Pedamentina a San Martino

This guide to the Pedamentina a San Martino in Naples follows the zigzagging staircase cut into the hillside around 1325, built not for tourists but for mules hauling tuff stone up to the Charterhouse of San Martino. It traces how the terraced walls beside the path are leftover construction fill, later repurposed as a defensive corridor for Castel Sant'Elmo, and how the writer Marguerite Yourcenar drew on this route for a 1982 story. Listen for the moment the traffic noise below finally gives way to birdsong.