anish kapoor draws from dante’s inferno for naples subway station

Naples Opens Landmark Subway Station by Anish Kapoor

A sculptural steel monolith by Anish Kapoor now marks the entrance to a subway station in Naples, Italy. The project at Monte Sant’Angelo Subway Station, which first began in 2003, is set to officially open on September 11th, 2025. Integrating sculpture and architecture into a singular environment, the work has been conceived by the celebrity artist as part of a larger regeneration of the city’s Traiano district.

Anish Kapoor explains: ‘In the city of Mount Vesuvius and Dante’s mythical entrance to the Inferno, I found it important to try and deal with what it really means to go underground.’

images by Amedeo Benestante © Anish Kapoor

two sculptural entrances

With his newly completed intervention, artist Anish Kapoor introduces to the station two distinct points of entry, each designed as sculptural thresholds into Naples’ metro network. The university entrance, formed from weathering steel, swells from the plaza in a way that is ‘archetypal, raw and labial.’ The artist’s team explains: ‘It appears to offer a descent into the underworld.’

The Traiano entrance presents a contrasting language. Here, a tubular opening of smooth steel is precise and brushed. The team continues: ‘As in so much of Kapoor’s work, interior space is turned inside out, he reverses upwards and downwards in a sculptural work that is not an object in the landscape, but rather is joined, rooted and part of the landscape.’ Together, the two entrances frame travelers’ movements through sculpture. The familiar thresholds are no longer secondary details, but are defining elements of Naples’ urban experience.

Naples opens Monte Sant’Angelo Subway Station, designed with Anish Kapoor

infrastructure becomes public art

Anish Kapoor collaborated with Jan Kaplický and Amanda Levete of Future Systems to build these new sculptures for the Naples subway station. The trio together worked to maintain a sense of raw continuity — the tunnel walls are kept raw, allowing for an expressive material honesty. The team concludes: ‘This is an architecture embodied with the porosity of the body — a collision of the functional and formal with the aesthetic and the mythic. It is art as architecture as never seen before.’

While the station arrives as a functional addition to Naples’s expanding metro system, it is also a cultural statement as the southern Italian city creates a dialogue between its infrastructure and the realm of public art. The opening marks the culmination of two decades of work.

Kapoor designs two sculptural entrances that act as thresholds to the underground

the university entrance swells from the ground in weathering steel 

the Traiano entrance forms a smooth, tubular opening which reverses interior and exterior