By Matthew Fiorentino

They say it's like death. There is no light, no sound. You see, hear, and smell nothing. The only sensation you have is the chilled damp stone beneath you. The time passes without change, without any end in sight, in impenetrable darkness. Your breathing slows, the soft humming in your ears fades, and your body starts to dissolve beneath your weight. Then, as you begin to reach a transcendent state, the lights come back on. Happily, your guide tells you it's time to return to reality, 120 feet above.

An hour and a half before descending to this eerie episode, Carmen and I met Salvatore in front of Caffe' Gambrinus, a bar just steps from Palazzo Reale in Naples, in hopes of exploring the bowels of the chaotic city. Salvatore is a small, retired man with fiery eyes and white hair who packs a wicked sense of humor and a potent Neapolitan accent. For fun he takes people into the depths of Naples' underworld and turns out the lights. He was our guide for the day.

While waiting for another couple, we reminisced about the good old days of the Romans, when indulgent feasts and wacky orgies were the norm. This decadent history was buried beneath our feet through hundreds of years of violent and not-so-violent geologic activity around Vesuvius. This volcanic activity created tufa, a porous volcanic rock easily scratched away yet incredibly durable and able to sustain immeasurable weight, e.g. Naples, effortlessly. Modern Neapolitans built their city over those of the Romans, who had built their cities over those of the Greeks, who had colonized the area around 470 B.C., calling it Neapolis (Nea meaning new and Polis meaning city). When the Greeks arrived, they built a magnificent city, full of grandiose buildings and dazzling art. To fuel this budding metropolis, they constructed an aqueduct. The potential of this aqueduct, however, wasn't fully realized until Roman rule, when a sophisticated network of cisterns carried potable water throughout the city until Vesuvius and friends gradually pulled the curtain.

While the opulence of the Roman republic has been in short supply in Naples' underworld for some time now, their cisterns reigned supreme until the nineteenth century. In fact, Neapolitans used this ancient Roman water system throughout the nineteenth century until their was a terrible cholera outbreak. After the city recovered, they abandoned the Roman's cisterns and constructed new ones, which are still used today.

Salvatore regaled us this history until the other couple arrived. And then we were on our way, dodging scooters, admiring draped unmentionables, and smelling fried pizza as we walked up a buzzing street to Salvatore's hideout. We disappeared behind a gray metal door into an office replete with underground relics and white fluorescent light, leaving the scooters, pizzas, thongs, and the world behind.

A 120-foot drop awaited us around the corner. Stairs, built in a square formation, spiraled down the abyss like a snake curling down from a tree. The air was immediately cooler. Moisture crept up from below. The most salient feature, however, was the powerful silence emanating from the depths beneath our feet. Mindful of the sound of our footsteps, we followed the serpentine path downwards with caution while Salvatore lead the charge, running to meet the darkness with glee.

When we arrived at the bottom, Salvatore had already turned on the lights. The room was massive, cavernous. The ashy tufa walls were scarred with slender niches and deep cuts from when the room had been hollowed out with an army of pick axes many years before. He told us to sit down in the white plastic chairs against the wall. Then he began: "This is an old well," he cried, grinning ear to ear, his voice echoing slightly. "This used to be filled completely with water. The stairs we just came down weren't installed until the Second World War! Before that, Naples used this cistern as one of its water supplies." He pointed to a shelf three feet thick perhaps ten feet off the floor. "Men used to walk around these shelves to help the people get water. And the people had to pay! But how do you get people to pay if you're all the way down here and they're all the way up there?" He shot his arm up towards the surface. "Ah, but you see, the Neapolitan is clever. He's always using his head." He touched his head with his fingertips. "If someone didn't pay their bill he sent them a friendly reminder in their bucket of water." This friendly reminder meant a dead cat, or, less creative, dirt in the water bucket, which made the water unusable. "And then they would remember to pay."

We went through a number of similar rooms: spacious, high ceilings, cool in the summertime, until we came to a room where we couldn't find the next hallway. We looked to Salvatore. "We have a choice," he said. "We can go to the next room the boring way. Or, we can go the fun way!" "Where's the fun way?" we asked. "Through there!" He pointed high up in the cistern to a sliver of a crack in the wall. One of the shelves would lead us there. "Take off your backpacks! We're going in!" He flew up the stairs, singing some kind of trumpet call, dashed across the shelf, mumbled something about Indiana Jones, and disappeared through the crack. We followed. Slowly.

We became intimately acquainted with the walls of that crack. Sharp and deviously layered, they were unfriendly and unforgiving to travelers looking to make it through their passage unscathed. The path between them was practically nonexistent, making tiny steps the most practical method of navigation. Thankfully, the walls separated around shoulder level. Yet it wasn't much, and the stone residue left on our shirts, and the scratches on Carmen's shoulder, were a testament to this fact. (Claustrophobics need not even think of thinking of trying.)

Salvatore's beaming face met us on the other side. "Fun, eh?" Then he directed our attention to the myriad graffiti adorning the cistern's walls. During World War II, when the Americans were decimating Naples with relentless bomb showers, the Neapolitans fled to the cisterns for cover; Mussolini provided none. The cisterns became veritable bunkers. People lived here for months at a time. Many of them expressed their feelings in prose. In one room a violent poet spits vitriol on his ex-girlfriend. "She is a woman, and all women are stupid," he wrote. In a different room, we found another poem, except this poet was gushing with sensuous prose for his beloved. "The first poet was upset because his woman cheated on him," Salvatore offered. "The second was happy, because the woman had cheated with him!" Then there was a drawing of Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito, the emperor of Japan during WWII, with the tag line beneath them saying, "Vinceremo!" ("We will win!") There were other drawings of actors, women and cats as well. Salvatore reminded us that these pictures were scratched into the tufa, with no room for error. "Be impressed!" Then we found other wartime messages in large, bold letters saying, "Resiteremo!" (We will resist!")

And we, too, tried to resist showing our fear when Salvatore told us he was going to turn out the lights, 120 feet beneath the surface. "It's a delightful experience," he said, finally calm enough to stand still. "If you do it long enough, even the slight hum in your ears stops. You begin to feel like you're floating. Some say it's like having a religious experience." Perhaps he meant death. There's nothing like being wide awake and receiving absolutely no sensory input. I began waving my hand in front of my face, with my eyes wide open, but saw absolutely nothing. Sheer blackness. Carmen and I were holding hands, but she was nowhere to be found. We were right next to each other, but I could barely sense her presence. We were utterly alone in this group of people, each of us smothered in our own darkness, each of us resigned to our own individual fate, each of us anxiously waiting for the lights to come back.

And then there was light, and a collective sigh of relief. We walked up the close to 40 flights of stairs to modern day Naples, in the heart of its fashion district. We were out on the street, surrounded by immaculately clad Neapolitans, a world away from the cisterns below. Salvatore closed Naples' underworld behind the door and bid us all farewell. Then we went about our business, just as the others did, staring in wonder at the ground beneath our feet.