Toledo

Riding the escalators down into Toledo station in Naples feels like sinking from the city into the sea. The upper levels are lined in warm ochre tiles that recall the volcanic tuff on which Naples is built; then, as the stairs descend, everything turns to deep, shimmering blue mosaic, with light rippling across the walls like sunlight seen from below the waves. Since it opened in 2012 the station on Line 1 of the Naples Metro has been repeatedly named among the most beautiful underground stations in the world, and it won the Emirates LEAF Award for Public Building of the Year in 2013 and an International Tunnelling Association award in 2015.

The station was designed by the Spanish architect Óscar Tusquets as part of the city's Art Stations programme, which turned new metro stops into commissioned works of contemporary art and architecture. Building it proved difficult: an aquifer lies beneath the site and slowed the works, and Tusquets made water the station's governing theme. The platforms sit about 44 metres below the street. The marine levels form the Sea Gallery by the American theatre director Robert Wilson, whose animated light panels show a sea stirred by waves along the corridors to the trains. Higher up, two large mosaics designed by William Kentridge show a crowded Neapolitan street scene, with San Gennaro, Vesuvius and the artist himself among the figures, and a cart loaded with emblems of the Parthenopean Republic of 1799. On Via Diaz outside stands Kentridge's weathering-steel horseman, Il Cavaliere di Toledo, unveiled in December 2012.

The excavation also opened a window into the city's past. Workers uncovered part of a bastion of the Aragonese walls from the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, which now remains visible in the station's mezzanine, along with Roman masonry probably from a second-century bath complex and, below everything, a Neolithic soil scored by ancient plough marks. Above ground, Via Toledo itself is one of the great streets of Naples, laid out in the sixteenth century under the Spanish viceroy Pedro de Toledo and running between the old centre and the Spanish Quarter.

Getting there

The station is on Via Toledo in central Naples, beside the Spanish Quarter and about 0.4 km from Montecalvario, served by Line 1 of the Naples Metro between Dante and Municipio. Naples International Airport (NAP) is about 6 km away.