Museo del Sottosuolo
Napoli (NA)
Hidden gemMuseums
The story
Cisterns, tunnels and wells under Piazza Cavour, where the munaciello (little monk of Neapolitan lore) is not a fairy tale but the trade of those who worked down here: small, hooded, always in the shadows.
Access
€ 10 (reduced € 7). Thu-Sun, tours every hour, booking compulsory. Tel. 081451085
More gems in Napoli
Sacred artCappella Sansevero (Cristo Velato)
Napoli (NA)
Beneath a veil of marble that still seems to breathe, Sanmartino's Cristo Velato rests in the chapel's half-light, and the whiteness of the stone deceives every eye.
Sacred artDuomo di Napoli
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Three times a year the city holds its breath as the blood of San Gennaro waits to liquefy, among Gothic naves and the gold of the chapel devoted to him.
Sacred artCappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro
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Behind a bronze gate lie silverware, gems and the jewel-studded mitre of the saint: a treasure heaped up over centuries by the devotion of Naples.
Sacred artChiesa del Gesù Nuovo
Napoli
The facade of pyramid-cut piperno stone hides symbols carved into the blocks, while inside the Baroque bursts out in marble and in the memory of the physician Giuseppe Moscati.
Sacred artChiostro di Santa Chiara
Napoli
A garden of pillars clad in yellow and blue majolica, where lemon pergolas and eighteenth-century scenes painted on the tiles keep the noise of the city at bay.
Sacred artChiesa di Santa Luciella ai Librai (teschio con le orecchie)
Napoli
In the crypt of a small church rediscovered in the maze of the Librai rests the skull with ears, which the faithful believed could listen to their prayers.
More gems: Museums
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Ospedale delle Bambole
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Behind a shop window in Palazzo Marigliano a craftsman mends glass eyes, porcelain arms and dolls' curls, in a workshop born more than a century ago.
MuseumsVilla San Michele (Axel Munthe)
Anacapri
The white house that Swedish doctor Axel Munthe built among ancient columns and pergolas, with its granite sphinx gazing out over the Gulf of Naples.
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Museo MEdA
(AV)
Room after room it rebuilds the peasant world of the Alta Irpinia: trades, objects and rites of a vanished civilisation, where daily life was interwoven with magic and superstition.
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Il Torrione (Museo Civico Giovanni Maltese)
Forio (NA)
Built in 1480 to spot Saracen sails, this cylinder of tufo (volcanic tuff) became four centuries later the home-studio of the sculptor Giovanni Maltese, who lived here into the twentieth century. Today his sculptures still inhabit the tower that once had to defend Forio from pirates.
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Villa La Colombaia (Museo Luchino Visconti)
Forio (NA)
Here Luchino Visconti wrote, quarrelled and hid from the world, among the holm oaks of Zaro and a view that slips straight into his films. The director wanted to be buried here: the park is still his, more than the villa.
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Museo del Mare (Palazzo dell'Orologio)
Ischia (NA)
Three floors of nets, ex voto, models and photographs of men who set out to sea and never returned. It is the museum the fishermen of Ischia Ponte built for themselves, in the clock tower palace that marked the rhythm of their departures.