THE narrow, winding streets of Naples reverberate with the sounds of impatient car horns, barking dogs and rat-a-tat-tatting scooters. Opulent Baroque churches and elegant palazzi open onto a landscape covered over in graffiti, and patrons in cafes keep a close eye on their bags as they chatter over pizza or the delicate, shell-like local pastries called sfogliatelle. Under towering Vesuvius, the city has a feel of chaos, congestion, frenetic activity.
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Chris Warde-Jones for The New York Times

The cryptoportico under San Lorenzo Maggiore.

But make your way beneath the espresso-fueled cacophony, and you discover the deep and ancient silence of a lost world: of catacombs and caves, Roman roads and markets, World War II air-raid shelters, and early Christian burial sites of faded frescoes and mosaics.

Naples is built layer over layer out of the compacted volcanic ash and rock that Italians call tufo. Porous and easily manipulated, it was used by the Greeks, starting around 470 B.C., as they built their Neapolis; the name means “New City” and emerged over time as Napoli — or, in English, Naples. Later the Romans used the tufo quarries for an extensive system of underground aqueducts. Early Christians dug caves to worship and bury their dead. Neapolitans of various centuries used the cavities as dumping grounds. Only the cholera epidemic of the mid-1880s shut down this underground city, but in World War II it was in use again, as shelter from the heavy bombing that decimated the city.

Most of Naples has a honeycombed underground, and slipping into it — and back through time — is as easy as descending a flight of stairs or turning a corner. Guided tours help travelers explore, and in a few places, where the excavations are parts of museums or churches, you can wander on your own.

This layered, partially exposed history lends Naples a haunting, mysterious quality. And there is a figurative underground as well as the literal one: the Camorra criminal network represents one use of the term, but the famed archaeological museum illustrates another sort of concealment. Its Secret Cabinet, long kept under lock and key and still off limits to unescorted children, is a collection of sex-themed ancient objects, many excavated from the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum, that were long considered too obscene to be brought into public view.

One group showing the way underground is the Libera Associazione Escursionisti Sottosuolo, whose tour, in Italian with English handouts, leaves a few times a week from the well-known Gambrinus bar in the Piazza Trieste e Trento. But on our visit in March, my husband, Greg Miller, and I chose to explore with Napoli Sotterranea, which runs several 90-minute English-language tours a day from the city’s historic heart.

Our guide, 23-year-old Alex Fusaro, whose other job is as a drummer in an indie band, led our small group down a flight of stairs in an apartment building and into the first-century B.C. Here, he told us, were the remains of a Greco-Roman theater with a capacity of 6,000 where Nero is said to have sung through an earthquake. Some 30 families live above it now. We gazed from a large open space at ancient, intricately constructed arches in what had once been the backstage.

Wandering on, through the interconnected passageways below the bustling Neapolitan streets, we saw aqueducts that had been used for 23 centuries and then descended 121 steps deeper to the air-raid shelters. In 1941, almost 250 miles of tunnels and waterways under Naples were cleared of water and refuse, most wells were sealed, and stairways were built and electricity installed. The Neapolitans who waited in the shelters as bombs pounded overhead left markers of their tense days and weeks there: drawings on walls of bombs and planes, the word “aiuto” (help). We saw toy cars and beds, a sewing machine and a radio that were later found in the shelters. Then we gripped lighted candles and navigated a chilly long, low and narrow passageway where water once flowed, to reach Greek and Roman cisterns. The largest, our guide told us, was built by the Romans in the second century A.D. and used until the 19th century; it is high and boxy, carved from the yellow tufo.

Afterward, it was a welcome contrast to re-enter the 21st century at Scaturchio, on the Piazza San Domenico Maggiore, with an espresso and sfogliatelle. Crowds wandered nearby in the Via San Gregorio Armeno, jampacked with shops that make and sell the traditional Neapolitan nativity scenes, known as presepi.

