He stumbled upon an underground Benedictine chapel that had been buried and forgotten for several hundred years. The discovery — and the secrets it held — would alter the course of his life forever.Photographs by Mario Mazziol
ROBERTO NINI was 20 years old when he tumbled through a hole and into the twelfth century. The year was 1979, and the setting was Narni, Italy: Nini and five friends were humoring an old man who had told them there were treasures on the other side of a hole that had opened in an ancient wall next to his garden plot. Nini and his friends dug with their hands until the dirt gave way — and then they fell through the wall.
At first Nini thought he was in a cave — that is, until his eyes adjusted to the light and he saw what remained of the religious paintings on a stone wall above an altar.
It turned out that the old man was right. There was a treasure of sorts on the other side of the wall: an underground Benedictine chapel that had lain buried for centuries. That night, Nini and his friends returned to the site — this time carrying sledgehammers. They had noticed an arched door that had been bricked up, and they wanted to tear it down; there was a better chance that no one would hear them in the dead of night. The adjacent church had been abandoned for 200 years. They would be alone.
Only later did Nini find that the rooms that lay beyond that bricked-up door had been used as a prison cell and torture chamber during the
Roman Inquisition. The cell, which was barely nine feet across, was covered in graffiti — code words and pictures that had been scratched into the wall.
“
The Da Vinci Code was nothing compared with this,” he tells me. “This was real.”
I FIRST MET NINI on a cold, billowing March evening at a café in Narni, a walled medieval city built on a hilltop above the Nera River and located about 40 miles north of
Rome, in the central
Italy region of Umbria. The city dates to at least 600 BC and was destroyed and rebuilt more than once. It was called Narnia in Roman times, and although there is no evidence that the writer C.S. Lewis ever visited it, the town fathers wonder if it was in any way an inspiration for Lewis’s
The Chronicles of Narnia.
Nini looks like the stereotypical archaeology professor: He’s tall and slender, with gray hair and an impassioned way of speaking.
“Give me 15 minutes of your time, and I will show you something that will surprise you,” he told me.
I followed him through snow flurries, walking up the street to a church and then down several flights of steps to a locked door. When my eyes finally adjusted to the flickering light on the other side, I saw faded and peeling frescoes, painted by unknown Umbrian artists in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. A thighbone protruded from the floor — I later learned that it likely belonged to an unknown nobleman who was buried beneath the chapel in hopes of his obtaining a hastened trip to paradise.
“This was discovered by six boys,” he said to me in Italian. When I asked who they were, he responded, “My friends and me.”
THE UMBRIAN REGION is famous for the religious art in the churches and abbeys of its numerous medieval cities, masterworks from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries — especially those created by the Vatican painter Pietro Perugino, who took his name from the region’s largest city, Perugia. Those paintings served as Scripture in the ages before common people knew how to read, and they especially depict the rich Catholic history of Umbria. Many of the region’s ornate churches are dedicated to the gentle Saint Francis of Assisi, because he traveled all over Umbria working miracles and preaching to the people.
But Nini’s find was a former Benedictine abbey, clearly more of an archaeological attraction than a tourist mecca or a religious shrine. Once upon a time, the abbey was accessible through the Benedictine convent above it. But the convent had been abandoned for more than a century before eventually being destroyed during World War II. The entrance to the long-forgotten underground chambers was obliterated — and then a hole opened up in an old man’s garden in 1979.
Up until that time, Nini had been an apprentice surveyor. But after his discovery, he followed his fortune and pursued a doctorate in archaeology. For the last 26 years, subterranean Narni has been his life. Working with paintbrushes and dental utensils, he and a volunteer staff have peeled away layers of history. They have uncovered a 2,000-year-old Roman cistern, the remains of what appears to be a house, and even the tusk of a woolly mammoth.
Today the hidden rooms are referred to as
Narni Sotterranea, or “Narni Underground”; you can tour them if you make reservations in advance. The chapel’s fading frescoes speak to the passage of time. The torture chamber’s walls are hung with photographs of the equipment that would have been used there during the Roman Inquisition, which lasted until the 1830s. The graffiti left by the prisoners is intact.
The secrets of these rooms intrigue Nini, and he has only recently learned more about the prisoners who were once held there. Last year, he found a treasure trove of Inquisition records in the library of the University of
Dublin, Trinity College. They had been carried off by Napoleon’s soldiers in the early eighteenth century to be housed in various museums in
Paris. But after Napoleon’s fall, the Vatican retrieved what it wanted, and the rest of the material was dispersed throughout
Europe. Through his research in Dublin and in archives in the Vatican, Nini determined the identities of two of the prisoners who were kept in the secret cells.
One was a bigamist, imprisoned in 1726, who escaped after strangling one of his jailers with a rope. Another was a Freemason, locked away in 1759. Though he was eventually freed, in his defiance against his inquisitors, he carved coded graffiti into the walls of the cell: a bird, a tree, a sun and a moon with human faces, and the numerals three, four, and seven. Nini interprets them as symbols of peace, liberty, and justice.
History isn’t yet done revealing itself to Nini, though. In December 2005, an earthquake split open the floor of the church adjacent to the hidden chapel. Beneath the pavement were the skeletons of men, women, and children.
