Gabriele D'Annunzio in Naples

Gabriele D'Annunzio, (1863 – 1938) (image, right), poet, journalist, playwright, valiant soldier in WWI, and Italian irredentist patriot, played a prominent role in Italian literature in the 1890s and 1910s and in later political life from 1914 to 1924. His ideas and style are often viewed as a "coming attractions" preview of Italian Fascism. (Indeed, he was once described as the John the Baptist of Italian Fascism!) He was all of that in one way or another, and yet he might have been none of that had he not done one simple thing -- he made a short stopover in Naples and then stayed for a while.

Certainly his early years showed no such promise. He was fatuous and flighty -- and a dead-beat. In 1891, D’Annunzio left his wife and children to go live with one of his lovers, Barbara Leoni. He was also a spendthrift, and whatever adroit physical prowess he might have later displayed in WWI was in early life spent keeping one step ahead of his creditors. At a certain point he fled his Rome residence to avoid them and went to Francavilla sul Mare, in the Abruzzi (his native province), as a guest of the famous painter Francesco Paolo Michetti. From there, he left to Sicily with Michetti, planning a stop over in Naples for a few days, but he stayed when Michetti left. Here is where D'Annunzia's plot thickens.

On arrival in Naples on August 30, 1891, he stayed at the luxury Hotel Vesuvio on Via Partenope and, as wrote to his lover, he was enchanted by the sea, the vitality of the city, and the beauty of the landscape. He quickly found a job as a journalist with Matilde Serao and Eduardo Scarfoglio. She was one of the foremost women writers in Italy and he was one of the founders of "Realism" in Italian literature. As husband and wife they founded a number of newspapers, among which was Il Mattino, still the largest Neapolitan daily. They published young journalists, including opinion pieces, editorials and some fiction. They published two of D'Annunzio's novels as newspaper serials, L’Innocente and Giovanni Episcopo, plus several books of his poetry, and six short stories, all of which dealt with violence.

As in Rome, D’Annunzio let a very active social and professional life. The Neapolitan author Angelo Conti (a fervid exponent of the music of Richard Wagner, introduced him to literary and musical circles. D'Annunzio became infatuated ("obsessed" is not too strong a word) with the music of Wagner, and, importantly, the philosophy behind it.

Equally important, it was in Naples that he first became acquainted with the works of his German contemporary, Friedrich Nietzsche, which he read in German and introduced to Italians in an article he wrote in September, 1892. Then, in his novel from 1900, Il Fuoco (The Flame of Life) he portrayed himself as the Nietzschean Superman, Stelio Effrena, fictionalizing his love affair with actress Eleonora Duse. He had bought the idea of the "Superman" (G.B. Shaw's brilliant rendering of the German 'Uebermensch' -- lit. 'Overman') and was driven by his own views of his potential that he was indeed that superior individual destined to overcome and transform mass culture and, to lead society and culture to a higher plane. Indeed he had out-Nietzche'd Nietzche, for when he read of Nietzsche’s criticism of the nationalism and supposed anti-Semitism in Wagner’s music, he sprang to Wagner’s defense in three newspaper articles published in the summer of 1893, trying to reconcile the views of the two geniuses.

D’Annunzio effortlessly absorbed different cultural and intellectual influences, and with a unique flair. They tell the story that he and the Neapolitan poet, Ferdinando Russo, were having an espresso at the Café Gambrinus, and Russo challenged D'Annunzio to write a song in Neapolitan dialect. D'Annunzio then wrote the poem A Vuchella (The Tiny Mouth) in a few minutes. Composer Francesco Paolo Tosti, D'Annunzio's friend set the poem to music in 1904 and the song became famous sung by no less than Enrico Caruso.

