As of March, 2011, the splendid new Morelli parking structure is open. It is dug into the side of Mt. Echia, a few yards from the west exit of the Galleria della Vittoria car tunnel one block from the Villa Comunale. The entrance to the structure is totally inconspicuous; within, however, it is a seven-story affair with 250 long-term rental spaces and 230 hourly slots. More impressive for our purposes, however, is that the entire affair occupies the western entrance to the old Bourbon Tunnel, which has now been opened for public tours; thus, another bit of the "city beneath the city" is now accessible to tourists who fancy themselves mole-people.

There is a difference between being "beneath the city" at this site and elsewhere, say, in the downtown area of Naples. Here, you are really beneath the pre-Naples city of Parthenope that sat on the hill above you. The entire hill has a great many quarried out caves, perhaps the most famous of which is the Cavern of Mithra. That one, of course, is Greek, but most of the large quarried spaces beneath Mt. Echia are cisterns that drew on the Carmignano Aqueduct from the early 1600s. These are upside-down funnel-like structures dug deep down into the hill, many of which were then incorporated into the Bourbon Tunnel in the 1850s. Those cisterns (and the tunnel, itself) were abandoned after the building of the new aqueduct in the 1880s; later, many of the cisterns were used as bomb shelters in WWII. The builders of the shelters used the Bourbon Tunnel for access and then tunneled off to the sides to find additional cisterns, and then tunneled further to the next one and the next, thus connecting them and giving a labyrinthian quality to the whole complex of shelters. Some of them are very large (one is nicknamed "The Cathedral"!), and some are small enough to make you intensely dislike being confined beneath a mountain. (Don't make me talk about the ant-hive corridors and connecting passageways!)

Stairways into the shelters from the surface were dug in WWII, but there are older stairs as well. A guide told me that during the process of exploring and clearing the old cistern spaces to the sides of the tunnel, they found a long, steep stairway leading up and decided to follow it. They found a closed door up at the top and knocked! A dog on the other side went into a frenzy of überbark since he had surely never heard a knock from behind that door before! Sooner or later, Fido's master came and opened up. (He said "Who is it?" first, at which point one of the fun-loving guys from Borbonica sotterranea replied, "We have come from the Underworld to take you! Heh-heh-heh.") The urban spelunkers found themselves in the basement of a veterinary clinic up on a busy thoroughfare atop the hill in the area known as Pizzofalcone. The members of Borbonica sotterranea have spent the last five years to get as far as they have and the results are impressive. For my tastes, however, they spend a bit too much time doting on their collection of old abandoned cars and motor scooters; rather than clear them out, the Borbonica sotterranea has pushed them all over to the side where they join the broken hunks of Fascist marble statues dumped in after the war; it all looks like a display of humorous installation art; for example, one old and crushed Fiat has been adorned with a scrawled reminder from the attendant to "please leave the keys in the ignition." (The sign was probably put there by "Underworld Guy" from a few sentences ago. The cars are even featured on the tickets for the guided tours (photo, above). So, the entrance is on via Morelli; there is a pedestrian entrance that will lead you past the parking structure to the back and to the gated entrance to the tunnel. (If I have not been obvious enough about it, don't go if you are claustrophobic.)

note: I am indebted to Clemente Esposito and his article "Il Tunnel Borbonico". It remains the defintive modern documentation on the subject.