Fontanelle cemetery

Interesting facts

The cemetery covers some 3,000 square metres, and the bones are thought to lie compacted to a depth of about four metres beneath the floor.

Its three galleries became known as the nave of the priests, the nave of the plague victims and the nave of the paupers, after the remains they hold.

According to legend, the skull called the Captain has one blackened eye socket and avenged insults by appearing at the offenders' weddings.

Donna Concetta, the 'sweating skull', stays glossy while others gather dust; devotees believed a damp hand after touching it meant a prayer would be granted.

Devotees often asked their adopted skulls for lottery numbers, and if the numbers failed, the skull could be abandoned for another.

A skull that proved generous was promoted from a biscuit tin to a wooden case, a locked marble box or even a little tabernacle.

Inside the church lie the clothed skeletons of Filippo Carafa, Duke of Maddaloni, who died in 1793, and his wife Margherita.

According to legend, Donna Margherita choked on a gnocco, which is why her mummified skull is said to have its mouth open.

A spot called the Tribunale, with three crosses over a base of skulls, is said to have hosted Camorra oaths and sentences.

Bones kept arriving long after the plague, including remains cleared from city churches and street works as late as 1934.

Why it is worth it

Rows of skulls, many thousands of them, line the galleries of a former tuff quarry cut into the hillside of Materdei, at the western end of the Sanità valley in Naples. The Fontanelle cemetery is an ossuary rather than a graveyard: three great trapezoidal galleries, each roughly a hundred metres long and ten to fifteen metres high, are joined by side passages, and the Neapolitans long called them naves, as if the quarry were a basilica. The cavity is estimated at around 30,000 cubic metres, and the visible remains are usually put at about 40,000 people.

The quarries supplied building stone for the city until about 1600. The bones began to arrive with the plague of 1656, which killed at least 300,000 people in the city, and kept coming for almost two centuries: remains cleared from crowded church burial vaults, and the dead of the cholera epidemic of the 1830s. A Neapolitan scholar of the 19th century, Andrea De Jorio, recorded that floods once washed bones out into the streets, after which they were gathered back into the caves and the place became the city's official charnel house for the poor. In 1872 the canon Gaetano Barbati had the remains sorted by type, skulls, shin bones and thigh bones, and the small church of Maria Santissima del Carmine was later built at the entrance.

What makes Fontanelle unlike any other ossuary is the devotion that grew up around it. Neapolitans adopted individual skulls, the "capuzzelle", cleaning them, housing them in little boxes and niches, and praying for the anonymous souls in purgatory in exchange for protection and favours. Local tradition holds that a skull's true name could be revealed to its keeper in a dream, and several skulls became famous in their own right. In 1969 the Church forbade the individual cult as fetishism, but the stacked skulls, the boxes and the votive shrines remain as the devotees left them.

Getting there

The cemetery lies on Via Fontanelle in the Materdei and Sanità area, about half a kilometre from the Avvocata district and within the city of Naples. Naples International Airport (NAP) is about 5 km away. The Materdei station of Naples Metro Line 1 serves the neighbourhood.

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia

The Fontanelle cemetery in Naples is a charnel house, an ossuary, located in a cave in the tuff hillside in the Materdei section of the city. It is associated with a chapter in the folklore of the city. By the time the Spanish moved into the city in the early 16th century, there was already concern over where to locate cemeteries, and moves had been taken to locate graves outside of the city walls. Many Neapolitans, however, insisted on being interred in their local churches. To make space in the churches for the newly interred, undertakers started removing earlier remains outside the city to the cave, the future Fontanelle cemetery. The remains were interred shallowly and then joined in 1656 by thousands of anonymous corpses, victims of the great plague of that year.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia