Catacombs of San Gaudioso
Gallery of skull-set niches where seventeenth-century nobles were drained, dried, and frescoed.
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About this audio guide
This guide to the Catacombs of San Gaudioso in Naples starts with a Neapolitan curse still muttered in the streets of the Sanita above, and traces it down to the seventeenth century, when Dominican friars carved stone seats into the rock to drain and dry the bodies of the city's nobility. You'll meet the schiattamuorti, the workers who tended the drying corpses, and the painter Giovanni Balducci, who spent years giving faces and fine clothes to nobles he never met alive. Walk the ambulatory slowly and look at each painted skull before you learn which one is different from all the rest.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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