Explore the real-world places that appear in The Chain of Chance by Stanisław Lem. Each location on the map shows what happens there in the novel, the real history of the place, and what's there today. Featured locations include Terme di Agnano, Lago d'Agnano, Campi Flegrei, Stazione di Napoli Centrale, Via Caracciolo Seafront and 8 more.
Via Agnano Astroni — Central spa at the heart of the mystery
The spa at Agnano is the epicenter of the entire investigation. A series of American men, all middle-aged, all following the same therapeutic regimen, have died or disappeared under circumstances that appear accidental but accumulate into a disturbing pattern. The narrator, a former astronaut named Adams, is sent to retrace their steps, undergoing the same daily routines at the spa to draw out whatever hidden mechanism is killing them. The thermal baths and mineral treatments become a kind of deadly ritual that Adams must experience firsthand.
Terme di Agnano has been a spa destination since antiquity, built around the volcanic hot springs in the Agnano crater west of Naples. The Romans exploited these sulfurous waters for medicinal purposes, and the site was famous throughout the medieval and Renaissance periods. By the twentieth century it operated as a modern therapeutic spa drawing visitors from across Europe.
The spa complex at Agnano has largely closed and the site has been repurposed. The Agnano crater area today is known primarily for the Ippodromo di Agnano racetrack, while remnants of the spa infrastructure remain on the grounds. The volcanic nature of the area is still evident.
Visit: Ippodromo di Agnano (landmark)
Agnano crater basin — Site of atmospheric dread
The extinct volcanic crater lake at Agnano forms the eerie natural backdrop of Adams's investigation. The strange, enclosed landscape of the crater — with its sulfurous vents and unnaturally still water — mirrors the suffocating logic of the mystery itself. Adams walks its perimeter during his days at the spa, turning over the inexplicable chain of events in his mind, feeling the oppressive sense that something systematic and invisible is at work.
The Agnano crater was once filled by a lake that was drained in the sixteenth century by Spanish viceroys for public health reasons. For centuries the area was notorious for its toxic volcanic gases — the famous Grotta del Cane nearby was demonstrated to tourists as a curiosity, where carbon dioxide pooled close to the ground and would suffocate dogs while humans remained unaffected.
The Agnano basin is now largely occupied by a sports and racing complex. The volcanic geology is still present, with occasional sulfurous emissions detectable in the area. It sits within the Campi Flegrei volcanic region, which remains geologically active.
Visit: Agnano Crater Area (landmark)
Pozzuoli coast — The volcanic landscape shadowing the plot
The Phlegraean Fields — the broad volcanic district stretching west of Naples in which Agnano sits — supply the novel with its atmosphere of hidden, impersonal forces operating beneath the surface. Lem uses this landscape deliberately: Adams, a man trained to think in terms of statistical probability and systems analysis, finds himself in a place where the earth itself is visibly unstable, where solid ground gives way to fumaroles and sulfurous vents. The setting externalizes the novel's central philosophical argument about chance operating as a concealed mechanism.
The Campi Flegrei is one of the world's most geologically significant volcanic areas, encompassing dozens of craters, calderas, and hydrothermal vents across the northwestern edge of the Naples metropolitan area. Ancient Greeks and Romans regarded it as an entrance to the underworld — Virgil set the gateway to Hades here in the Aeneid. The region experiences ongoing bradyseism, a slow rising and sinking of the ground.
The Campi Flegrei remains an active volcanic zone under continuous monitoring by Italian geologists. Parts of it are accessible as archaeological and natural parks, including the Solfatara crater near Pozzuoli, though sections have been closed due to increased seismic activity in recent years.
Visit: Parco Archeologico dei Campi Flegrei (historic site)
Piazza Garibaldi — Adams's arrival point in Naples
Adams arrives in Naples via the central station, entering a city that immediately overwhelms him with its noise, density, and apparent chaos. His journey from the station toward the spa district introduces the reader to his methodical, analytical character — he is a man who has orbited the Earth, who understands probability and systems, and who now applies that same cold rationalism to the teeming streets of Naples. The contrast between his astronaut's precision and the city's disorder is immediate and deliberate.
Napoli Centrale was built in its current monumental form in the 1950s and 1960s, replacing earlier nineteenth-century structures. The station sits at Piazza Garibaldi, historically one of the most chaotic and commercially dense squares in the city, serving as the primary gateway for millions of arrivals to Naples by rail.
Napoli Centrale remains the primary rail hub for the city and one of the busiest stations in southern Italy, connecting to high-speed rail to Rome, regional lines to the Amalfi Coast, and the Circumvesuviana line serving Pompeii and Herculaneum. Piazza Garibaldi has undergone extensive renovation in the 2000s.
