Necropoli di Cappella

Tombs once lined the road out of Misenum the way shops line a street. At Cappella, on Monte di Procida, colombaria and painted burial chambers still face the ancient highway towards Cumae, their vaults decorated with dancing figures and their inscriptions thick with the names of sailors.

Why it matters

Roman custom kept burials outside the town, and the road became the address of the dead. Along the highway that ran from Misenum, the fleet's port, towards Cumae, clusters of tombs grew up on both sides; several survive today around piazza Michele Sovente in Monte di Procida, on a stretch whose very name, via Cappella, is said to recall the burial chambers. The record spans from the beginning of the first century BC to the first half of the fifth century AD, five centuries of continuous funerary presence at the gate of the fleet town. The monuments also speak for the living: epigraphs recovered in the old and recent excavations name the sailors of the fleet and record how it was organised, making the necropolis a primary document of the Classis Misenensis's people, not only of its commanders. Modern Via Cappella follows the line of the ancient road.

What to notice

The surviving group includes roadside colombaria, built along the ancient highway, and another cluster facing present-day Via Miliscola. Two monument types alternate, hypogean chamber tombs with loculi for ash urns and collective rooms for inhumations, with simpler pit graves filling the spaces between. Painted decoration survives on vaults and loculi: figures set in tondi against yellow and red bands, including Selene flanked by protective symbols and a female figure interpreted as a dancing maenad. The paintings are notable for their refined drawing.

Context and history

Antiquarians knew the site by the late nineteenth century, but eighteenth-century travellers had already passed this way and gone wrong: misled by a kind of obelisk shown in period prints, in fact a funerary monument, they identified the ruins as a Roman circus for games and horse races. Modern excavation has corrected the picture and extended it, with recent campaigns bringing to light further monuments and pit tombs in a more interior strip. The necropolis's inscriptions continue to feed research on the fleet, since their stones preserve information on the sailors and on the organisation of the Classis Misenensis.