The Piperno Quarry in Masseria del Monte in Pianura

Another kind of volcanic formation, much older than Yellow Neapolitan Tufo, is to be found in the Phlegraean Fields. This is the piperno of Soccavo and Pianura, a unique rock that is not found elsewhere in the world. The urban history of Soccavo and Pianura, municipalities situated at the foot of the Camaldoli hill, is closely linked to the concept of the hamlet as an early grouping of rural dwellings (De Seta, 1984). They were situated along Via Puteoli-Neapolis,on the hill, just beyond Via Antiniana. The Map of the Dukedom of Noja in 1775 shows the first signs of the hamlets of Soccavo and Pianura, which remained socially and culturally autonomous until 1926-27 when, with urban reform, they were annexed to the city of Naples.

These two hamlets were noted not only for their mainly agricultural economy, but above all because it was here that the piperno masters began to appear, a fact which gave an impulse to the extraction process at the end of the 15th century, when the city walls of Naples were rebuilt.
The piperno of Pianura began to be quarried in 1250, when it is likely that a more permanently settlement began to be established around the activity of piperno extraction (Coleterra et al., 2003). Quarrying ceased in Pianura after World War II. What is sure is that piperno, as a building and ornamental material for the architecture of Naples, played a pre-eminent role.

It can be seen at every corner of the old city, in the cloisters of the most beautiful churches and on the facades of the old palazzi. It is a rock that has a very characteristic texture, a scramble of dark-grey lenticular lines, called "flames", of variable length and depth in a light-grey matrix.
 
Differently from Yellow Neapolitan Tufo, piperno is a very tough stone, and is therefor difficult to extract unless it is split into large blocks which were worked on afterwards, probably in the open air. It is hard and resistant to atmospheric agents, and for this reason has been used for the facing of buildings (Maschio Angioino, the entrance to the Parco Virgiliano and the Church of Gesù Nuovo) as well as for the construction of the portals of palazzi in the historical centre (the cloisters of S. Marcellino, the Courtyard of the Statues of the Federico II University).

At present, the piperno slabs covering the walls of the buildings of the historical centre have "flame" shapesand sizes which are totally different from one another, in spite of coming from the same quarries in Soccavo and Pianura. The much-discussed development of the Piperno Quarry of Masseria del Monte and Pianura is partly the result of there being so many different types of piperno in the same quarry; this suggests that, according to the requests that came in, the piperno masters followed veins of homogenous types of stone I terms of their texture, but which were in different places and at different depths of the quarry (Albertini et al., 1994). Such variations are the result of the origin of the volcanic formations, the times and types of explosion.