Visit: Napoli Centrale (landmark)
Lungomare Caracciolo — Adams's reflective walks along the bay
Adams walks the Neapolitan seafront during his off-hours at the spa, using the long promenade along the Bay of Naples to order his thoughts. Faced with a case that seems to generate no leads, only accumulating coincidences, he paces the lungomare and attempts to apply the logic of probability theory to the deaths. The vista of Vesuvius across the bay — another volcanic presence — becomes a repeated visual motif in his ruminations about impersonal forces and catastrophe.
Via Caracciolo was laid out in the nineteenth century as a fashionable waterfront promenade for the Bourbon aristocracy of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. It stretches from Mergellina to Piazza Vittoria, offering unbroken views of the Bay of Naples, Vesuvius, and the islands of Capri and Ischia on clear days.
The Lungomare Caracciolo remains one of Naples' most popular public spaces, used by joggers, cyclists, and strolling families. On Sundays it is often closed to traffic and filled with pedestrians. The seafront has been extensively renovated in recent decades and features several historic villas and gardens.
Visit: Lungomare Caracciolo (park)
Corso Vittorio Emanuele — Adams's lodgings during the investigation
Adams stays at a grand, slightly faded hotel in the upper city, the kind of establishment that has hosted wealthy northern European visitors since the nineteenth century. His room becomes a workspace where he spreads out the dossiers of the dead men, charting their movements, their daily schedules at the spa, the sequence of their treatments. The hotel's atmosphere — formal, international, slightly unreal — reinforces his sense of operating in a world that presents a reasonable surface over something deeply irrational.
The Hotel Britannique on Corso Vittorio Emanuele is one of Naples' oldest continuously operating hotels, founded in the mid-nineteenth century to accommodate the flood of British tourists on the Grand Tour. It occupies a position on the hillside above the city center with sweeping views of the bay, and has hosted numerous writers and artists over the decades.
The Hotel Britannique continues to operate as a boutique hotel in Naples, retaining much of its nineteenth-century character and décor. It remains a popular choice for visitors seeking a quieter, more historic alternative to the larger modern hotels near the waterfront.
Visit: Hotel Britannique (landmark)
Via Mergellina — The western spa district waterfront
Mergellina serves as the coastal anchor of the western Naples district closest to the Agnano spa, and Adams passes through it repeatedly on his commute between his hotel and the thermal baths. The small port with its fishing boats and café terraces offers one of the novel's few moments of sensory pleasure amid the grim investigation. Adams watches the fishermen and reflects on systems — biological, mechanical, social — that function without anyone understanding the whole.
Mergellina has been a fishing harbor and leisure port since antiquity, sitting at the western foot of the Posillipo hill. The area was associated with the poet Virgil, whose tomb is traditionally located in the nearby park of Piedigrotta. By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it became a fashionable residential and recreational district.
Mergellina remains an active small harbor and one of Naples' most pleasant neighborhoods, with a cluster of cafés, gelaterie, and seafood restaurants facing the water. The port serves hydrofoil connections to Capri and Ischia and is a popular gathering spot for Neapolitans on warm evenings.
Visit: Porto di Mergellina (landmark)
Via Medina — Police headquarters and bureaucratic obstacle
Adams's investigation brings him into contact with the Neapolitan police, who have officially classified the deaths as accidental. His meetings at the Questura are exercises in institutional obstruction — the authorities have no interest in reopening closed cases or entertaining the statistical argument that so many accidental deaths among men of identical profile at the same location cannot be coincidental. The police scenes illustrate Lem's point about how institutions are structurally resistant to recognizing patterns that fall outside conventional categories of crime.
The Questura di Napoli — headquarters of the state police for the Naples province — has historically been one of Italy's most challenged law enforcement institutions, operating in a city with complex organized crime dynamics and a massive, dense population. The building on Via Medina has served administrative police functions for the postwar decades.
The Questura di Napoli continues to operate as the main police headquarters for the Naples metropolitan area, handling both administrative and investigative functions. It remains a busy institution in one of Italy's largest and most complex cities.
Piazza dei Martiri, Chiaia — The chemical clue
A key thread in Adams's investigation involves the medications and chemical preparations the dead men had been taking — a confluence of over-the-counter remedies, prescription drugs, and the mineral compounds administered at the spa. He traces some of these substances through pharmacies in the Chiaia district, interviewing pharmacists about the combinations involved. The revelation that certain common drug interactions, combined with the spa's chemical environment, could produce fatal results is central to the novel's climactic explanation — that the deaths were caused not by any murderer but by a catastrophic chain of chemical coincidences.
The Chiaia district has been Naples' most elegant neighborhood since the Bourbon period, and its pharmacies have historically served an affluent, cosmopolitan clientele. The Piazza dei Martiri — named for martyrs of the Neapolitan revolutionary uprisings — has been a prestigious commercial address since the nineteenth century.
