In Naples, a New Metro Station by Artist Anish Kapoor Opens

Located in the Traiano district, yet another signature station has been added to the Naples metro network: with the arrival of the first train on Line 7, the Monte Sant’Angelo station officially opens its doors.

The station, designed by the internationally acclaimed artist Anish Kapoor in partnership with the design studio Future Systems, was inaugurated on Thursday, September 11, 2025, in the presence of Campania Region President Vincenzo De Luca and EAV President Umberto De Gregorio.

Monte Sant’Angelo Station: Between Art and Architecture

Invited in 2003 to design a station for the city’s new metro system, the British-Indian artist Kapoor conceived a work that contributes to the cultural and urban regeneration of Naples’ Traiano district. From that moment, a project began that would unfold over the next two decades, culminating in the realization of the Monte Sant’Angelo Station and its Traiano entrance.

The Monte Sant’Angelo Station represents a perfect synthesis of sculpture and architecture – a hallmark of Kapoor’s artistic language. From his early works with pigments rising from the ground, biomorphic and architectural, fully formed yet composed of materials so fragile they bordered on the formless, to his monumental public works like Cloud Gate in Chicago – a seamless reflective form that absorbs and mirrors everything around it – Kapoor’s work contains, and simultaneously creates, the new space in which it exists.

The station’s two entrances – the university access and the Traiano entrance – are themselves veritable works of art, conceived as object-openings.

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Two Entrances, Two Works of Art

At Monte Sant’Angelo Station, Kapoor’s three recurring themes come together more powerfully than ever: the mythological object, the body, and the void.

The university entrance, made of Cor-Ten steel, rises from the ground like an archaic and primordial form, evoking both a gateway to the underground and a symbolic entrance to the underworld. As the artist himself stated: “In the city of Vesuvius and Dante’s mythical entrance to Hell, I found it important to confront what it truly means to go underground.”

The Traiano entrance, by contrast, appears as its opposite: a smooth, tubular, circular opening that transforms interior into exterior and vice versa, blending architecture and landscape.

Inside, the collaboration with architects Jan Kaplický and Amanda Levete of Future Systems gave rise to essential, material-driven spaces. The tunnel walls, intentionally raw and elemental, maintain a stylistic unity that makes the station feel like a single living organism: an architecture that fuses the functional and the aesthetic, the everyday and the mythical.

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