Napoli Sotteranea

We visited a really old part of Naples on Monday. First, lunch at a stand up cafeteria on via Toledo, then we wandered our way into the the old part of the city. The streets became narrower and the buildings taller and more crowded; the only place to really see the sky was in the small piazzi in front of the churches. The place was vibrant -- shops of all kinds, butchers, fish markets, bakeries, green grocers, artisans, etc. Pedestrians, cars, trucks, scooters, and bikes all trying to be in the narrow alleys at once.
We encountered one church that was built in the 6th century. Then there was another church that was built in the 16th century by a cult of the Catholic Church dedicated to helping souls caught in purgatory to reach salvation. There were two levels of the church, the upper level in baroque style with beautiful but slightly creepy artwork ( lots of depicted skulls and bones). The church in the basement (closed to the public) is where the cult carried on their practice of each member adopting a skull from a crypt and caring for it until the skull's soul could be saved. Needless to say the Vatican frowns on the practice.
We found the subterranean tour and went down into the system of cisterns and narrow aqueducts built by the Greeks and expanded by the Romans. The system was in use until it was blamed for a cholera epidemic in the 1890s. After that it became a handy garbage dump and then an air raid shelter during the Allied bombardment of WWII. Now it is part of a tourist attraction and is being explored by spelunkers and archeologists. The tour ended with a visit to a neighborhood that was built in, around, and on top of a 2000 year old Roman theater . More than anywhere so far, this tour showed us that we Caucasians think of history in Alaska is just a blink of the eye.