Buried beneath the basilica of Santa Maria della Sanita in the lively Rione Sanita district of Naples, the Catacombs of San Gaudioso are an early Christian burial complex dating from the late fourth century onwards. They take their name from the African bishop Settimio Celio Gaudioso, who fled to Naples to escape Vandal persecutions and was buried here on his death in 452 AD. The catacombs grew over the following centuries as a popular Christian cemetery, with simple loculi tombs lining the walls of the long galleries, family cubicles for wealthier groups and a number of small chapels for veneration of the holier graves. Frescoes and mosaics, some preserved to the present day, decorate the more important spaces. The most unusual feature of the complex, however, is what happened to it in the seventeenth century, when the Dominican friars who maintained the church above adopted a striking and macabre burial system for prominent local citizens. The bones of the deceased were dried in seated niches in the wall, the skulls embedded into the plaster and a painted portrait of the dead person added below. The result is a vivid gallery of skeletal portraits along the walls of the lower catacomb, each combining a real human skull with a frescoed body, vestments and inscription identifying the deceased and dating the burial. The effect is unsettling and unique, a baroque Neapolitan meditation on mortality very different from the calmer iconography of the older galleries. The catacombs are administered by the Sanita Foundation, a local cooperative that emerged from a community redevelopment programme in the early twenty-first century, and guided tours are conducted by trained local guides who often come from the surrounding neighbourhood. Visits combine well with the catacombs of San Gennaro further uphill. Reached through the church above and entered by stairs near the high altar, the catacombs offer a memorable counterpoint to the more conventional Christian catacombs of Rome, with the seventeenth-century skeletal frescoes turning the visit into something part history lesson, part theatrical exercise in Neapolitan baroque attitudes to death.

Type: Tourist Attraction

Address: Via della Sanita 123, Naples, Italy

Website: https://www.catacombedinapoli.it