He showed me their remains, and as we stood in the church apse, the evening light flickered eerily. Side by side, the partially excavated skeletons grinned up from their shallow tomb. Nini grinned too. He has more secrets to decipher.
Narni Sotterranea, Via S. Bernardo 12, 011-39-074-4722292, www.narnisotterranea.it
American Airlines provides year-round service to Rome with daily flights from New York/JFK and Chicago O’Hare. From Rome, Narni is roughly 50 miles north, and Perugia, the largest city in the Umbrian region, is about 85 miles north.
under the umbrian sunumbria, which lies just east of tuscany, in the dead center of the italian peninsula, looks just as italy is supposed to look: rolling green hills covered with vineyards and olive groves, and hilltop walled cities with cobblestoned streets so narrow that pedestrians compete with puttering tiny cars and buzzing motor scooters — an eternal paradox of ancient and modern times, side by side. one street i stroll along is so narrow that two people cannot walk abreast. it has jokingly been named vicolo baciadonne, “kiss-the-women alley,” and indeed is so tight that if a woman were heading toward you, your lips might touch when you passed one another.
as much as the landscape looks like what you would expect, the
food in umbria is not what americans think of as italian. it’s earthy and wholesome — barley, lentils, chickpeas; sheep and goat cheeses; veal and prosciutto. there’s less pasta than in the south, less risotto than in the north, and umbrian chefs sprinkle grated truffles on everything. the locals talk about the various grades and purities of their
olive oil as if they were talking about wine. and speaking of wines, theirs are full-bodied and smooth. there’s not a lot of english spoken, but you can get by, because the umbrian attitude makes up for everything. the following umbrian cities embody all that makes this region unique.
assisi is where saint francis lived in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. his remains lie in the basilica in the old city, and a cathedral outside town hovers over the tiny chapel where he died. francis was a young nobleman who denounced his riches for a pair of sandals, preaching simplicity and communing with animals. despite the mystic’s candor, the two churches are astoundingly ornate; in contrast to his kind and gentle nature, the franciscan friars police the basilica, snatching caps from the heads of schoolboys and hushing those who dare to speak out loud.
orvieto’s world-famous cathedral has a gold facade and dizzying frescoes, and there are angels and demons that look over panels depicting the lives of christ and saint francis. just as dizzying is the view into a sixteenth-century well that you can visit on a tour of the orvieto underground. in the evening, you can stroll along the city streets with handsome young italian couples and pop into a trattoria for a fine meal or a glass of wine.
perugia is the largest city in umbria. its oldest, uppermost part is home to a fortress called la rocca paolina, which was built right into the original etruscan gates of the city and named for the catholic pope who commissioned it. its vaulted-ceiling underground passageways have been turned into an entertainment center with various clubs, bars, and performance spaces — though in the corners remain the claustrophobically deep, narrow holes that are said to be where, way back when, the authorities threw people they didn’t like very much.
montefalco is a walled village renowned for its red wines, which are made from grapes that grow on trellises over tiny courtyards of medieval houses where people still live. the city walls, the townsfolk say, keep dangerous blights away from the vines. it’s a marvelous town to walk through — and, better yet, for attending a wine tasting.
a few other standouts include
spoleto, best known for its annual music festival;
cittÀ di castello, renowned for its thermal baths; and
terni, known for the roman engineering mistake that created a magnificent waterfall.
sights to beholdumbrians have a talent for incorporating elegant hotels and restaurants into ancient buildings without compromising their historic value.
la badia di orvieto was once a benedictine abbey. across a valley from orvieto, it dates to the sixth century. its tower was built in the twelfth; its frescoes were painted in the thirteenth and fourteenth. the sisters who run the hotel and restaurant like to talk about the celebs they claim have stayed there, including
richard gere and
brad pitt. from $275 a night; 011-39-0-76-3301959,
www.labadiahotel.it the restaurant
redibis, in the town of bevagna, was built in what remains of a tunnel from a first-century roman theater. the tables sit in a passageway that was used by gladiators on their way to the arena. dinner might include chickpea soup with crunchy pork cheek, barley with braised chicory in sagrantino sauce, stuffed guinea fowl, and several glasses of red montefalco wine. expensive to very expensive; 011-39-0-74-2360130,
www.redibis.itcastello dell’oscano is a medieval castle in a wooded area outside perugia that has been converted into a hotel. among the menu offerings: prosecco, parmesan cheese chipped from a giant round, soft goat cheese with figs on a spoon, salad with truffles and potato mousse, risotto with saffron, and veal steak wrapped in pancetta and served over a potato stack. from $261 a night; 011-39-0-75-584371,
www.oscano.it hotel le tre vaselle is one of two five-star hotels in umbria. set in a seventeenth-century home, it’s nestled among the lungarotti family vineyards and olive groves in torgiano. lungarotti sends three million bottles of wine to 42 countries every year. in the
united states, their olive oil is carried by williams-sonoma. chiara lungarotti, a striking woman in her 30s, runs the family business with her half sister and her mother. she says, “the only thing i demand of the family members who want to be involved in the business is that they love it. … we have our land. we are proud to be from umbria.” from $275 a night; 011-39-075-9880447,
www.3vaselle.itfor more information on umbria, visit
www.umbria2000.it or contact the italian government tourist board, (212) 245-5618,
www.italiantourism.com.