Cimitero delle Fontanelle
Via Fontanelle, 80, Napoli, 80136 NA, Italia
Historical and archaeological sites
This place would be definitely much fun for Ghost Busters. It has so many ghost stories that it’s easier to be a victim of it rather then the storyteller. First of all in times past this space was a quarry from where the very famous Neapolitan tuff was extracted. At a later time, following revolts, famines, eruptions, earthquakes, epidemics, you name it, it became a very particular cemetery and nowadays it hosts more then 40.000 corpses, in between bones and skulls (word is that there are 15 metres of rests underneath the ground). Even Giacomo Leopardi has been a guest here.
Local people used to venerate skulls, scattering money and rosaries along them (how sweet…). The shiniest skull belongs to “Donna Concetta”, who spared several big shots of the place for a long time. Moving on, you’ll find the pleasant remains of Carafa spouses, which have been put in two different sarcophaguses (she still has her mouth open as word says she died chocking on a “killer gnocco”).
Anyway the cemetery guest star is definitely the “Skull of the Captain” (with a broken orbital socket): legend has it that a betrothed, visiting the cemetery with his fiancée – who was devoted to the Captain, stabbed the man’s eye with a bamboo staff in a jealous rage. To get revenge the Captain turned up – or rather his head and his skeleton turned up – to their wedding scaring people away… (When people say weddings are boring to death… because they are very tiring, OF COURSE! And most likely the Captain must have been freakishly skinny…)
