Naples Underground

Forty meters below the characteristic and lively streets of the Historic Center of Naples, you find a different world, unexplored, isolated by time, but deeply connected with the world above. It’s the heart of Naples, and the place from which the city was born. To visit it is to travel to the past, a world 2400 years old.Every historic epic, from the foundation of Neopolis, to the bombs of WWII, has left it’s mark on the walls of the yellow tufa stone, the soul of Naples, and the stone with which the city was built.

Galleria Borbonica (Bourbon Gallery) 

An exciting journey of inestimable value: the 17th century aqueduct; the Galleria Borbonica, a nineteenth-century military route with its majesty of civil engineering of the nineteenth century; the admissions of the Second World War; cars, vintage motorcycles and buried statues.

The Galleria Borbonica, is an underground cavity of Naples that extends under the hill near Palazzo Reale.
With a decree dated February 19, 1853, Ferdinando II di Borbone commissioned the architect Errico Alvino to create a long underground tunnel that connected the Largo della Reggia (today Piazza Plebiscito) to Piazza della Vittoria.
Its true end was military: it had to constitute a quick escape (towards the sea) for the royal family in case of riots and a quick connection with the royal palace for the soldiers.

The tunnel should have been called Galleria Reale and both lanes should have taken the royal names: the one leading to Chiaia was to be called Strada Regia while the one in the opposite direction Strada Regina.
Work began immediately, in April of the same year. We began to dig from the west. Along the way the tunnel intercepted the network of tunnels and cisterns connected to the ancient aqueduct built by the noble Cesare Carmignano (1627 -1629) that served the city of Naples

The tunnel, dug by 1855 after several interruptions, was inaugurated by the King on May 25 of that year.

The death of the King in 1859, and the historical-political events that invested his successor Francesco II of the Two Sicilies, hindered the recovery of the excavation, which remained so unfinished.
The route, in the following century, was abandoned, until during the Second World War some underground rooms were used and set up as an anti-aircraft shelter.