Naples keeps its dead close. The catacombs of San Gennaro, cut into the tufa on the north side of the city, contain frescoes and mosaics from the second century onward and were a burial place of bishops before they were a pilgrimage site. Far larger is the Fontanelle, a quarry cavern filled over centuries with the bones of the anonymous poor, plague dead and cholera dead, tidied into ranks in the nineteenth century.
Around those bones grew a devotion with no exact parallel. A person would adopt a skull, clean it, give it a box and a candle, pray for the soul in purgatory it belonged to, and expect help in return, often after the soul appeared in a dream and gave its name. The practice was overwhelmingly the work of women, and it operated as a system of exchange with the unremembered dead. The archbishop condemned it in 1969 as superstitious and closed the site; the ossuary later reopened as a monument, and the devotion has continued quietly, which is the ordinary fate of popular practice under official disapproval.
Above ground the same instinct is visible on nearly every street corner in the old city, in small glazed shrines holding a Madonna, a saint or a photograph of a local dead, kept lit and dressed with flowers by whoever lives nearest. At Easter the Madonna dell'Arco sanctuary outside the city receives the fujenti, associations who process barefoot in white and blue, an expression of vow keeping that the church has regulated more than once without ever suppressing.