Explore The Haunting Cimitero Delle Fontanelle Burial Site

Cimitero delle Fontanelle, or Fontanelle Cemetery, is an ancient necropolis in the Valley of the Dead, Naples. A 30,000 m² cavern in Capodimonte Hill, it holds the skeletal remains of those too poor to afford proper burial, vast numbers that died from disease and the numbers that overflowed from local burial places. In use since the 16th century, estimates suggest that at one point it held over eight million bones. The cemetery began as a secondary burial ground but, unusually for an ossuary, saw the bones come to be cared for exceptionally carefully and lovingly. Closed for a period, it is now reopened to the public and makes for both an extraordinary site of worship for the faithful and an astounding sight for all others.

With nothing quite like it in the world, you'll want to find a villa with pool in Campania and spend a day in the city, exploring the site.

Burial sites have a long history in the area and remnants of Greek burial chambers, called hypogea, have been uncovered in the area. By the sixteenth century, there was worry about where cemeteries should be located as they needed to be moved outside of the city walls.

Locals wished to be buried in the cemeteries adjacent to the churches they had frequented in life and fought the move to new locations.

To make space, gravediggers moved earlier bodies to the cave that later became Fontanelle. With the great plague in 1656, there was suddenly a huge influx of bodies (around 40,000) that needed burying and these joined the older corpses in the cave.

Seen as a haunted place, it was avoided at all costs. However, when the number of bones increased so much that they grew into giant stacks, periods of heavy rain were prone to pushing the bones into the city. This led to Father Gaetano Barbati beginning to catalogue and organise the remains in 1872. Still unburied, they were now arranged and carefully placed on shelves and racks, in boxes and crypts.

The cult of the “anime pezzentelle”, or “the abandoned souls” grew up in the area with locals cleaning, caring and praying for the souls doomed to spending eternity in purgatory. This continued for nearly a century until the Archbishop became worried that it was too close to paganism and had the cemetery closed in 1969.

In the early 2000s a major renovation project took place with the cemetery reopened to the public for a few days a year in 2006. Protests by locals meant that this was expanded to a full-time basis in 2010. The Fontanelle is close to the hearts of many Neapolitans and remains a sight that attracts many outsiders as well, each year. Make sure you see it for yourself the next time you end up in Campania.