The Fontanelle cemetery is an old charnel house located in a former tuff quarry at the heart of the Sanità district, once used to bury the corpses of people for whom there was no room in the public graves at the churches within the city. Before long it become a place of popular worship and the focal point for various rites, legends and tales of miracles. The anonymous bones are the object of great devotion and have always been referred to by the Neapolitans as the anime pezzentelle, or ‘little wretches’, thus creating that link between the living and the dead that is ever present in the Parthenopean city.

Copyright
Images: Mentnafunangann, IlSistemone, Dominik Matus