Castel Nuovo

This guide to Castel Nuovo in Naples opens with the guards' own legend: a Nile crocodile said to have slipped through a hidden channel into the moat sometime in the thirteen hundreds, making a den in the dungeon and dragging prisoners into the water. In 2018, restorers at Naples's Academy of Fine Arts finally tested the castle's stuffed crocodile, pulling DNA from a tooth root and running radiocarbon dating on a hide that had sat in a museum storeroom for a century and a half. A seventeenth-century historian left behind a very different account of how the animal came to the castle at all.