Also not to be missed in this part of the city are the remarkable Greco-Roman ruins beneath the 18th-century cloister at San Lorenzo Maggiore. We descended a staircase and wandered entirely alone for 90 minutes in a buried world that was once at street level: the remains of a first-century A.D. Roman market, a barrel-vaulted shopping arcade and a road with remnants of ruins, including a domed oven of an ancient bakery and a communal laundry with tubs and drains.

The Windy City is one of America’s sports meccas: home to the Bears and the Bulls, the Sox and the Cubs, and, Chicagoans are only recently willing to admit, the Blackhawks. But can it become Surf City, U.S.A.?
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This week, Chicago Park District’s governing board empowered the city superintendent to lift a decades-old ban on the use of flotation devices like boogie boards on the city’s waterways. (The ordinance was established to prevent accidental drownings; government officials were chiefly concerned about liability, and the prospect that novice swimmers, imitating highly skilled surfers, might leap into Lake Michigan, especially in harsh winter conditions.) The move will effectively legalize surfing in the heart of the Midwest, and make Chicago an unlikely beachfront in the war to extend surfing’s influence across the country. (Read a story about how recession threatens the original Surf City, U.S.A.)

At first, the idea of surfers riding waves within view of Chicago’s iconic skyline may seem bizarre. But this city has long had robust beaches: This spring, Chicago opened its newest beach, on the South Side; and a former resident of the South Side, the city’s favorite adopted son, Hawaiian-born President Barack Obama, is a surfer — although it’s hard to imagine him ever taking to the shores of Lake Michigan. The city’s beaches have more than a century’s worth of history. In the 1890s, a group of prominent Chicagoans, including doctors and businessmen, lobbied for the creation of public beaches along Lake Michigan, in part for working-class residents to have access to clean bathing water. In 1913, the beaches became the site of controversy when women’s rights activists used them to protest the legally mandated but voluminous “swimming costumes” — one woman stripping down to her bloomers to swim because it was impossible, she said, to swim in the required skirt. A judge ruled that her attire was not indecent. (Check out a story about the new sport of Stand-Up Paddle surfing.)

Surfing, for its part, is not an alien sport to Chicagoans. At Ryan Gerard’s Third Coast Surf Shop, in New Buffalo, Mich., many of his growing base of customers make the 90-minute drive from Chicago to purchase their gear. “There’s no reason we shouldn’t be allowed to surf,” Gerard says. “We see ourselves as an asset to local communities.” But, given the risk of being ticketed and fined $500, Chicago surfers had typically gone elsewhere in the Great Lakes, the world’s largest body of fresh water. Still, aficionados continued to sneak into the water and, after one ticket too many, a group of surfers last December sent Chicago’s Park District a proposal asking that surfing be allowed at four of the city’s beaches during the traditional beach season, Memorial Day to Labor Day, as well as year-round at a fifth beach. Officials are still sorting through various details of regulating surfing, like whether there will be an age requirement for surfing, and what, exactly, signs along beaches will say (For example, “Surf at Your Own Risk”?).

Midwestern surfers prefer Labor Day through Memorial Day, particularly November onward, when the waves are especially choppy. The water, experts say, is warmer than the air’s temperature, and creates an “unstable boundary layer” near the water’s surface — hence more waves. Waves during a storm may reach 20 feet, and appear roughly every six to eight seconds. How do they compare to the surf in Hawaii and California? Pacific waves tend to be stronger, and longer, than those in the Midwest because they gain momentum having crossed thousands of miles from Asia. They may be twice as tall, and appear every 10 to 12 seconds during a storm.

Those differences, however, don’t matter much to Midwestern surfers. Last December, Vince Deur, co-chair of the Surfrider Foundation’s chapter here, took a group of friends to the southern shore of Lake Michigan. The air temperature was about 25 degrees. A winter storm covered much of the lake, sending fierce winds from the north to create waves nearly two feet above Deur’s head. “The waves,” he recalls, “had some nice shape and power. But look,” he continues, “we know that in the world of great surfing, as far as quality goes, we’re at the bottom. We’re in it for the fun.” Anticipating the arrival of surfing on Lake Michigan, Deur said Wednesday, “We understand and respect the city’s small step approach to opening these beaches. And we consider this a victory.”