In the sweltering month of August, Italians from Torino to Messina flock to the beach. Temperatures sore to well above 35 degrees centigrade and everything reaches a sort of raucous crescendo on August 15^th, the national holiday of Ferragosto. Extended families bring multi-course picnics, foldout tables, awnings, flotation devices, nonnas in wheelchairs and a hodgepodge of seemingly non-essential beach paraphernalia to temporarily colonize over 7,000 kilometers of Italian coastline until children return to school the second week of September.  

While this wild mess ensues at the beach, a restive calm incongruously lurks about 50 meters below ground in the 3,000-year-old city of Naples. Subterranean temperatures average 22 degrees centigrade and your balmy companions are the dearly departed saints and sinners of Naples from the past several millennia. 14,000 years ago a nearby phlegrean volcanic eruption dramatically altered the continental shelf of Europe, also covering the region that now constitutes Naples in several meters of ash.This ash later became the malleable rock, a sort of yellow tuff, ideal for constructing aqueducts, tunnels and catacombs.