Fontanelle Cemetery

This is not a normal cemetery. It's a cave — a vast tuff cavern in the hillside of the Materdei neighborhood — filled with the skulls and bones of roughly 40,000 anonymous dead, stacked in neat rows like macabre library shelves. Most of them wound up here because there was nowhere else to put them. During the devastating plague of 1656, which killed half the population of Naples, the city's churches ran out of burial space. Bodies were collected and dumped in this abandoned quarry. More arrived after the cholera outbreaks of the 1800s.

But the truly strange part is what happened next. In the 19th century, a cult of devotion sprang up around the skulls. Ordinary Neapolitans would "adopt" a skull — clean it, give it a name, place it in a small wooden box or marble case, leave flowers and prayers. In return, the adopted soul (anima pezzentella, or "poor little soul") was expected to intercede from purgatory on behalf of its living patron: help find a husband, cure an illness, win the lottery. People reported receiving winning numbers in dreams from their adopted skulls. The practice blurred the line between Catholic devotion and folk magic in ways that made the Church deeply uncomfortable.

In 1969, Cardinal Ursi declared the skull cult superstitious and ordered the cemetery closed. It remained shuttered for decades, reopening only in 2010 after extensive restoration. The cult is officially discouraged, but fresh flowers still appear on certain skulls, and locals still whisper about which ones are the most generous with favors.

The cavern itself is enormous — three vast galleries stretching into the hillside, with pale light filtering through high openings. It's one of the most hauntingly beautiful places in a city that specializes in beautiful haunting.