounter another fence about 100 feet into the mile+ long tunnel. This one wasn’t remotely climbable - it stretched about 50 feet to very top of tunnel, completely barring any and all access. We hopped back over the first fence and decided to try the other grotto. This time, the entrance wasn’t so obvious. We wound through the hills of what seemed to be a very rich, residential part of town - the kind of part of town where you definitely don’t want to be caught accidentally wandering into someone’s backyard instead of an old Roman tunnel. Still, we eventually found what we thought was the entrance. Over the fence we went - with the same result as the first tunnel: a ceiling-to-floor gate making it impossible to continue.

The extralegal way wasn’t a complete bust, but it was close. In quite a new development for our motley crew of international urban adventurers, the straight and narrow would turn out to reveal more of the city. But of course, it wasn’t quite as much fun.