In Naples and still continuing his affair with Leoni, who had joined him there for a while, he also had an affair with a former lover of Eduardo Scarfoglio and then a new entanglement with the 31-year-old married mother of four, the oversexed Countess Maria Gravina Cruyllas di Ramacca, the married daughter of a Sicilian prince. That affair had started in secret in a small hotel in Naples, but soon Maria moved in with D’Annunzio. She finally went back to her husband, but the affair with D’Annunzio did not end. When her husband lost a large amount of money in financial speculations and moved to his country estate, his wife refused to follow him and moved with her children and a maid to a rented apartment and told her husband that she would seek a legal separation. Husband (count) then went snooping and found wife (countess),

Maria, in bed with (guess who!) D'Annunzio! Husband (count) then challenged D'Annunzio (poet) to a duel. Poet declined (this is all in 1892 and poet is still anticipating a great future in WWI a mere 25 years down the road. He can't afford to get shot now. The count then went to the cops and reported the crime of adultery to the authorities, and the two were indicted. In the meanwhile, Maria’s father had cut off her allowance, and neither she nor D’Annunzio had money to pay the rent, so they moved in with one of her friends, Princess (!) Emma Gallone di Ottaviano, in her castle in the town of Ottaviano. The castle was cold and Maria was pregnant, and after a few months they moved to the town of Resina (now Ercolano). In July 1893, D’Annunzio and Maria were tried, found guilty of adultery, and sentenced to five months in jail; on appeal the sentence was upheld, but there was a royal amnesty in 1894 and everyone walked.

In 1893, the couple had a child, Renata Anguissola, but the relationship was falling apart, as D’Annunzio was still straying

from one bed to another. Creditors were also still hounding him daily. D'Annunzio and Maria lived together on and off until 1897 in Francavilla al Mare, not far from Pescara. Later, Maria moved to Montecarlo (Monaco), became the manager of a small hotel, and died there.

Villa Conigliera

Il palazzo Muscèttola di Leporano (storpiato in Luperano) o villa Conigliera è un palazzo monumentale storico^[1] di Napoli ubicato in vicolo Luperano, nella nota zona detta il Cavone. L'edificio è appartenuto ai principi di Leporano. Nel XV secolo il palazzo venne fatto edificare da Alfonso II di Napoli come casino di caccia ai numerosi conigli che popolavano l'area e la residenza si estendeva fino alla Strada dell'Infrascata (attuale via Salvator Rosa); il progetto fu redatto da Giuliano da Maiano che realizzò, secondo gli scritti di Giovanni Battista Chiarini, un edificio difettoso, cioè senz'aria e senza giochi d'acqua (per via delle cattive condizioni della zona).

Come già detto il palazzo passò, alla morte di Alfonso, ai principi di Leporano che rimaneggiarono l'edificio lasciando il cortile in piperno e una conchiglia incavata che ospitava lo stemma dei Muscèttola, poi rimosso agli inizi del XX secolo.

Di notevole è rimasto solo il cortile in piperno ad arcate; questo venne successivamente chiuso per far posto a botteghe, ma dell'antica struttura del cortile si possono notare le nicchie che probabilmente ospitavano busti e decorazioni pregiate.

The Museum of San Gennaro

The newest museum in Naples has to do with one of the oldest manifestations of religious faith in the city, and certainly the most fascinating. Elsewhere in Naples: Life, Death & Miracles there is material dealing with the person of San Gennaro(St. Januarius). This brief item you are reading here, however, is dedicated to the recently inaugurated Museum of the Treasure of San Gennaro, where a great number of gifts are on display that have been donated ex voto to the saint—that is, to honor a vow made per grazie ricevute—for grace received.

One should note, at the outset, that there was a great deal of resistance to having a museum of this kind in Naples. Neapolitans regularly and unselfconsciously talk to their saints—their personal onomastic saints, of course, but especially to San Gennaro, the patron saint of the city, itself. Not all of the talk is about matters of the spirit, either, or even to invoke intercession against illness or calamity. Some of it is downright pecuniary and folksy: ("Come on, Gennà, would it kill you just this once to let these few numbers come up in the lottery, tomorrow?). Thus, there is a "cult of San Gennaro," people whose faith is so deep and whose dedication so unwavering that a museum of ex voto items seemed irreverent and out of place. The very idea of having tourists lollygagging by to look at these items out of abstract cultural interest...well, it didn't seem right.

