The discovery of an ancient underground city of Cappadocia in the heart of the Mediterranean

This work aims, for the first time, to publish the results of complex research that has led to the discovery of underground connections and routes, underground factories, and churches on the small island that was once the medieval city of Taranto and which, between the tenth and nineteenth centuries AD, became one of the most important and luxuriant city-emporiums in the Mediterranean. Contrary to what has hitherto been assumed, these spaces were not created in different periods and as isolated forms but were actually conceived as a single urban form, an underground city, a basement city of what was to be the new city of Taranto, re-founded in the 10th century, and of which it was to be the true economic and productive engine. Hence the need for the identification and architectural cataloging of a submerged, fragmented and forgotten heritage that could, in fact, constitute the real driving force behind the future urban and social transformation of Taranto's Old City.