9 May 2022 - BOURBON TUNNEL IN NAPLES, ITALY

 

BOURBON TUNNEL 

IN NAPLES, ITALY

G'day folks,

Dug as a secret royal escape route, the tunnel became a wartime bomb shelter and dumping ground for vintage cars. 

Lurking about 100 feet below the streets of Naples is a cavernous tunnel filled with rusting vintage cars and wartime relics, that was originally built to be as a secret escape route for the royal family in 1853.

The tunnel was commissioned by King Ferdinand II of Bourbon (the same French dynastic house that lent its name to New Orleans’ famous Bourbon Street), who reigned over Sicily and Naples during a tumultuous period marked by riots and uprisings. It was meant to be a passageway from the Royal Palace to the military barracks, in case the royal family needed to flee the revolting populace.

The tunnel was dug out of the volcanic rock below the city, connected to the existing, early-17th-century Carmignano aqueduct system. However, the king died before the tunnel was completed, and it was left unfinished and largely forgotten until World War II. 

 

During the war the subterranean corridors and neighboring cisterns were used as air raid shelters, housing up to 10,000 Neapolitans. On a historic tour of the tunnels you can see artifacts left by the people who sheltered here, including children’s toys, gas masks, and personal items like hair brushes. You can even see the remains of toilet blocks and beds.

After the war the Bourbon Tunnel (Il Tunnel Borbonico) became a dumping ground for wartime rubble and unwanted debris, storing everything from fascist statues to impounded cars from the end of the war until the 1970s, when the tunnel was forgotten again.

The tunnel was restored in the 2000s and now the vintage cars and wartime rubble scattered throughout the tunnel are on display in the eerie space, dubbed the Bourbon Gallery (Galleria Borbonica). It’s not far from the Naples Underground, another entrance to see the maze of underground tunnels hidden beneath the ancient city. Tours of the site are given, including expeditions into the darker corridors of the historic tunnel.

 

Clancy's comment: Naples is one of my favourite cities, but I never knew this existed.

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21 February 2022 - THE WORLD'S FIRST MOTOR RACE

 

THE WORLD'S FIRST 

MOTOR RACE

G'day folks,

The record books show that in 1887, Georges Bouton “won the world’s first motor race”.  

But it was a hollow victory and there was no champagne celebration – because Bouton and his co-driver were the only ones taking part. And, in fact, it wasn’t even a car. It was a steam-powered quadricycle.

The event was a “test” organised by the newspaper Le Velocipede to see if Bouton’s machine, which had boasted speeds of 60kmph, could make the 29-kilometre distance between Neuilly Bridge in Paris and the Bois de Boulogne.

Bouton, born in 1847, was an engineer scraping a living building and selling mechanical toys with another engineer, Charles Trépardoux. They had long dreamed of building a steam car but did not have enough money to finance the project.

That was to change when in 1881 the wealthy Marquis Jules-Albert de Dion bought a toy locomotive that he saw in the window of the shop run by the engineers. He asked them to build another and, impressed by their skill and their passionate interest in building a car, he went into business with them.

That was the start of the de Dion-Bouton automobile company which, for a while in the early 20th Century, established itself as the largest car manufacturer in the world, renowned for quality and reliability.

For the record, Bouton and de Dion completed the test course in 1 hour and 14 minutes riding La Marquise, the quadricycle named after the aristocrat’s mother.

Clancy's comment: We have certainly come a long way since then, eh?

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30 September 2017 - HIDDEN VEHICLE TOMB IN NAPLES

HIDDEN VEHICLE 

TOMB IN NAPLES

G'day folks,

Nobody likes a visit to the car pound. It probably is one of my least favourite places to be on earth, but you wouldn’t have a hard time convincing me to pay a visit to this particular car pound, hidden 150ft below a piazza in the city of Naples, sealed off after WWII and forgotten about for more than 60 years.

The place is filled with vintage cars, motorcycles and scooters dating back to the 40s and 50s, but the walls and tunnels they’re entombed in look ancient. And they almost are. Built in 1853 by Ferdinand II of Bourbon, the multilevel subterranean network was conceived as a sort of emergency escape route for the unpopular monarch who feared revolution. The vast underground tunnels would serve as a passageway large enough for his troops and horses to escape the palace and make it to the military barracks. The revolution never came, at least not before Ferdinand’s death in 1859, and the network was never completed.

In the 1930s, the overcrowded city decided to make use of the space again, this time as a vehicle impound lot for confiscated and even contraband vehicles– this is Naples after all, a city notoriously ruled by the maffia and capital of contraband.

They were sealed off sometime in the early 1950s, with a full parking lot of vehicles still inside.

It wasn’t until the new millenium that this underground world would be accidentally re-discovered on a routine geologist excursion in 2005, checking the conditions and safety levels of the quarries that lie beneath a bustling neighbourhood in the heart of the city.

Along with the cars, trash heaps and strange creatures of the underworld, they also found WWII relics and a discarded fascist monument that had been made for Aurelio Padovani, an early leader of the movement.

A team of Neapolitan geologists began a monumental excavation project in the Bourbon Gallery, but it would take them another seven years and an unlikely tip from a 90 year-old WWII survivor to discover that the network was also the location of significant bomb shelter.

The excavations found remains of an infirmary, showers, mattresses, stoves and all manner of objects needed to survive down there as the city above was being destroyed by war. Naples was the most bombed Italian city during World War two, with an estimated 380 air strikes that killed almost 25,000 civilians.

After the tunnels were cleared of trash and rubble, the Galleria Borbonica opened as an underground museum offering unique tours of the tunnels. 

The tours range in difficulty, from a standard visit to something more adventurous…

A standard tour will take you down into old cisterns of the Bolla and Carmignano aqueducts, which were also used as air raid shelters during the Second War World. The adventurous tour goes down into another cistern still full of water and through an old metro gallery where you’ll embark on a raft and sail under the city.

The “cavers” tour involves crawling along the ground through the aqueduct tunnels to reach the most beautiful cisterns full of water. As a bonus, you’ll also get to see the private bomb shelter of the ex Neapolitan President during the war and finish the tour by flying over a cistern harnessed to a zip-line.

 Here are some more photographs.

Clancy's comment: Amazing, eh? Imagine what was hidden by the Nazis after world War 11? Stay tuned, folks.

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