A downshift of 24 centuries.

Slip into the heart of Naples is almost a habit for many people of Naples ever. No matter who, how or why you decide to slide under it. The point now is “when” it gets. You can run 33 meters under the ground, you can push tens of meters away from this city at that point and never go outdoors. You will come in contact with many traces of which Naples remained buried there, or painted or engraved on tuff.

But only in a hidden basement of Naples you can walk away of 24 centuries from your everyday life. I write about a point, but maybe it’s a line marked by a door that seems to me one of those space-access that you see in movies or imagine in the books of Wells. In an alley, a door, no frills, no billboards. Without ceremony. Immediately after the threshold, the stairway leads you down to the first level. For many small items you realize you’re still around 1600. The pipes, the tracks of the tank, the well over there and the stairs for the well cleaners. But with one eye you see a black hole in the bottom left corner behind you. You feel that the time goes there. Or maybe it comes from there. I can tell you exactly.

Few steps, few bricks forming an arch and in the background the words of Carlo are telling us where tecnically we are. The when we see with our eyes. And in a way we feel it on our skin. The damp smell, the mushrooms. The drops of water coming down from who knows where and who knows when they have left their mark on the ceiling and wall. A white trail, like that of a snail, but a trail now calcified that looks like a giant hanging coral constantly growing.

There, 2,400 years ago (year more year less) during the Greek Neapolis someone built this tomb. A Hypogeal precisely, a “below the hearth” that can still be reached today only from here, in 2010. From the Sanità.