However that may be, the museum has been open since February of this year. It took eight years to plan and seven months to set up. It is on the premises of the Duomo, the Naples Cathedral. The entrance is just to the right of the main entrance to the cathedral at the end of the portico walkway of the adjacent building. The premises of the museum occupy two floors. (The museum is not to be confused with the Chapel of the Treasure of San Gennaro consecrated in 1646 and within the Cathedral, itself.)

The inside of the museum is softly lighted such as to set off the 25 illuminated display cases on the ground floor and to bring out the reflected light that plays off the bronze, silver and gold of the many objects, each one the work of a craftsman and each an ex-voto gift to the saint: the bronze busts of the saint, the crucifixes, the chalice, the ostensory (the receptacle in which the Host is displayed to the congregation), the ampulla (of unique interest since the mysterious liquefaction of the saint's blood within a similar ampulla in the cathedral on certain days of the year constitutes the so-called "Miracle of San Gennaro," the most Neapolitan of all religious rituals). Many of the precious items are from the late 1600s; one is from the Angevin 1300s, and one is as recent as the early 1900s.

The Port of Palepolis (Old City)

In a press conference this week Neapolitan archaeologist Mario Negri brought us up to date on underwater archeology in the area of the Egg Castle (seen in the photo of the main logo display at the top of this page); that is, at the base of Mt. Echia, the height upon which the original Greek city of Parthenope used to stand. Parthenope was founded in around 750 BC by Greek settlers. The years between the founding of Parthenope and that of late-comer Naples (Neapolis/New City) in the mid-400s were complicated by the strong presence of theEtruscans,  who were at their height in around 600. That presence sent the original city of Parthenope into a decline that was not halted until the final defeat of Etruscan naval forces by the Greeks in the 400s. (The "Etruscans" link in the previous sentence will tell you what an absolutely rotten century the 400s were for the Etruscans.) At that point, more Greeks arrived to found Neapolis, at which point the former Parthenope became Palepolis (Old City). 

Underwater archaeology has now revealed remnants of what appear to be the harbor of Palepolis (which itself may be on the site of whatever port the Parthenopians had). So far the submerged remnants (image, above) include four tunnels, a three-meter-wide (9 ft) street with cart-furrows still visible. There is also a long trench at a depth of 6 meters (18 ft) near the castle, as well as a street obviously meant to lead away from the port and up to the city, itself. The most obvious physical fact is that what we think of as the island upon which the Egg Castle stands was once a true peninsula (it is now an "artificial peninsula," joined by a causeway to the mainland). The great change in sea level is also evident elsewhere along this part of the coast. Further submerged archeology will continue in May. There is a great deal to be learned about the early history of the city and there are already enthusiastic comparisons to the sunken ruins of Baia at the western end of the bay of Pozzuoli and the possibilities of somehow opening the site to tourism. Don't hold your breath. Seriously, get some SCUBA gear.

Naples in the 1600s

The decline of the Spanish Empire from the loss of the Armada (1588) through the entire 1600s to its ultimate demise in 1700 with the death of Charles II is complex. Some of the factors (besides the original loss of the Armada and subsequent loss of naval dominance) were Spain's continuing wars with the French, English and the Dutch in the early 1600s, her involvement in the Thirty Years War (resulting in a disastrous defeat in 1643 at the battle of Rocroy), and, most of all, her terrible mismanagement of wealth from the New World.

As a Spanish vice-realm, Naples might have been expected to follow a parallel decline. For various reasons (one of which was the simple geographical distance from the battlefields of the Thirty Years War) that was not the case. The year 1600 marks the beginning of what is often called a "Golden Age" in the history of Naples. The city had been transformed in the mid-1500s into a modern city, the best defended and largest port city in the Spanish Empire, the second largest city in Europe (after Paris)—essentially being primed for just such a period of greatness. By 1600 a number of Spanish villas had begun to spring up along the Chiaia, opening the western part of the city to an incredible building boom of luxurious estates; in 1600 the cornerstone of Domenico Fontana's great Royal Palace (illustration, above) was laid; churches and public buildings went up; and the first public theaters and opera houses were built. The list of those living and working in Naples for much of the century reads like a Who's Who of Baroque genius in various endeavors from architecture to art, music and philosophy: Domenico Fontana, Caravaggio, Luca Giordano, Carlo Gesualdo, Giambattista Vico, etc.

