Anish Kapoor designs Naples station as a reflection of ‘what it really means to go underground’

Designed by artist Anish Kapoor, a new Naples station blends art and architecture, poised and somewhat mysterious – a functional piece of sculpture. Officially titled the Monte Sant’Angelo Subway Station, the striking new piece of infrastructure in the southern Italian city is set to be formally inaugurated tomorrow (11 September 2025) by the president of Campania, Vincenzo De Luca and EAV president Umberto De Gregorio.

Tour Anish Kapoor’s new Naples station

The project is part of a wider urban and cultural regeneration scheme in the Traiano district of Naples. Not too far away, EMBT, the Barcelona-based architecture studio of Benedetta Tagliabue, recently designed a spectacular timber-framed new subway and train station, Centro Direzionale di Napoli, which opened in 2024.

It is part of a series of new stations for the metropolitan train line that were commissioned in 2004, using the triptych ‘art, architecture and archaeology’ as its motto and including works by Foster + Partners, Massimiliano Fuksas, Álvaro Siza, Dominique Perault, and Karim Rashid.

With Kapoor's project, the design signals strongly a similar desire for a harmonious symbiosis of architecture and art. While, of course, the project is a working building, it also confidently showcases the artist's explorations, which have resulted in world-famous pieces such as Cloud Gate in Chicago.

The new station is clad in weathering steel and features two entrances – each distinct in its look, one smooth and clean-cut, and the other swelling from the ground, hinting at an abstract 'bodily organism'.

Kapoor, referencing three key elements as his starting points – ‘the mythological object, the body and the void’ – and tying the design firmly to its site, said: ‘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.’