A Neapolitan neighbourhood marked by poverty and organised crime had a hidden treasure: its burial chambers. Thanks to an enterprising parish priest and his youth group, these are now a tourist attraction and are also helping to redefine our ideas about the early Church
It’s dawn in winter Naples, and I am walking across the still-sleeping city. I’ve just arrived from Rome: the Italian capital is a thousand miles away – or might as well be. No one would call Rome (140 miles north, in fact) clean, ordered or straightforward: but within 10 minutes of sliding into Napoli Centrale on the first train of the day, I know I’ve landed somewhere that takes chaos, edginess and street-decked filth to new highs (or lows, if you prefer).
The rubbish is piled up on every street corner; washing flutters from a sea of wrought-iron balconies above the cobbled streets; and there’s a menacing edginess in the sharp morning air. Colour and madness and danger, or the promise of them, explode like the bursts of graffiti that embellish the walls of every cat-strewn alley. So there’s trepidation in my step, since the area of Naples I’m headed to is one even a local would regard as perilous.
Rione Sanità is a 30-minute walk north of the centre. Back in the eighteenth century it was affluent, thanks mostly to the existence of the Bourbon palace of Capodimonte on the top of the hill. But then in 1806 a new bridge was built that meant the well-off visitors to the palace could bypass the area entirely, and Sanità fell into a long-term decline characterised by unemployment, poverty and crime, with the Mafia-like Camorra holding sway.
