Castel Nuovo
Medieval fortress with five sea-facing towers around a moat, home to a stuffed Nile crocodile legend.
Location
About this audio guide
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.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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