WTI Magazine #53    2015 February, 6
Author : Enrico De Iulis      Translation by:

This time the good news is worth double, not only for the opening of a new museum created in an almost unique place, but also for the city in which this is happening: Naples. A city that apparently remains motionless in the museum sector and that sometimes seems to expect the most complete decay by consumption.

It is not so. With the contemporary art museum MADRE and the opening of the extraordinary underground stations, the city had already shown an interest in new and contemporary; but now it adds an important piece to the knowledge of the Italian late medieval. We are talking about the Gothic underground of the Certosa di San Martino, virtually the supporting structures of the original building that was founded in 1325 by the order of Charles of Anjou, thanks to the genius of Tino di Camaino and Attanasio Primario.

After a long renovation, finally open to the public these powerful buttresses made by pillars closed by pointed arches; between these spaces, visible from the outside in their upper part, the tombstones, the inscriptions and the marble works will be set up. A collection of one hundred and fifty works gathered through deposits, bequests and consolidations that will allow the visitor to take an interesting journey in the art of sculpture from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century.

The place becomes almost metaphysical, with the works accessible in the very high spaces of this huge Angevin hall, and you can see fourteenth-century pieces like the sarcophagus of Beatrice del Balzo, proceeds from the reuse of a Roman bath of the II-III century dc; a reclining figure from the shop of Tino Camaino himself; a "Veiled Allegory" by Angelo Viva from the late eighteenth century. In addition, there will be an important epigraphic collection, a kind of real stone archive, which will witness with its inscriptions the facts of urban life in the city.

Napoli not only enriches its portfolio of highest quality art sites that absolutely have to be visited, but it increases the chance to know the city in its subsoil. This new opening is going to join the famous "Napoli sotterranea" (Underground Naples) that returns intact Greek and Roman environments of Naples from the early centuries of its foundation, along tunnels dug into the tuff around what was the cardo/decumano axis of the classical period.

Not to forget, in this matter, is also the less known "Tunnel Borbonico" (Bourbon Tunnel), which at this point we can consider the chronological closure of a journey that starts from the foundation of Naples and arrives to the second world war. In fact in this tunnel, which is inserted on the areas linked to the seventeenth-century traits of the "Acquedotto della Bolla", you can admire the civil works carried out by Errico Alvino, but also the display of vintage motorcycles and cars, there remained because deposited during the second world ward, when the tunnel also served as air-raid shelter.

Napoli gives us a new experience, guarded in its always varied subsoil.