The new Naples metro station was designed by Anish Kapoor First stop on line 7, which departs from the Monte Sant'Angelo university campus

After more than two decades of waiting, interruptions, and restarts, tomorrow, September 11, the new Monte Sant’Angelo station will finally open, designed by Anish Kapoor together with the London-based studio AL_A led by Amanda Levete. It is the first stop of Line 7 of the Naples metro, an infrastructure aimed at connecting the Cumana with the Campi Flegrei and, in this initial step, allowing students to reach the Federico II university campus directly from the Circumflegrea.

The Line 7 project dates back to 2002, but the works on the so-called “Monte Sant’Angelo link” began in 2008, only to be interrupted three years later due to a lengthy legal dispute. It was not until 2016 that the construction site resumed, bringing with it Kapoor’s first monumental installation, “La bocca”, a corten steel sculpture that, according to the artist, evokes both the form of the body and a symbolic gateway to the unknown.

Anish Kapoor’s work in Naples

As reported by Dezeen, Kapoor conceived the entrances as “sculptures you enter”, elements that seem to emerge from the ground and dialogue with the geology of the city of Vesuvius and with the Dantean imagery of the entrance to the Inferno. One of the entrances, in corten steel, was designed as a funnel leading underground; the other, in smooth aluminum, is embedded in the ground and recalls a void in the urban landscape of the Traiano district. Both connect to pre-existing tunnels, deliberately left rough and unfinished, to emphasize the relationship between matter, body, and myth.

In Kapoor’s work, as highlighted by Lisson Gallery, three recurring strands of his research converge: the mythological object, the body, and the void. Themes that here take on an urban and everyday dimension, transforming the entrance to a subway into a radical artistic gesture. It is no coincidence that the artist himself stated: “These are not architectures. It is art that plays with the scale of architecture, but remains useless, and precisely in this it finds its meaning.”

A new Naples

The new Monte Sant’Angelo station was not born in a vacuum but is part of a twenty-year-long journey that has transformed Naples’ metro system into an open-air, or rather underground, museum. The so-called “art stations”, launched between the late 1990s and early 2000s, have brought into the city’s underground over two hundred works by more than ninety international artists and local architects, combining different languages in a project that has received worldwide recognition (the Toledo station is now considered a tourist destination in its own right).

Kapoor now joins a constellation that includes international names such as Óscar Tusquets, Karim Rashid, and Gae Aulenti, consolidating the idea that public transport in Naples can be both infrastructure and cultural space, a non-place. It is increasingly evident that the administration, from Mayor Manfredi to the Region, is trying to push the city upward, without betraying its horizontal essence. The 2500th anniversary of Naples seems to be acting as a catalyst for new milestones, from the vision of an Italian Silicon Valley to the arrival of the 2027 America’s Cup. At this point, the question is inevitable: what more can be expected from the city of Partenope?