Under the earth

The subterranean world has always fascinated man. At first as a refuge: ‘Lo, there was a great earthquake... and the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondsman, and free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains’. So wrote St. John the Divine in the 6th chapter of Revelations - and we shall see how recent experience has confirmed that such places are useful retreats during an earthquake. There too both martyrs and carbonari used to hide. Man has always felt drawn towards those wondrous caverns concealed in the body of the Earth, attracted by the unknown, by the sense of danger and the mystery of those regions, peopled in myths and legends with sibyls and nymphs, which some religions see as the seat of eternal damnation and others as the realm of bliss, while to certain heroes of the Arthurian legends they were the place of repose.