If in the whole city of Naples more than 400 religious buildings could be counted at the end of the seventeenth century, for this research about 821 sacred buildings were discovered in the city, of which 223 inactive, abandoned to ruins or adapted. This has been achieved thanks to a cross-analysis between the survey of sacred spaces of Maria Caputi in 1994 and the surveys of the Regional Cultural Heritage Center of Campania Region.

The 223 abandoned, inactive or reused sacred buildings form a dense network of sacred architecture in the urban fabric that externally show the various possible categorizations of the Bust-Pelt relationship: some appear as Busts maintaining their identity as intangible monuments, others appear instead like Busts colonized by Pelt in which it is now difficult to identify their monumental strength except to their interiors.

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Churches turned into garages, temples incorporated within residential buildings or inactive chapels stuck in time between the narrow streets of the city, become significant elements of the Neapolitan urban landscape. Studying these sacred bodies through their relationship between Bust and Pelt, becomes a clear investigation tool to summarize the complexity of the phenomenon. With this filter, therefore, the theory that sacred spaces, designed as a monumental memory of the city, have participated less than other architectural buildings to the destruction of memory that the succession of centuries necessarily entails, is partially refuted. As a matter of fact, Naples gives us a totally new image: if the temples are defined as places excluded from profane activity, as spaces of the sacred, they could be more unlikely than others subjected to forms of reuse. Some of these spaces, once religious, are totally re-shaped and re-appropriated to imagine new possible uses. Showing this phenomenon is not intended to emphasize it but to detect it, even admitting the likely improper use of these architectures, which sometimes become a symbol of neglect and bad governance.