The Lure of Going Underground

Is literally going underground a pull from our atavistic past millennia ago or just a way to get out of the deathly sun for a few hours?

Calcata, Italy, sometimes irreverently referred to as “paese di fricchettoni,” or “village of freaks,” by outsiders.

At midnight on December 21st a few years ago, I was sitting on the floor of a cave in central Italy, 60 feet deep into the volcanic stump that’s crowned by a bewitching medieval hill town called Calcata.

The village is honeycombed with caves, carved out by our medieval predecessors for the purpose of stocking wine and/or storing foreigners deemed untrustworthy. For me, an American, I was here to write a book—eventually called An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church’s Strangest Relic in Italy’s Oddest Town—about this wacky village made up of hippies and artists. I wanted to write about the village folk but I was also here to write about the strange relic that existed in Calcata for 450 years until it mysteriously disappeared.

And I was hoping to escape this village one day without being locked up in one of those caves. On this night, though, I was taking part in a winter solstice ceremony with Athon, a ginger-haired sexagenarian artist who lives in an adjacent cave with a dozen crows. She was leading me and five others through several rituals that included blowing horns and beating drums.

I asked Athon why we weren’t doing this in the village piazza or even my living room. “Energy!” she said. “You can really feel the energy of the earth when you’re underground. Don’t you feel it?”

I let my eyes explore the subterranean space, our shadows dancing on the walls from the half dozen candles burning, and tried to will myself to feel it. And then I caught Athon’s eyes. She was giving me that, “Well….?” look. 

I gave her a solemn nod and tried to go back to meditating, hoping she wouldn’t press me on it.

Athon with her crows

As Athon led us out of the cave so we could stand on the cliffside and howl at the moon, I spent the next few moments marveling at the fact that somehow – an unconscious desire? – I often find myself in these below-the-surface situations. During a trip to Krakow, when I heard about the nearby Wieliczka Salt Mines, I was on a bus pointed in that direction. I marveled at baroque monuments carved out of the saline walls by off-duty yet pious minors. Or when I’d learned it was possible to take a tour of the necropolis, or scavi, as it’s called in the local parlance, beneath the Vatican, I immediately knew I had to descend. So what if I had to wait for a month and I didn’t have a choice what day I’d be going – when the Vatican tells you the time and day they’re giving you special access to the underground space below St. Peter’s Basilica, you go. Likewise, I always gravitate to underground cave bars and restaurants: I’ve spent hours in the Grotta dei Germogli in Calcata and the Cave Bar More in Dubrovnik.

So it’s no surprise that I ended up writing a book about travel and underground places. The aptly named Underground Worlds: A Guide to Spectacular Subterranean Places features over 50 sub-terrestrial spots around the globe. And my previous experiences traversing the underworld coupled with writing the book, got me thinking: why are we so lured (and fascinated) with the nether regions of our planet?

And so now when I’m frequenting a bar or restaurant set in a cave, while sipping a glass of wine or grazing on a fire-roasted steak, I wonder if it sparks something in our collective unconscious; an atavistic feeling of getting in touch with our primal roots. We don’t start grunting and lighting fires nor we do we suddenly feel the need to draw a large crudely shaped mammal on the wall. But somewhere deep down, we ache to get in touch with a way of life we’ve long abandoned. Could it be the more we become connected to our smart phones and the internet, the less we feel connected to the earth? It may not be a coincidence that our recent craze for uber-local gastronomy and our desire for knowing exactly where our food comes from – or even more apt, our recent proclivity for the “caveman” or paleo diet – has coincided with our dependence on technology. We lose our phone or internet connection for a few hours and we experience a desperation, a profound sense of being lost. Admit it, you’ve been there.

It’s not only about channeling our primal selves. The earth, mother earth, Gaia, whatever you call this rock we’re living on, has long been perceived as a spiritual force to humans. Even now. The New Age-y group in Piedmont, north of Turin, at the self-proclaimed micro-nation of Federation of Damanhur, were sitting around one warm August night in 1978 when they took the sight of a shooting star as a sign that it was time to put shovel to earth. And that they did. A decade later, they created a multi-chamber subterranean electric Kool-Aid acid test of a temple on a spot they claim is a main vein of the earth’s energy lines.

Kind of like what I was doing in Calcata. Standing on the cliffs of the medieval hill town overlooking a moonlit verdant valley below, it was my turn to let out a primal howl. My roar, though, was more of a whimper.

Athon patted me on the back and said, “It’s okay. Let’s go back into the cave.”

My inner hippie may have failed but I was happy: we were going underground again.