It's world-famous for the Roman ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii, destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 C.E., but the latest tourist attraction in Naples shows a very different side of the city.-- Hypogeum of Cristallini Street -- is part of an ancient cemetery, located just outside the walls of Neapolis, as the city was called 2,300 years ago.
This is only a small part of the original necropolis, or cemetery, built by the Greeks. In the fourth century B.C.E., when the tombs are thought to have been built, dozens of them would have been dug into the hills outside the city walls, says Luigi La Rocca, who, as Naples'The race against time to save Pompeii
But centuries of mudslides that regularly devastated the area -- only ending in the 1960s when the sewerage system was overhauled -- buried the tombs a few centuries after they were built. "There's basically nothing left of anything painted on wood or furniture, and there's very little wall painting -- mainly Macedonian tombs that conserve important pictorial murals, but it's almost nothing.Down in the depthsThe painted tombs give a very different impression of Greek art to those bone-white sculptures and buildings . One tomb has scarlet-painted steps leading down to a red faux-marble floor.
Elsewhere are sculptures of people, and traces of portraits -- potentially dead ancestors, according to Paolo Giulierini, director of the
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