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Translation of rare book on Naples underground begins

admin — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 22:17:43 +0000

Following WWII a building boom raced across the verdant hills above Naples like wildfire. Speculators with lots of money ran roughshod over a city government besieged with restructuring and organizing City regulatory and permitting offices following heavy bombing and other trials of WWII. Multi-story apartment buildings on long spindly concrete pilings of uncertain strength began to rise above the bucolic valleys and hillsides that ring the lower old city center. Something had to be done to get control of potentially sub-standard unapproved construction. In 1967 an extraordinary task force was formed to pull together experts in all fields of surveying, topography, earth core sampling of the subsoil, and an unprecedented attempt to locate and identify the undulating topsoil depths and location and tops of the solid tuff sandstone strata which run beneath the geothermal regions beneath Naples and surrounding area. The data gathered would be used to formulate recommendations for zoning, construction, and permitting in many areas to bring order and legal control to any future building.

This was no mean task, and to further complicate matters, the tuff sandstone strata are honeycombed with hundreds and hundreds of gigantic manmade cavities where the durable sandstone had been quarried and brought to the surface to build palaces, villas and other buildings over the centuries. Additionally other voids included railroad tunnels, ancient Greek and Roman aqueducts and water reservoirs, long tunnels from the city’s pneumatic mail and message network from the early 1900’s, as well as elaborate network of ancient as well as operating sewer lines, gas lines and other similar cavities.

The 1967 “Sottosuolo dii Napoli” or Subsoil of Naples was published in a limited edition by the Commission that had guided the extraordinary project. It contains photos of the time as well as numerous charts, maps, diagrams, engineering studies and a census table of all the known cavities up to that time . . . many of which were used as air raid shelters in WWII.

With the permission of The City of Naples and a specific approval signed by the Mayor, Fulvio Salvi, founder of Napoli Underground was given permission to optically scan and digitally reproduce the entire 500 page work in its initial Italian form. And he did so … one page at a time, making this truly fascinating and informative work available to the world in well-done PDF form on the NapoliUnderground.org web site.

NUg associate and friend, Jeff Matthews, a long time Naples resident, university professor, translator and all round good guy came forward with an offer to translate the book into an English language version. Matthews invited fellow American and NUg friend and translator, Larry Ray, to join in. Over the coming months we hope to complete the translating and pagination as translation and formatting into PDF format progresses.

PART ONE of “The Subsoil of Naples” is now online for you to bookmark and to check with for updates as translation progressed:

PDF of “THE SUBSOIL OF NAPLES”

http://www.napoliunderground.org/files/IlSottosuoloDiNapoli-1967/SubsoilofNaplesCUMLT.pdf

Larry Ray

History of cave diving

admin — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 03:24:09 +0000

Here you can read about the history of cave diving, starting from 1878 Nello Ottonelli’s first attempts at Vaclause, to the latest records of today. By espeleobloc.

CADI KAZANI – turkish speleo bulletin

admin — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 20:07:51 +0000

On the link below, you can find the bi-monthly e bulletin called CADI KAZANI published by ASPEG speleo club, Turkey. The last two editions contain English abtract section at the back of the bulletin. The bulletin generally concentrates on the culture, art, friendship and memoirs of trips and expeditions of caving. It aims to cover more non-scientific issues and articles.

http://aspeg-tr.org/cms/node/492?docId=100108091904-119a01f335ea45a1b7750687623ee067&viewMode=

Speleo drawings about Padirac expo

admin — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 08:29:54 +0000

On calcairecrayon blog you can find a nice series of drawings about a Padirac expedition.

New website of the Ukrainian Institute of Speleology

admin — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 23:07:01 +0000

Today a new version of the website Ukrainian Institute of Speleology and karstology (UYSK): http://www.institute.speleoukraine.net/ is availabele. UYSK opened access to the archive of magazine “Svet” – “Light”, with opportunities searching for various key (years,numbers, authors, headings). As a result of large work, now all materials, published in the journal “Light” from 1991 years – at the level of articles (more than 500!) are available In the form of PDF. The site es also working on archiving the issues of “Caving and Kartologia”.

15th Anniversary at showcaves.com

admin — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 22:44:04 +0000

Showcaves.com is now 15 years online. The first descriptions of caves and the collection of useful information was made around 1990 by Jochen Duckeck, first for the new show caves in eastern Germany, which became accessible after the border was opend in November 1989. The first idea to publish a guidebook was never realized: printing books was expensive and impossible to finance by a student. The first online version was created in 1994 with the tool latex2html from the original LaTeX book. So actually showcaves.com went online 15 years ago.
In this early times it was hosted on the webserver of the FORWISS in Erlangen, the company where Jochen Duckeck worked at this time. It listed 55 show caves in Germany and started with the first caves in other countries.
In 1995 the site was hosted by the new company of Jochen Duckeck, the small internet company mediatec. Finally in 1998 the website was moved to bubis.com, and 2002 it got its own domain showcaves.com, hosted by domainfactory. And that is where it is hosted until today. Today showcaves.com lists almost 3,500 underground tourist sites or subterranea, including show caves, show mines, cellars, bunkers, tunnels and much more.

original at blog.showcaves.com

The Proceedings of of the 15th International Congress of Speleology

admin — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 06:36:52 +0000

The Proceedings of of the 15th International Congress of Speleology are now available at http://www.lib.usf.edu/karst-test/SPT–BrowseResources.php?ParentId=367

The proceedings are currently posted as PDF files, as they were printed in three large volumes. The PDFs are thus large, 11, 16, and 18 Mb for volumes 1, 2, and 3. The Table of Contents is in Volume 1. The index is in Volume 3. You will notice thatfor most items in the index, the given page numbers are 2 pages larger than the actual page number. The above address is the direct address to the proceedings. This is a part of the KIP that is being redesigned and tested. The main address for the KIP is www.karstportal.org. You can use the keyword search in the upper right corner to find information. The keyword can be a cave name, author name, or other information that may be in the reports you want. However, the proceedings PDFs have not yet been indexed for the search system and so you will not yet find them that way.

Cave in Spitsbergen

admin — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 06:14:34 +0000

A cave in the end moraine of the glacier Larsbreen, Spitsbergen. You can find wonderful photos & more text here .

Eduard Alfred Martel Cartoon

admin — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:17:16 +0000

Here’s a retro cartoon about the adventrues of E.A. Martel from espeleobloc.

Survey of the longest cave on earth

admin — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 08:07:26 +0000

Here you can find an article and some pictures about the survey of the longest cave on earth, Mamooth Cave System, which is 590km long!