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The Neapolitan caves where a cult of old women "adopt" human skulls and commune with the dead

Naples has a reputation for being Italy's city of greatest extremes. The gap between rich and poor is nowhere more visible; despite being devoutly pious, the city is also more crime-ridden and mob-controlled than any in the country; and in all respects Neapolitans seem to pursue life with a visible - even maniacal - passion. The occult side of Naples is equally extreme, and the city is one Italy's most mysterious and superstitious. One of its greatest enigmas was a strange cult, composed almost exclusively of elderly women who communed with the dead, lavishing their attention on, and even making offerings to, human skulls.

The cult was centred on a cemetery known as the Fontan­elle. The "cemetery" is in fact a huge (5,000 sq m / 54,000 sq ft) ossuary in a man-made cave and series of adjoining grott­oes. Malle­able tufa, deposited by local volcanoes, was easily manipulated by ancient Greek colonists, who began a system of tunnels that the Romans and then early Christians extended. The high walls within the main cavern of the Fontanelle marked the northern boundary of the old Greek city. This area - just outside the city - had always been used as a place to deposit bodies, and the Romans and Christians each constructed burial catacombs nearby. By 1500, a large quantity of bones had already accumulated in the cave, and over the next century and a half this mass was greatly augmented as the spacious site became the standard depository for victims of plague and other epidemics.