Fontanelle Cemetery (Cimitero delle Fontanelle) Tours and Activities
40 Reviews
Free admission
Despite the name, Fontanelle Cemetery (Cimitero delle Fontanelle) in Naples isn’t a traditional cemetery. It’s a place of many thousands of burials, but it’s actually an ossuary built into a natural cave in the soft rock underneath the Capodimonte Hill in the early 16th century. It served as a burial ground until the late 1960s.
The bones interred at Fontanelle were painstakingly catalogued and re-organized in the early 1870s, after flooding and mass burials had made the cemetery more of a jumbled mess. A cult devoted to the skulls in the cemetery sprang up, and a church was built at the entrance. Today, visitors can still see the church - Maria Santissima del Carmine - as well as the cataloging work done in the 19th century.
Prior to 2010, Fontanelle was only open to the public on a few days every year. Now, it’s open year-round. Visitors are free to walk through the site without a guide, though joining a tour that includes Fontanelle Cemetery as one of its stops is beneficial to help make sense of the history of the place. Tours that include off-the-beaten-path parts of Naples sometimes include Fontanelle Cemetery.
10am-5pm daily
Via Fontanelle 80, Naples, 80136
Tours and Activities to Experience Fontanelle Cemetery (Cimitero delle Fontanelle)
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Not far from the historic center of Naples is one of the most fascinating places in the city, it is the Fontanelle Cemetery.
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The cave was used as a cemetery when in 1656 a severe plague raged in the city making numerous victims, and the bodies continued to be stored during other epidemics during the following centuries.
During the last century the bones preserved here have been the subject of a widespread rite among the Neapolitan people, that of the "pezzentelle souls" (poor souls). People adopted a skull of which they did not know the story and took care of it, hoping that this could help him with graces and intercessions and that, in a dream, reveal his story to him.
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