Cemetery of the 366 Pits

Neapel · Italy · Cemetery

One grave for every day of the year, 366 numbered stones. Above number 313 an aunt and her niece hold each other in the dark.

Ferdinando Fuga designed Europe's first public cemetery for Ferdinand IV in 1762, forty years before the Napoleonic burial laws. Inside the wall lies an empty square laid with 366 numbered stone hatches in nineteen rows and nineteen columns, one pit for each day of the year, leap day included. Here the poor were brought, along with prisoners and those who died at the Incurabili hospital. The legend keeps to a single stone. On the night between 7 and 8 November 1868 a woman followed her niece's coffin here and kept vigil praying at pit number 313 until dawn. Tradition holds that the two take shape above that stone, aunt and niece, that they hold each other for a long moment and dissolve as the light comes — and that it happens once every twenty years. The cemetery closed in 1890.

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Where is Cemetery of the 366 Pits located?

Cemetery of the 366 Pits is in Neapel, Italy.

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