Northwest of old Naples, an easy 10-minute walk from Materdei metro station, an ordinary driveway leads to a gaping chasm in the hillside over La Sanità. The gates were wide open when I arrived to explore the enormous ossuary here.
Looking up inside, the chiseled walls make clear that the space was an ancient quarry, likely carved by Greeks and Romans for the tuff used in temples, aqueducts and city walls. But my eyes were quickly drawn to the cavern’s vast floor, tightly packed with the skulls and bones of tens of thousands of napoletani.
The cave first swelled with Naples’ dead in the 17th century, when a number of plagues swept the city. The plague of 1656 alone – like the city’s old decumanus, Spaccanapoli, which ‘splits’ the city in two – killed off at least half of the population. The dead may have numbered as many as 200,000, and likely required significant expansions even here. Just as in the city’s overcrowded crypts, arrangements and rearrangements were made at Cimitero delle Fontanelle, cramming new arrivals over time. The cholera epidemic of 1836 was the last major wave to reshape the remains piled here.
Naturally, the vast site became a locus for at least one of Naples’ death cults: the cult of the anime pezzentelle – the souls of the ‘poor, abandoned, wretches’ awaiting an end to the pains of Purgatory. It arose from an established tradition of encouraging those still alive to pray to God for the dead, even unknown corpses, hoping to lighten their sentences on the other side. But for cult devotees, the reverse became valid: their prayers were directed to the abandoned souls themselves, now divine intermediaries, in hopes these nameless spirits might be willing to put in a good word with God.
Condemned as dark superstition in the 1960s by the city’s archbishop, the cult only attracts a faint trickle of its former following. But in wandering the cemetery, it’s impossible to miss the local attention showered on certain, specific remains, picked out from the roughly 40,000 sets of skulls and bones, gifted with trinkets and charms and, in some cases, even assigned with names.