Piazza dei Martiri remains one of Naples' most refined public spaces, surrounded by high-end boutiques, art galleries, and historic buildings. Several traditional pharmacies continue to operate in the Chiaia area, some retaining their nineteenth-century interiors and fittings.
Visit: Piazza dei Martiri (landmark)
Viale Fulco Ruffo di Calabria — Departure point and frame of the novel
The novel opens with Adams already in transit, and the airport frames his movement between the world of international investigation — his handlers, the American intelligence-adjacent organization that has dispatched him — and the specific, suffocating locality of Naples and its spa. His eventual departure from Capodichino at the novel's end, after the pattern of deaths has been explained as a terrible convergence of chemical accident rather than human malice, carries a powerful ambivalence: the case is solved, but the solution is more disturbing than any murderer would have been.
Capodichino airport has served Naples since the early twentieth century, originally as a military airfield. It became the city's civilian international airport after World War II and has been continuously expanded to handle the growing volume of tourism to southern Italy, though it remains constrained by its urban location.
Aeroporto Internazionale di Napoli–Capodichino continues to operate as Naples' sole commercial airport, handling approximately eleven million passengers per year. It serves connections across Europe and to transatlantic hubs, and has been the subject of ongoing expansion and infrastructure debates due to its limited runway capacity.
Visit: Aeroporto di Napoli-Capodichino (landmark)
Via Posillipo — Wealthy residential heights above the investigation
Adams follows certain leads into the wealthy residential district of Posillipo, where some of the deceased spa visitors had rented villas or maintained social contacts. The steep hill with its panoramic views over the bay and the Campi Flegrei district — visually connecting the city to the volcanic landscape where the deaths occurred — becomes a spatial metaphor in Adams's thinking. From here the whole geography of the case is literally visible, yet its meaning remains elusive.
Posillipo — from the Greek Pausilypon, meaning 'relief from pain' — has been an elite residential district since Roman times, when the Emperor Augustus's advisor Vedius Pollio built a villa here. The hillside is lined with aristocratic palaces, gardens descending to private jetties, and the remains of Roman maritime villas.
Posillipo remains one of Naples' most exclusive neighborhoods, with spectacular villas, private beaches, and some of the most expensive real estate in the city. The Parco Virgiliano at the hill's western tip is a public park offering sweeping views of the bay, the Campi Flegrei, and the islands.
Visit: Parco Virgiliano a Posillipo (park)
Via San Carlo — Indoor meeting point for Adams and his contacts
Adams meets informants and contacts in the neutral, public anonymity of the Galleria, Naples' great nineteenth-century glass arcade. The location suits his investigative method: busy enough to prevent close surveillance, prestigious enough that his well-dressed contacts do not attract attention. It is here that he receives some of the documentary evidence about the dead men — their travel records, medical histories, the precise schedule of their spa treatments — that allows him to begin constructing the statistical argument for a non-random pattern.
The Galleria Umberto I was built between 1887 and 1890 as part of a sweeping urban renewal project in central Naples, modeled on the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan. Its magnificent iron and glass dome rises 57 meters above the cross-shaped arcade. It was intended as a symbol of Naples' modernization and commercial ambition in the new unified Italy.
The Galleria Umberto I remains a functioning public space and commercial arcade in the heart of Naples, adjacent to the Teatro San Carlo. Though some of its shops have turned over to fast food and tourist outlets, the architecture remains magnificent and it continues to draw visitors. It is freely accessible to the public.
Visit: Galleria Umberto I (landmark)
Via Solfatara, Pozzuoli — Volcanic landscape mirroring the novel's themes
The Solfatara — a shallow volcanic crater near Pozzuoli emitting jets of steam and sulfurous gas — is the most viscerally present emblem of the Campi Flegrei landscape that Adams moves through. Lem invokes this terrain to make tangible his philosophical argument: invisible forces, neither malicious nor accidental in the human sense, operating through chemical processes that produce deadly outcomes. The Solfatara's gases, toxic at high concentration, are a real-world analog to the chain of chemical coincidences Adams eventually identifies as the true killer.
The Solfatara crater near Pozzuoli has been known since antiquity as a site of volcanic wonder, called the Forum Vulcani by the Romans. It emits carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide through fumaroles and has a distinctive bubbling mud pool at its center. For centuries it was a major tourist attraction on the Bay of Naples itinerary.
The Solfatara was a popular tourist attraction until 2017, when a tragic accident — a family fell through the ground into a fumarolic vent — caused three deaths and led to the permanent closure of the site to visitors. It remains closed as of the mid-2020s while legal proceedings and safety assessments continue.
More by Stanisław Lem: All Stanisław Lem books
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