The Naples Underground Route, Stop by Stop
The official route into Napoli Sotterranea is about an hour long and takes in six distinct spaces, in a fixed order, roughly forty metres below via dei Tribunali. This is what each one is, what it was for and what not to walk past.
Down the 136 steps
The descent is a single staircase of 136 steps, low and comfortable by the attraction’s own description, with a handrail the whole way and no lift. It is the part people ask about most and the part that surprises them least once they are on it: the risers are shallow because the stair was cut for people carrying things, not for speed. The air changes about a third of the way down and stays changed.
There is no lift and no step-free alternative on this route, and the listing puts it plainly: not accessible to wheelchairs or walkers. The Neapolis Sotterrata under San Lorenzo Maggiore is the step-free way to see a Naples underground — every route compared on steps and access.
The six spaces, in the order you meet them
| Order | Space | What it was for | Time there |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The quarry chambers | Cutting building stone | 10–15 min |
| 2 | The Greco-Roman aqueduct | Carrying water under the centre | 15–20 min |
| 3 | The cisterns | Storing and drawing the supply | 5–10 min |
| 4 | The candlelit passage | A channel too narrow to widen | About 10 min, or 10 min waiting |
| 5 | The wartime shelter | Sheltering from air raids | About 10 min |
| 6 | The Roman theatre and Summa Cavea | Public performance | 10–15 min |
Dwell times are typical rather than fixed; a guide reads the group.
Book a guided walk of this route
The quarry chambers
What it was: Working faces where tuff was cut out and hauled up the shaft to build the palazzo standing above them.
What is there now: Bell-shaped rooms, wider at the floor than the ceiling, with the tool marks still legible on the walls and blocks left stacked where they were cut.
How long you spend: Ten to fifteen minutes, usually the first proper stop after the stairs.
Do not walk past: The change in the tool marks between one wall and the next — different hands, different centuries.
The Greco-Roman aqueduct
What it was: Part of the Greco-Roman aqueduct: channels cut between the quarry voids and plastered to carry water under the whole historic centre.
What is there now: Narrow passages at head height that you walk along rather than look at. The plaster survives in long stretches; so do the levelling marks.
How long you spend: Fifteen to twenty minutes, the longest single section.
Do not walk past: The vertical shafts overhead. Each one dropped into a courtyard, and each one is why a household never had to leave home for water.
The cisterns
What it was: Sealed chambers that held the city’s water supply, filled from the channels and drawn from above by bucket.
What is there now: Several still hold water — green, entirely still, and deeper than it looks. Steps and walkways were cut in later so the chambers could be reached.
How long you spend: Five to ten minutes.
Do not walk past: The waterline on the wall above the current level. It is not where you would guess.
The candlelit passage
What it was: A working channel too narrow to widen, kept as it was.
What is there now: A stretch barely shoulder-wide leading to a Roman cistern, walked by candlelight. It is entirely optional and the operator builds the choice into the tour.
How long you spend: Roughly ten minutes if you go; roughly ten minutes of waiting if you do not.
Do not walk past: The point where the candle is the only light. It is the one moment on the route that is genuinely hard to photograph, and the one people describe afterwards.
The wartime shelter
What it was: The same voids, reopened between 1940 and 1944 when Naples was being bombed.
What is there now: Bunk frames, tins, toys and charcoal drawings left where they were. Among them a woman’s profile with an elaborate hairstyle, drawn on the tuff by somebody waiting out a raid.
How long you spend: Ten minutes, and it is the section that goes quiet.
Do not walk past: The drawings at child height. They were not made by adults.
The Roman theatre and the Summa Cavea
What it was: The theatre of Neapolis, where the city watched performances and where later buildings simply grew over the top of the seating.
What is there now: Sections of the structure survive inside and beneath present-day houses, reached from the street rather than from the tunnels. The upper tier, the Summa Cavea, has recently been brought back into the route.
How long you spend: Ten to fifteen minutes.
Do not walk past: The domestic doorways. You reach a Roman theatre through what is still somebody’s building.
The hydroponic garden
One space on the route is neither Greek, Roman nor wartime: a hydroponic growing experiment kept under lamps at depth. It is a modern addition and the operator presents it as one. Whether it belongs on an archaeological route is a fair question, and it does answer a real one — what grows forty metres down if you give it light.
Three things most visitors walk past
- The fill line. After 1885 the tunnels were used as a dump, and on several chamber walls you can still read the height the rubble reached before the clearance.
- The marble bust in the niche. A bearded Roman head set into a recess cut in the tuff, easy to miss because it sits at the edge of the lit area.
- The join between periods. In two or three places a Greek cut runs straight into a Roman plaster face into a 1940s widening, within a single arm’s length of wall.
Photographs, light and temperature
Photography is permitted, and you are told so directly. The lighting is warm, low and directional, which flatters the stone and defeats most phone cameras — bracing against a wall works better than raising the exposure. It is noticeably cooler than the street, which in a Neapolitan August is the reason several travellers give for going at all.
Back up to via dei Tribunali
The route returns you to the same square you left, which is disorienting in a useful way: the street you step back onto is directly above the aqueduct you have just walked. San Gregorio Armeno and its year-round nativity workshops are one turn away, and Spaccanapoli a few minutes south.
Several of the guided walks listed here bundle exactly that circuit with the descent, so the hour underground arrives inside a two-and-a-half-hour tour of the streets above it — compare them on walking tours.
Walk this route with a guide
The official entry ticket includes the guide, because the operator does not allow the walk to be made alone.
Every tour that enters this route, with its price and its length, is on Naples Underground Tours.