The most important social/political event of the century and, indeed, a reflection of the profound problems affecting Spain, herself, was The Revolt of Masaniello, but, by and large, the destiny of Naples in what might have been a "Golden Age" was shaped not by corruption, upper-class sloth or mismanagement of money, but by staggering natural calamities and pestilence.

In 1631, Mt. Vesuvius gave vent to a powerful eruption. By all accounts, it was a highly explosive event that rivalled in intensity the famous eruption that doomed Pompeii andHerculaneum in the first century a.d. Sources say that the eruption destroyed most of the towns in the area of Vesuvius. The event was so terrifying that it stoked the creative imaginations of the great painters of the day, primarily Micco Spadaro (name in art ofDomenico Gargiulo, 1610-75). His "Eruption of Vesuvius in 1631" (painting, right) shows the procession of the populace, viceroy, church prelates and aristocracy. They carry the bust of the Patron Saint, Gennaro, in a show of penitence, invoking divine mercy.

Two major earthquakes struck the kingdom of Naples in the 1600s. The quake of 1660 destroyed many towns and villages in Calabria. Closer in to the city —right in the city, to be exact— the earthquake on June 5, 1688, was frightful. People camped out for many days near the Chiaia beach and in the open market squares and near the Maschio Angioino. Due to the risk of buildings collapsing, streets were blocked off, and the city could be crossed only by small carts.

The worst disaster to strike the kingdom and city of Naples in the 1600s was the plague of 1656. The Black Death, of course already had a long and inglorious history in Europe, going back to the original European outbreak in 1347 (presumably traced to China in the 1330s). The population of Europe dropped from 75 million before that outbreak to 50 million afterwards, truly "apocalyptic" in the minds of many chroniclers of the day.

Subsequent outbreaks have not been that devastating, but even "lesser" outbreaks can have severe repercussions on the life of a nation. The outbreak of the disease in Naples occurred in January of 1656 when a Spanish soldier who had arrived from Sardinia, was admitted to the Annunziata hospital. The alarm was sounded by Dr. Giuseppe Bozzutto, who first diagnosed the symptoms. His promptness was not appreciated by the viceroy's government, which decided to imprison the doctor for having spread the news. The plague, however, can quickly spread its own brand of news. When bodies started piling up, when provisions ran low, when people started fleeing the city, the government was forced to admit the outbreak.That was in May. By August, the plague had run its course. It had killed about half the city's 300,000 inhabitants and at least that many again in the rest of the kingdom.

The economic and social effects are obvious: even the people who survived fled the city. No one worked. Even in the countryside, people fled elsewhere; farms went unattended. Law enforcement, in general, was ineffective, and lawlessness spread. Again, Spadaro was on the scene to survive and paint (above) an utterly soul-chilling scene of the Mercatello (the square that is now Piazza Dante). It is truly a scene from Hell. The city of Naples would take almost two centuries to climb back to its pre-plague population.

The Vesuvius Observatory

The observatory —now, officially, the Vesuvius Observatory, Naples Section of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology— is quite visible on the western slopes of Vesuvius. It rests on Colle del Salvatore, a knoll (image, left), putting it out of the range of ejecta and in a position where lava from an eruption will be channeled around the observatory and not through and over it. It is the oldest such institution in Italy and is still an active institution for important research in geophysics and vulcanology. The observatory is responsible for monitoring the volcano it rest upon as well as keeping tabs on other geological happenings in the area, such as those involving the nearby Flegrean Fields and the island of Ischia.

In 1970 the original building was relegated to the role of museum, exhibit hall, and library, and a new building was constructed to meet the needs of modern science. Directors of the observatory have included perhaps the best-known Italian geologist, Giuseppe Mercali (director from 1911-14), among whose achievements was the descriptive system used to classify earthquakes according to perceived effect on the environment (a system since superseded in most places by the Richter and later scales, which measure the amount of energy released by a quake).

