April 3, 2010, Barcelona.

PRESS RELEASE

The Government delegate al'Alt Pyrenees and Aran, Víctor Orrit, today introduced the first canyoning guide published in Spain which is free and is framed within a project of publishing and disseminating the canyon, in the region and their lesser-known corners, not to mention the natural environment and basic safety standards. Low-title "i Barrancs Pallars Gorgs Jussà", the book contains 32 canyons. The work has been performed by Joan Luis Haro, David Sylvester, Laura Samso and David Espinal, and has enjoyed the cooperation of some twenty people.

We are pleased to announce that our first three English language videos are now available for viewing. We hope to continue to add English language narrations to our growing and fascinating library of NUg videos. For the first time, visitors who do not speak Italian, but do speak English, may join in on the fascinating explorations and visits to the "Parallel City" that stretches beneath Naples, Italy. Aqueducts dug by Greek slaves 2,400 years ago come alive as we take you with us for a close-up visit.

Huge quarried caverns beneath the city were transformed into air raid shelters, and we take you racing down into the silent tunnels and caverns which sheltered thousands of Neapolitans from the allied bombings of WWII. See the fascinating and haunting artifacts that remain below ground to this day.

And come along for a more detailed look at the ancient underground Greek and Roman aqueducts that served Naples into the early 1900's as we "go with the flow" of these ancient waterways. Crawl through the honeycomb network of connecting feeder tunnels and cisterns hundreds of feet underground that provided the "water of life" for the growth and development of Naples over the centuries.

So let's go. Come along for a video visit to . . . Napoli Underground!

 

“Surviving Underground: WWII and the Bombing of Naples”

“The Ancient Aqueducts of Naples Italy”

“Going With the Flow: Naples’ Ancient Aqueducts”

 

We really hope you enjoy our new Videos in English. It has been my pleasure as translator and retired Radio and TV broadcaster to also do the voice-over narration working with webmaster Fulvio and master speleo and videographer, Luca. If you find these interesting, please forward the links to your friends and join the Napoli Underground speleo family!

 

All the English language videos can be found HERE.

 

Larry Ray  :)

The church of Pietrasanta, tucked between two buildings at the back of the little piazza where Dani, Luca and I sipped coffee, looked like any other Neapolitan church. A little older than other churches, perhaps, but otherwise inconspicuous, nondescript. It did not, for example, look like a portal into an ancient underground labyrinth of narrow aqueducts and vast, echoing cisterns.


When we finished our coffee, Dani and Luca led me down into the basement of the church. In the back corner of the basement was a forgotten staircase, and at the bottom of these stairs was a rectangular black hole. This would be our entrance. First we strapped on our gear – Luca and Dani in caribbeaners, ropes, helmets, harnesses and suits with reflective piping; me in jeans, an inside-out t-shirt, and a piece of rope tied like a primitive diaper around my crotch. We began our descent. Down fifteen meters of dilapidated concrete stairs, down another fifteen meters on a flimsy rusty ladder. Then a quick scramble up a tufa wall. Next, another drop down. This time it was backwards, feet-first through a rabbit-sized hole, kicking blindly into a void, fifteen meters above ground. For a speleo-veteran, this is old hat. But I was a speleo neophyte, a newbie, and for a moment, as I dangled by rope fifteen meters in the air, I wondered if Luca and Dani were trying to kill me. But they weren’t (or at least they didn’t succeed) – I touched down safely. (‘Touchdown!’ Dani told me to say). From the ground, I admired the space where I found myself standing. It was an ancient cistern, shaped like a large bottle, reaching a narrow point twenty meters up. At about the four meter point was the water-line where faded white ceramic lining met the copper-colored tufa. Before our descent, Luca had looked at me and said, “this is what I call the time machine.” Indeed, we were traveling back into time. Twenty-five centuries back. When Ancient Greeks inhabited Naples – Neapoli, they called it – this cistern was a water tank into which they would lower buckets and bring up fresh drinking water.


We spent the next five hours tromping through the dark underground of Naples. The brilliantly engineered underground water system became for Luca, Dani and I a sort of jungle gym or obstacle course. We flattened ourselves through dagger-narrow aqueducts, contorted our bodies like circus performers to squeeze through tiny foxholes. We clambered up silty tufa walls, tip-toed along narrow ledges, lowered ourselves into cavernous, echoing spaces, always retracing the path of water that rushed through these channels so many centuries before. Luca and Dani showed me the long narrow chutes leading down from the surface through which the Greeks once brought up their water buckets. And the tracks of treacherous-looking footholds – tiny holes running up the side of the tank walls – on which the Greeks who built these cisterns would climb up and down. We saw remnants – electrical wires, staircases, toilets, makeshift altars, graffiti, shards of plates and tile – from when the cisterns were used as bomb shelters during WWII. Luca and Dani introduced me to the Wave Room of ___Marina (Luca’s daughter), an oblong cistern lined with watermarks oscillating in beautiful wave patterns. We ducked into previously unexplored passageways (appropriately labeled with spray-painted question marks) and ‘discovered’ two cisterns, helping Luca fill in the blanks on his map of Naples’s hollow underworld.


Before coming to Naples, I had researched the city’s underworld. I knew there were ancient cisterns and bomb shelters. I saw a few pictures on google images. But to walk through these spaces, to see their vastness, to hear my voice reverberate in the silence were things for which nothing could have prepared me. Beneath the city of Naples is a treasure. Expanses of negative space, dark silent voids, all interconnected in a seemingly infinite network of passageways, all waiting to be discovered. When it was time to leave the underground behind, we were tired and hungry, our faces smudged with mud, but all of us grinning like kids after a satisfying adventure. During that afternoon, I was Dante; Luca and Dani were my two-headed Virgil. As I climbed back up the sagging rusty ladder, preparing to resurface in the church of Santapietra, Dani, standing at the foot of the ladder, called up to me: ‘E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stele.’ (When we came out again, we saw the stars).


The videos :)

Photos
of the perfect circles formed on various surfaces on the cave
floor and formation of perfect circle on test panel after only
a few months.

foto by Luca Cavallari
posted by Fulvio, June 9th, 2008

YouTube VIDEO Grotta Imbroglita ultime misurazioni