The macellum
Neapolis's market with bakery, laundry and shops.
Giuseppe Guida — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Dominik Matus — CC BY-SA 4.0 · José Luiz — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Argo Navis — CC BY-SA 4.0
A Gothic church over a complete Roman market: San Lorenzo Maggiore on Via dei Tribunali was built by the Angevin French in the thirteenth century, and excavations beneath it uncovered the macellum — the commercial market of Greek-Roman Neapolis with its pavements, shops and drains. You walk a complete Roman street under the church on its original stones: a bakery with its ovens, a laundry with its basins, a market treasury, shop arcades — a Greek layer below and a medieval one above, making this the clearest place in Naples to grasp the city's three stacked levels. Above ground the church has a French Gothic nave rare in the south with radiating chapels behind the altar; and in its adjoining cloister Boccaccio, by his own account, first saw Fiammetta, his literary love, in 1336, and wrote what he wrote from it. The attached museum displays the excavation finds.
Neapolis's market with bakery, laundry and shops.
Where he saw Fiammetta in 1336.
Via dei Tribunali 316, Naples
Naples UndergroundBeneath Naples's streets lies a second city: forty metres down runs a labyrinth 1 minute walk4.6
The Doll HospitalIn 1895 Luigi Grassi painted backdrops for Naples theatres and puppet shows out 2 minutes walk4.8
Pio Monte della MisericordiaA Caravaggio in the place it was painted for: the Pio Monte charity was founded 3 minutes walk4.7
Naples CathedralNaples Cathedral is the house of San Gennaro — the city's patron, centre of Chri3 minutes walk4.8
The Obelisk of San GennaroA baroque obelisk before Naples cathedral, raised in the seventeenth century in 3 minutes walk4.4Napoli Sotterranea is a network of aqueducts and war shelters forty metres down, visited by guided tour; this is an archaeological excavation of a Roman market beneath one building — the first is a tunnel experience, the second legible archaeology.