Naples Underground	Volume 61 Number 3, May/June 2008
by Jarrett A. Lobell and Marco Merola

Subway excavations are changing the city's history

The Piazza Municipio excavations are in the heart of both the ancient and modern city. (Pasquale Sorrentino)

Chaos reigns in Naples, Italy's noisiest, craziest, and most frenetic city. Traffic lights are mere formalities. One-way streets are a joke and speed limits nonexistent. People park cars facing the wrong way, in the middle of the street, and if all else fails or the mood strikes, on the sidewalk. Being a pedestrian is a life-threatening adventure. Being a passenger in a car is not much better, and many would say worse. No city ever screamed more loudly for an improved subway system. Lack of funding, ever-changing governments with different priorities, and a peculiar Neapolitan need for a crisis to arise before anything gets done, have kept the city's harried inhabitants waiting. But the wait is over and, as part of a $22 billion regional transportation package, the expanded Naples Metropolitana subway is set to open in 2011. In the meantime, Italian archaeologists are having a field day.

Left: Preparing two of the discovered ships for removal during excavations of the Roman port. Right: Workers protect the stakes that once supported one of the piers of the ancient Roman port. (Pasquale Sorrentino)

As in many other European cities such as Athens, which also has a new metro system after more than 30 years of construction, and Rome, whose metro is currently being expanded, subway construction has been a boon for archaeology in Naples. The city dates back more than 2,700 years, and thanks to the massive holes and tunnels needed for stations and tracks, according to Maria Luisa Nava, the city's archaeological superintendent, "It is no exaggeration to say that these excavations have changed the history of the city and altered our understanding of the place of Naples in the Mediterranean world." For the first time archaeologists are able to identify when its important harbor was built, how it expanded when the need arose and contracted when the city's character changed from commercial port to luxury retreat. Previously unknown aspects of the Greco-Roman, Byzantine, Angevin, and later topography have been uncovered. And the discovery of an extraordinary temple complex has bolstered the importance of the little-known Isolympic Games, a Hellenic-style contest instituted by the glory-hungry Roman emperor Augustus.

An excavator displays pieces of a terracotta mask and lamps found during the excavation of the port in Piazza Municipio. (Pasquale Sorrentino)

For now most of the more than 3.3 million (and growing) artifacts are stored in three nondescript warehouses in Piscinola.The well-guarded gray steel structures are already filled to overflowing with bright yellow and white plastic trays holding ceramics, pieces of marble column drums and capitals, inscriptions, decorative plaster, painted fresco fragments, stone ballista balls, anchors, and animal bones. Some of the larger architectural elements, such as the thirteenth-century fountain from the courtyard of the temple in Piazza Nicola Amore, where the subway tunnel is more than 60 feet lower than the level of the temple, cannot be accommodated on site, so they have been moved intact to the warehouses. Many of the larger remains have been left in situ for future metro passengers to see in the museum-like spaces of the stations, and some of the smaller artifacts will go back to the sites when work is completed. In the future, tens of thousands of Neapolitans who take the metro every day (will they give up those cars and Vespas?) will see their city's history in a way that was never before possible. The busy modern coastline next to the ancient port, the now-visible 750-year history of the castle that dominates the city center, the traces of the area's earliest inhabitants as many as 7,000 years ago, and the surprising evidence of a competition that would have brought the ancient city together in a way familiar to soccer-crazed Italians, all will become a part of the daily life of this fascinating city. Hopefully Neapolitans will stop long enough to look.

Jarrett A. Lobell is a senior editor at ARCHAEOLOGY. Marco Merola is ARCHAEOLOGY's Naples correspondent.

© 2008 by the Archaeological Institute of America
www.archaeology.org/0805/abstracts/naples.html

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