Catacombs of San Gaudioso, Naples

The Catacombs of San Gaudioso are underground Christian burial chambers beneath the raised presbytery of Santa Maria della Sanità. Their surviving spaces are only a small remnant of a cemetery whose origins reach back to the fourth and fifth centuries. At the entrance, an arcosolium shelters Saint Gaudioso’s tomb, marked by a mosaic from the sixth century.

Local tradition says Gaudioso, a North African bishop, arrived in Naples after surviving a shipwreck; he was buried between 451 and 453, after which the site drew veneration. The walls and vault carry scenes of martyrs painted by Bernardino Fera, while the adjoining burial chambers preserve early Christian frescoes and a mosaic dating to around the end of the fifth century. The atmosphere becomes especially unsettling when you learn how the catacombs were reused in the seventeenth century.

Dominican friars placed bodies in stone cavities to dry them, kept the heads, and sometimes set those heads into the walls above painted bodies suggesting the dead person’s profession. This practice, reserved for wealthy families, ended in 1637. Humidity has since left many embedded burials represented only by skullcaps.