This article is a reworked version of a text published in Domus 1108, January 2026.
Monte Sant’Angelo is a small hill in the western area of Naples, on the edge of Fuorigrotta: an agricultural zone that later became home to Federico II University and is now a cultural hub of the city. Here, on 11 September 2025, Anish Kapoor’s latest work was inaugurated.
The project began in 2003, when the Municipality invited the Cloud Gate artist to design a metro station as part of the urban and cultural regeneration of the Traiano district: a construction site that lasted more than two decades, culminating in Monte Sant’Angelo station and its Traiano entrance. “In the city of Mount Vesuvius and Dante’s mythical entrance to the Inferno, I found it important to try and deal with what it really means to go underground.” Kapoor wrote in Domus 1108, anticipating two key themes of his subterranean world: the unknown and the mythology of an elusive city.
In the city of Mount Vesuvius and Dante’s mythical entrance to the Inferno, I found it important to try and deal with what it really means to go underground.
Anish Kapoor
The result is an infrastructure that exists in symbiosis between sculpture and architecture: a work that does not simply add itself to space, but creates an entirely new world. “Monte Sant’Angelo is a work of art that happens to be a metro station. Not the other way around. It’s really a sculpture that you enter.”
The station behaves like an underground passage marked by two mirrored entrances. The entrance on the university side is made of weathering steel and rises from the ground in a warm, earthy rust colour, swelling upward. The Traiano entrance is the reverse of this first descent: a smooth, tubular opening, cold and reduced to a marginal edge.
“We want to acknowledge that it is underground – a journey into the world of Dante. Rather than into the light at the end of the cave, it’s a journey into the back of the cave. And if one acknowledges that, then maybe the experience of passage, of moving through, of travelling, can also be one of art.” In keeping with this idea, the interior preserves a raw, essential topography: the tunnel walls are left unfinished, while the station’s spaces—developed in collaboration with Jan Kaplický and Amanda Levete (Future Systems)—blur the boundary between architecture and sculpture, between infrastructure and experience.
All images: Anish Kapoor, Monte Sant'Angelo Station. Naples, Italy. Photograph by Amedeo Benestante. © Anish Kappor. All rights reserved, DACS
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