Neapolis: the Greek city beneath the centre of Naples

What does Neapolis mean?

Neapolis means, quite literally, "new city". That's where Napoli comes from, and in turn the English "Naples". There's something rather charming about it: UNESCO counts it among the oldest cities in Europe, and it's been calling itself "the new one" for some twenty-five centuries.

New compared with what? With an earlier foundation, which UNESCO calls Parthenope or Palaepolis, "the old city", and dates to the ninth century BC. The city council of Naples gives a later date: according to the council, Greek settlers from Cumae landed around the middle of the seventh century BC on the islet of Megaride, where the Castel dell'Ovo stands, and built their first settlement on Monte Echia, the hill opposite. Their burial ground turned up in 1949, when foundations were being dug for a building that replaced one destroyed in the bombing.

And Parthenope? She was a siren. A Greek poem from the Hellenistic period tells how, once Odysseus had sailed past, the sirens threw themselves into the sea, and one of them, Parthenope, was washed up dead on this coast, where the locals buried her and honoured her every year. That's legend, but the cult was real: centuries later, Strabo writes that the siren's monument was pointed out in Neapolis, and Pliny the Elder says the city was called Parthenope after her tomb. That tomb has never been found.

Who founded Neapolis, and when?

UNESCO dates the new city to 470 BC. Ancient writers describe it as a mix of peoples. For Strabo, it was a city of the people of Cumae that later took in new settlers, Chalcidians, people from the island of Pithecusae and Athenians, and that's why it was called the new city. Pliny, more briefly, calls it a colony of the Chalcidians. The details vary; the essentials don't: this was a city of Greeks.

What was the Greek street plan of Neapolis like?

The most striking thing about Neapolis isn't buried at all: you walk on it. The Greeks planned it as a grid: a few long, parallel axes, known in Naples as the decumani, with a mesh of narrow streets meeting them at right angles. Via dei Tribunali follows the line of one of those axes; Spaccanapoli follows another.

UNESCO puts it plainly when it explains why the historic centre is a World Heritage Site: the grid of the Greek foundation is still discernible and still gives the city its basic shape. Walk along Via dei Tribunali, notice the side streets crossing it, and you're reading a plan that's two and a half thousand years old. The houses have been rebuilt time and again. The streets have hardly moved.

What lies beneath Piazza San Gaetano?

This square was the heart of the city: the Greek agora stood here, and the Romans built their forum on top of it. According to Italy's official tourism portal, it was arranged on two levels: politics up above, trade down below, with a flight of steps linking them.

Under the neighbouring basilica of San Lorenzo Maggiore, excavations begun in 1976 uncovered the macellum, the market of the Graeco-Roman city: porticoes with shops at the back and, in the middle, a little circular colonnaded structure, a tholos. One source thinks it housed a fountain, judging by the remains of its drainage; another describes it as a food stall. There's also a stretch of street about sixty metres long, lined with shops, which matches a present-day alley, the vico Giganti.

You can read the eras one on top of another: Greek foundations of tuff blocks, a first-century Roman market above them and, higher still, a sixth-century Christian basilica, part of whose mosaic floor survives. The sources don't agree on how old the Greek part is, mind you: one speaks of a fifth-century BC agora, another of fourth-century foundations.

A Naples beneath Naples: quarries, cisterns and shelters

And beneath the buried city lies another one, made of empty spaces. The ground beneath Naples is tuff, a soft volcanic rock that's easy to work, and the Greeks quarried it underground for the stone of their walls and temples. The Romans, under Augustus, went much further: a network of aqueducts carrying water into the city from the Serino springs, about seventy kilometres off, and reservoirs to hold it. It wasn't until the early twentieth century that people stopped digging into the ground for water.

There was one last twist. During the Second World War, those spaces were given lighting and turned into air-raid shelters. At the sound of the siren, people rushed down the stairs into the heart of the rock. The very cavities that had supplied the stone for the Greek city ended up protecting twentieth-century Neapolitans. And since that war, stretches of the Greek city walls have been excavated.

How long did Naples stay Greek?

Far longer than you might think. Neapolis was one of the great cities of Magna Graecia, and UNESCO credits it with a key role in passing Greek culture on to Rome. Under Roman rule, Strabo, writing in the first century, reports that the gymnasia, the associations for young men and the Greek names for things were all still there, although the people themselves were Romans. Every four years there was a sacred contest in music and athletics that rivalled the most famous in Greece, and plenty of Romans retired to Naples to live the Greek way, at a gentler pace.

That's why, in AD 64, Nero chose it for his debut as a singer. Tacitus, no admirer of his, writes that Nero lacked the nerve to make his debut in Rome and preferred Naples, as a Greek city. The theatre where he sang took up the northern part of the forum, and its remains ended up inside the houses of Via Anticaglia and the streets around it. And in Piazza San Gaetano two Corinthian columns, some eleven metres tall, from the Temple of the Dioscuri still stand, built into the façade of San Paolo Maggiore; the rest of the temple front held out until the earthquake of 1688.

Fact or legend?

• Fact: Neapolis means "new city". UNESCO dates the Greek foundation to 470 BC and says its grid can still be made out in the historic centre.
• Fact: from 1976, the Roman market was excavated under San Lorenzo Maggiore, on top of Greek remains. The quarries and cisterns beneath the city served as shelters in the Second World War.
• Legend: the siren Parthenope, washed up dead on this coast. Ancient writers document her cult; her tomb hasn't been found.
• Dates that don't match: UNESCO places Parthenope in the ninth century BC; the city council, in the mid-seventh. Nor do the sources agree on the age of the agora, and the only one that dates the first quarries puts them in the third century BC, after the foundation.
• Unresolved: whether the round structure in the market was a fountain or a food stall.
• What we don't take on trust: the eye-catching figures for how much of the city sits on empty space. They come from those who run tours of the underground, and we haven't been able to verify them.

Where to hear it

Podtour tells this story on the route "The Historic Centre, Layer by Layer", which works its way down through the eras along Spaccanapoli and Via dei Tribunali. The Greek city is told in Piazza San Gaetano, at the stop "The Greek City Beneath Your Feet", and the next two pick up the thread: "Pagan Columns in a Church Façade" and "The Emperor Who Came to Sing".

The siren has a stop of her own, "The Siren Who Gave the City Its Name", on the route "Santa Lucia and the Egg Castle". And in the same historic centre, the cathedral holds another very Neapolitan story: the miracle of San Gennaro's blood. For the practical side of your trip, see our Naples guide.

Further reading

• UNESCO World Heritage Centre, "Historic Centre of Naples" (no. 726). https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/726/
• Strabo, Geography, V, 4, 7, translated by H. L. Jones (Loeb, 1923), on LacusCurtius. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Strabo/5D*.html
• Pliny the Elder, Natural History, III, 9 (§62), translated by J. Bostock and H. T. Riley (1855), on Perseus. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137%3Abook%3D3%3Achapter%3D9
• Tacitus, Annals, XV, 33–34 (Latin text), The Latin Library. https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/tacitus/tac.ann15.shtml
• Italia.it, "La Neapolis Sotterrata – Complesso Monumentale San Lorenzo Maggiore" (in Italian). https://www.italia.it/it/campania/napoli/musei/la-neapolis-sotterrata---complesso-monumentale-san-lorenzo-maggiore
• Ministero della Cultura, "Teatro antico di Neapolis" (in Italian). https://cultura.gov.it/luogo/teatro-antico-di-neapolis