Galleria Borbonica

On February 19, 1853, King Ferdinand II of Bourbon signed a decree commissioning the architect Errico Alvino to dig a tunnel under Monte Echia, linking the Royal Palace with the barracks near the sea. Its purpose was military: a protected route for troops, and an escape for the royal family after the uprisings of 1848. Digging began in April 1853 and was done entirely by hand, with picks, hammers and wedges, by torch and candle light.

The diggers kept hitting the city's older water system: the tunnels and 17th-century cisterns of the Bolla aqueduct. Alvino built bridges across the cisterns, one 20 m long and 10 m high, so that houses above would not lose their water. The work ended in May 1855 with a tunnel 431 m long, reaching Piazza Carolina behind the colonnade of Piazza del Plebiscito. It never reached the Palazzo Reale. It opened to the public for three days after the king's visit on May 25, 1855, and then the project stopped.

From 1939 to 1945 the tunnel and its cisterns sheltered between 5,000 and 10,000 people during air raids. After the war, until 1970, it was a police car pound, where vehicles and debris recovered from the bombed city were dumped. Excavation from 2007 uncovered them again: cars and motorbikes under 8 m of rubble, and statues, including the funeral monument of the Bersaglieri captain Aurelio Padovani.

Standard walks the Bourbon tunnel and the wartime shelter, with sculpture fragments and vintage objects recovered from the rubble. The route descriptions only promise the main room of parked vintage vehicles on the Adventure tour, so ask when booking if the cars are your reason to go. Via delle Memorie starts in the courtyard of Palazzo Serra di Cassano and goes down through the building's basements, with a small Second World War museum, to the tuff quarries. Adventure takes you with a helmet and torch through the narrow channels of the pozzari, the aqueduct's maintenance workers, across an old bridge and onto a small raft on a flooded stretch linked to an abandoned subway tunnel. Speleo Light is a longer walk through the aqueduct's narrow tunnels to 15th-century cisterns still full of water.

The pages for Adventure, Speleo Light and Via delle Memorie each state that the English tour is available only for groups, with a minimum number of participants. The Standard page does not say which languages its public tours use. If you do not speak Italian and are traveling as a couple, email the association ([email protected]) or phone before you pay, and ask which departures run in English. That one message can save you an hour in a tunnel you cannot follow.

• Campania Artecard: 20% off the full Standard price at the ticket office. See whether the Artecard is worth it.
• MANN ticket: the archaeological museum lists the Galleria Borbonica among partner sites giving 25% off to holders of its ticket.
• City Sightseeing ticket: 30% off the Standard price.
• Accessibility: from the Via Morelli entrance, visitors with disabilities can follow about 60% of the Standard tour. The other routes are not accessible.
• Photos are allowed on Standard and Via delle Memorie, only in some areas on Adventure. No smoking or e-cigarettes anywhere.

Vico del Grottone 4 is a dead-end alley off Via Gennaro Serra: from Piazza del Plebiscito, walk past Gambrinus up Via Gennaro Serra and take the second street on the left, about 325 m in all. Via Domenico Morelli 61 is inside the Morelli car park near Piazza Vittoria, on the Chiaia side. Via Monte di Dio 14 is in Palazzo Serra di Cassano on the Pizzofalcone hill. From the port at Piazza Municipio, all three are within walking distance.

To decide between this and the old-town underground, read our comparison Napoli Sotterranea or Galleria Borbonica. The longer story of the city's tunnels is in Naples from below.

Galleria Borbonica Entrance Ticket in Standard Route

Same €15 as the Galleria's own adult price. Entries at 10 am, noon, 3 pm and 5 pm from Vico del Grottone 4. The listing's child prices differ from the Galleria's own page, so check before booking children.

1 hour

4.9★★★★★★★★★★(2,849 reviews)

Reserve

Rating as shown on Viator

Booking through these links supports this site at no cost to you. Prices move by date, so we do not print them here; the official prices we checked are in the page above.