Raising Naples: how the catacombs of saints transformed Sanit?

“If you walked around Sanità 15 years ago with your camera on your shoulder like that it would’ve been stolen,” says local shopkeeper Antonio Vitozzi, pointing at my battered Nikon. More than likely I would’ve been nowhere near this neighbourhood back then. Riven by urban decay and high unemployment, Naples’ poorest district used to be a dangerous place where the Camorra held sway. It wasn’t just Italians afraid to come here but Neapolitans too.

Not these days, though. Sanità has undergone a quite miraculous transformation thanks to La Paranza, a cooperative of idealistic young friends who began running guided tours to Italy’s finest catacombs in the early 2000s. At the time, the only access to the catacombs was granted by the Catholic church for academic study.

Today, after significant restoration funded by La Paranza, the catacombs, alongside Vesuvius, Pompeii and Herculaneum, are a must-see Neapolitan attraction, and tourism to Sanità has inspired new guesthouses, restaurants and employment. In its 15th year, the cooperative is launching a new above-ground walking tour this December called Luce (light), featuring specially commissioned contemporary art in neighbourhood churches.

Sanità lies north of Naples’ historic centre. The walk there takes me along via Santa Theresa degli Scalzi, a long, straight road running towards the 18th-century Bourbon palace of Capodimonte. En route, I cross a towering bridge built in 1806, which came to symbolise the neighbourhood’s decline, because its construction saw this once affluent suburb slowly bypassed by merchants and dignitaries who could travel more directly between historic Naples and Capodimonte.

San Gennaro’s catacomb is found near a sugar-white church, a 1960s replica of St Peter’s in Rome. It’s here that Cooperativa La Paranza began guided tours to Naples’ two most important catacombs, Gennaro and Gaudioso - the only way to see either. Enzo Porzio, 36, one of La Paranza’s founders, tells me that by 2019 the catacomb tours were attracting 160,000 visitors a year.

As a teenager with poor employment prospects, Enzo and his neighbourhood friends in Sanità were galvanised by the arrival of a progressive clergyman, Antonio Loffredo. “We were young when Father Loffredo permitted us to start tours in the catacombs,” he says. “At this time, we were asking ourselves what we could do as adults: should we leave Naples to work, or do something to help our community? There was much prejudice against Sanità.”

After several years spent guiding as volunteers, making money only from tips, they established La Paranza in 2006 to formally launch paid tours. “As tourists came, the project started to change the neighbourhood. The Camorra’s influence weakened. We created a new environment for arts, theatre, culture and archaeology to flourish. From a no-hope neighbourhood, local people saw new opportunities.” The cooperative now employs 40 guides and in 2014 was a founder member of the San Gennaro Community Foundation, which finances social enterprises across the neighbourhood.