Wild vegetation smothers the crumbling tombs, most of them dating back to the 1800s, that line the square beneath the imposing Chiesa Madre, or Mother Church, at Poggioreale monumental cemetery in the southern Italian city of Naples.
In the middle of the square, a makeshift storage area has been installed for coffins containing retrieved skeletal remains of the dead that were flung out of burial niches after a series of collapses at multistorey marble columbariums last year.
The colossal, maze-like Poggioreale, open since 1837 and among the largest cemeteries in Europe, is spread across a hilltop overlooking Naples. It is the burial place of a long list of illustrious Neapolitans, but in recent decades has fallen into severe disrepair owing to a combination of poor management and the ruinous repercussions of organised crime.
In scenes akin to a horror film, the cemetery’s problems were thrust under the spotlight last January when two columbariums containing more than 600 burial niches partially collapsed, an event believed to have been triggered by the digging of a tunnel beneath the cemetery as part of the extension of Naples’ metro network.
“It was as if there had been an earthquake,” said Pina Caccavale, whose parents and grandfather were buried in one of the niches. “There were coffins hanging from the buildings, you could see skulls. You can imagine our desperation, it was like experiencing the pain of the deaths of our loved ones all over again.”
Poggioriale was closed for nine months amid an investigation that led to the arrests this summer of 20 people working on the metro project. Naples’ metro company said the tunnel became engulfed with water due to a burst aquifer, and promised to quickly repair the damage.
Caccavale created a committee for the hundreds of families whose relatives were buried in the buildings, calling for construction on the metro to be stopped and for the authorities to move swiftly in recovering the remains of their loved ones from the rubble.
The cemetery reopened in September, only for the two buildings to completely cave in two weeks later. Then, in mid-October, part of a three-storey columbarium in a different part of Poggioreale collapsed, once again leaving several coffins dangling precariously in the air. It is unclear what caused the third collapse.
Authorities only recently started the challenging process of retrieving and identifying the remains of the estimated 2,000 deceased who were buried in the columbariums. “The problem is, they just saw them as people who were already dead, not as victims, so saving them quickly didn’t matter,” said Caccavale. “The suffering for us is incalculable, as for us they weren’t just bodies, they were our loved ones.”
Anna Petrazzuolo, whose parents, brother and niece were buried in a single niche, has become the committee’s vigilante of the recovery operation, watching through binoculars from a nearby street as workers delicately retrieve the dead. “I’m the joke of the neighbourhood, but I am not giving up until all the dead are found and identified,” she said. “It’s continuously painful to think my relatives are still beneath the rubble.”
The management of cemeteries in Naples involves a complex web made up of the local municipality, which owns the land and is responsible for general upkeep, and Arciconfraternita del SS Rosario, a Catholic association that owns most of the columbariums.
Father Giuseppe Tufo, the confraternities director for Naples diocese, said the first two collapsed buildings were under its care and the third was privately owned.
“The buildings that collapsed in January and again in September were only refurbished about seven years ago,” Tufo said. “They were in good condition, we sent all the documents on work done to maintain the buildings to the prosecutor. We are now working on a census of the deceased, and eventually we will rebuild the columbariums, but this isn’t something that can be done in a few days.”
Naples’ cemeteries have also fallen prey to swindlers and the Camorra mafia organisation, which is known to have taken over tombs in order to bury its deceased members. In 2016, weapons belonging to a Camorra clan were found stashed in a columbarium at Poggioreale. A year later, police seized an entire columbarium in the cemetery from the mafia, which had planned to use the building for the burial of a boss who had been killed in an ambush.
Francesco Emilio Borelli, a Europe Greens party councillor for the wider Campania region, said he had been decrying the situation at Naples’ cemeteries, particularly Poggioreale, for years.
“Let’s say things how they are: Poggioreale should be to Naples what Père Lachaise is to Paris,” he said. “Instead, it is the mirror of the state of abandonment of our region. If we have no respect for the living, how would there be respect for the dead? There are scamsters, the mafia … cases of tombs being emptied and illegally resold. Parts of the cemetery have been destroyed, and nobody seems to intervene.”
Vincenzo Santagada, the Naples councillor with responsibility for cemeteries, plans to change all that. He was elected less than a month before the first building collapse. The subsequent lengthy closure of the entire cemetery as prosecutors carried out their investigation meant everyday maintenance could not be carried out. “It was already an abandoned place, and the closure made it worse,” he said.
He discovered dozens of neglected columbariums, buildings containing the remains of deceased buried decades or even centuries ago whose relatives have also long passed, that needed to be emptied and renovated.
In addition, rules clamping down on illegal activity are to be introduced. “We’re working to clean up the cemetery,” Santagada said. “So many important people are buried there. My goal is to turn it into a place that is visitable for tourists, to give it a rebirth.”
