Historic Sites in Naples
Naples doesn’t keep its past behind glass. Monasteries, arcades, tunnels and ossuaries: these are places where the city’s history is still part of everyday life, and where a local can tell you what the guidebooks leave out.
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Castles and palaces have their own pages, and so do churches and museums. This section gathers everything else that shaped the city: places that don’t fit neatly into one box, but that you’d be sorry to miss.
Start with the monasteries. On the Vomero, the Certosa di San Martino housed Carthusian monks for over five hundred years before becoming a museum. In the centro storico, Santa Chiara hides a cloister of painted majolica tiles behind its plain Gothic church.
Then go underground. Below the streets, Naples is hollow: Greek quarries, Roman cisterns, a Bourbon tunnel built for a king, and air-raid shelters where whole neighbourhoods waited out the bombs of the Second World War. In the Sanità, the Fontanelle cemetery holds thousands of anonymous skulls that Neapolitans once adopted and cared for.
And don’t skip the 19th-century city: the glass dome of Galleria Umberto I, or the vast Real Albergo dei Poveri, built to house the poor of the kingdom. Pick one and give it a slow afternoon.