This is good to know since hundreds of thousands of people live in the immediate area described as the "Red Zone", the area that will have to be evacuated when (not if) the time comes. A recent report from 32nd World Geological Conference in Florence essentially said that an explosive eruption (not a slow, effusive, what-a-lovely-lava-flow! eruption, but a true explosion) was just a matter of time. The report  described Vesuvius as the world's most dangerous volcano and warned that by 2100, Mount Vesuvius will certainly repeat its most dramatic performance, the infamous eruption of 79 A.D., which buried Pompeii.

Dramatic moments in the history of the Vesuvius observatory have included an episode in 1872 in which director, Luigi Palmieri, stayed at his post during a large eruption in order to make accurate observations. That eruption killed a group of students taken by surprise by a sudden burst from a cone on the northwest slope. Palmieri stayed while the lava flowed dangerously close. He survived and continued to edit his Vesuvius Observatory Annals, a prestigious journal that he founded and edited until his death in 1896. There was a powerful eruption in April, 1906 and one in 1944 (photo), accurately predicted, by the way, by the director at that time, Giuseppe Imbò. He had been responsible for adding the newest scientific tools at the observatory. The institution continues to keep abreast of the latest in geological monitoring techniques in order to prepare as best as possible for whatever dramatic events lie ahead.

Street Food in Naples

The culture of Naples food comes from the poor people that lived the whole day around the city and so the neapolitan cuisine has a lot of food recipes perfect to be eaten on the street.

Are you in Naples and you want to know where to eat the true Neapolitan Street Food? Only in Naples you can taste the best pizza in the world eaten on your way, and feel like a real Neapolitan.

Naples offers a variety of historical pizzerias where you can enjoy a fried pizza, or try the pizza “a portafoglio“. The pizza a portafoglio is a pizza folded in on itself and thus eaten on your way.

You can find theese and other recipes in our list of the best places to eat street food in Naples.

https://www.visitnaples.eu/en/where-to-eat/street-food-in-naples

The Persano Horse

Persano is also well-known as the home of the Royal Stud. (That is not a reference to Charles III, the first Bourbon king of Naples, although he did sire 16 children!? Perhaps Royal Horse Breeding Facility, or something like that, is more appropriate.) It was the home of the Persano horse, a breed created to look like the Anglo-Arabian horse and created by crossing Andalusians, Arabians, Persians and Mecklenburgers. The stud farm at Persano was started in 1742. *note The Persano breeding herd was largely neglected following the unification of Italy; indeed, in 1874 breeding of the Persano was officially abandoned and remnants of the species were sold at auction. In 1900 the breed was reconstituted to a certain extent according to the needs of the Italian cavalry. The claim is made that horses of this breed were part of the last successful cavalry charge in modern warfare when the Italian cavalry employed them against Soviet infantry near Isbushensky in WWII in August of 1942.

Throughout WW II Persano remained one of the two facilities in Italy that raised and provided war horses to the Italian army. In 1972 the breeding facility at Persano was closed definitively and the remaining 246 horses were transferred to the other facility, the Italian Military Veterinary Center in Grosseto in Tuscany. That center supplies horses, including the Persano (now also known as the governativa--government--breed) to ceremonial as well as working mounted units of the Italian armed forces. Nevertheless, the status of the Persano breed was listed in 2007 as critical by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. There are, however, a number of private stables in the area of Persano that maintain some of the horses and there is intense interest in saving the breed.

*Note: (Horse breeding in the area had an earlier history under the Spanish rule of the kingdom--indeed, well before that. There are literary references even in Boccaccio's Decameron to the quality of horses bred in Naples. And In "Characterization, conservation and sustainability of endangered animal breeds in Campania (Southern Italy)" in V. Peretti et al. / Natural Science 5 (2013) 1-9, we read:

Campania felix, the plain that stretched from the Volturno and Sarno rivers, currently corresponding to part of Caserta and Naples provinces, has always been, because of its specific climatic and geo-pedological [the study of soil] characteristics, a suitable area for horse-breeding. In fact, the Etruscans had already chosen this area to establish their horse herds, inland from the Greek settlements of the Phlegrean coast, in Capua, where later the Romans raised the best examples of horses for the imperial court...

 The Historic Center of Naples - Map & Tour

1. Palazzo dei Congregazioni

2. Church of Gesù Nuovo

3. Santa Chiara Church and Monastery

4. Church of Santa Marta

5. Palazzo Filomarino

6. Palazzo Mazziotti

7. Palazzo Venezia

8. Palazzo Tufarelli

9. Palazzo Carafa della Spina

10. Palazzo Pinelli

11. Palazzo Petrucci

12. San Domenica Maggiore

13. Capella Sansevero

14. Palazzo Sansevero

15. Palazzo Corigliano

16. Palazzo Casacalenda

17. Church of Sant'Angelo a Nilo

18. Palazzo Pignatelli

19. Statue of the Nile

20. Palazzo di Parnormita

21. Palazzo Carafa di Montorio

22. Palazzo Carafa Santangelo

23. Church of S. Nicola a Nilo

24. Church of Ss. Phillip & James

25. Monte di Pietà

26. Palazzo Marigliano

27. Monastery of S. Gregorio Armeno

28. Excavations: S. Lorenzo Maggiore

29. Church of S. Lorenzo Maggiore

30. Pio Monte della Misericordia 31. Monastery of the Girolamini

The Cathedral (Duomo) is opposite n. 31

32. Palazzo de Scorciatis

33. Church of S. Paolo Maggiore

34. Palazzo D'Angiò

35. Church of Purgatorio ad Arco

36. Palazzo Spinelli di Laurino

37. The Pontano Chapel

38. S. Maria Maggiore and belfry

39. Church of Croce di Lucca

40. Church of S. Pietro a Maiella

41. Music Conservatory

42. Church of S. Antonio

43. Greek Wall  (Piazza Bellini)

The Greco-Roman city of Naples was contained within city walls, approximately bounding the area shown in the map above. Today that area is commonly called "The Historic Center." Two of the three main east-west streets of the ancient city are today called Via Tribunali and Via B. Croce/Via S. Biagio dei Librai and are visible on the map. The section immediately below deals with Via B. Croce/Via S. Biagio dei Librai, the so-called Lower Decumanus of the ancient city. Following that, there is a description of the main Decumanus, via Tribunali. To skip to that section, click here.)

Via B. Croce/Via S. Biagio dei Librai is still one of the most interesting streets in the entire city. Although today it changes names every few blocks, it is, in effect  still the single straight street it was 2,500 years ago, a thoroughfare which divides the city, so to speak, in half, which fact has given it the popular name of 

Spaccanapoli, Naples-Splitter.

 When the city was enlarged towards the west, the original decumanus was extended as far as the hill of S. Martino, and it is from this vantage point looking down at "Spaccanapoli" that the effect of this division is most striking. Along this straight line are many of the most noteworthy monuments in the city, some of which are dealt with in detail elsewhere on this website. At the beginning of the original decumanus, starting at Piazza del Gesù Nuovo (image, left) at the site of the Spire of the Immaculate Virgin, the Church of Gesù Nuovo (Palazzo Sanseverino, number 2 on the map), and the Church and Monastery of Santa Chiara  (number 3 on the map) and heading east, you immediately cross a street named via Costantinopoli, built along the line of the original Greek west wall of the city.

Into the old city now, you pass the Filomarino Palace (#5) , which retains in its structure traces of the numerous renovations undergone during the centuries. The portal is by Sanfelice, and it is here that Italy's greatest modern historian and philosopher, Benedetto Croce, lived and worked. Further on, at  Piazza San Domico Maggiore is the Church of the same name. The church has been altered several times and has lost its original 14th century appearance, but it still retains the Gothic doorway and wooden door. Attached to the church was the convent which the Dominicans transformed into a center of study and culture and where Thomas Aquinas taught. Inside the church is the 13th century crucifix that tradition says spoke to Aquinas.

Immediately after Piazza San Domenico Maggiore is the small Piazzetta del Nilo. Here was the Alexandrian "Egyptian" quarter of Greek Naples and the ancient statute of the river Nile, venerated by the Alexandrians, is still to be found there. Here is where the ancient Temple to Isis probably stood. The modern street now takes the  name of via S. Biagio dei Librai (book-shops); as you continue, the Palazzo Santangelo is on the right, erected by Diomede Carafa in the middle of the 15th century. It is one of the most interesting Renaissance buildings in Naples, containing elements of Florentine architecture mixed with others of Catalan derivation.

The decumanus now crosses  via San Gregorio Armeno, famous for the  church of that name (# 27 on map). It  is one of the oldest in Naples, built on the site of the ancient Temple to Ceres. For centuries the street has been well known for the figurari who have their workshops here. These are the artisans who construct the small figures and models for traditional Neapolitan Manger scenes at Christmas. Spaccanapoli then crosses via Duomo, just south of the Cathedral  (Duomo) (opposite n. 31 on the map) and finishes shortly thereafter as it passes the line of the old Greek east wall.

Via dei Tribunali

 You can enter the main east-west street of the Historic Center of Naples from Piazza Bellini (see #43 on the map). A few yards south of the excavated ruins of the old Greek wall is the Naples Music Conservatory (#41 on the map). Conservatories, themselves, go back to the mid-1500s in Naples, when the Spanish opened a number of them in the city on the premises of various monasteries. The location of this particular conservatory is the result of a consolidation undertaken in the early 1800s under Murat. It is actually housed on the grounds of what used to be the monastic courtyard of the adjacent church, San Pietro a Maiella. This is the approximate location of a gate in the western wall of the original city.

As noted in the short description of that church on this website (click here) the church (image, right) was dedicated to the monk Pietro da Morone, who became Pope Celestine V in 1294. Pope Celestine V subsequently became the only Pope to abdicate, an event that also took place in Naples, in the Maschio Angioino, the Angevin Fortress. At least in Dante's version of the afterlife, Celestine resides in Hell. The Divine Comedy places him just past the gates of Hell among the Opportunists --(in John Ciardi's translation)-- "...the nearly soulless whose lives concluded neither blame nor praise...[and in reference to Celestine]...I recognized the shadow of that soul who, in his cowardice, made the Grand Denial...". (To play the Pope's advocate, I remind you that Dante was really upset at the fact the Celestine, by quitting, left the door open to the subsequent Pope, Boniface VIII, corrupt and, in Dante's view, responsible for much of the evils that befell Dante's city of Florence.)

Farther along on the left as you leave the church of San Pietro a Maiella is the church, Chiesa della Croce di Lucca, originally (in the first decade of the 1600s) part of a larger monastic complex. The construction of the main University Hospital on that location made it necessary to tear down much of what was on that site.

Beyond that on the left are the Church of S. Maria Maggiore and The Pontano Chapel (#37 and 38, respectively, on the map). The Pontano Chapel was built in 1492 at the behest of Giovanni Gioviano Pontano, the most celebrated Neapolitan humanist of the day and often referred to as the last great poet in the Latin language. He was an early member of The Academy, a group of scholars founded in Naples under the Aragonese dynasty. Because of his great influence, the group became known as the Pontanian Academy. 

Adjacent to that chapel is Church of S. Maria Maggiore. It was built in 533 and is one of the Paleo-Christian churches in Naples (click here for a related item). It is on the site of an earlier temple dedicated to Diana. The remarkable red-brick belfry on the grounds is the oldest free-standing tower of its kind in Naples. It was part of the original church complex, though built later (c. 900 AD). The base of the tower incorporates earlier Roman bits and pieces as construction material, some of which are said to be part of the earlier temple. The more modern appearance of the church is due to the reconstruction of 1653.

Just beyond the Palazzo Spinelli di Laurino (#36 on the map) and also on the right is a building that often goes unnoticed. If you stand back and look at it, you see that it is one very long structure, extending almost all the way to the next intersection. The unity of the building is hard to see at first, broken up, as it is, by numerous small stalls and businesses behind the row of arches that fronts the street. It has also been sub- and resubdivided into many private residences on the floors above. However, it is, indeed, a single building, built in the mid-1300s to be the residence of Phillip II of Valois (also 'of' Taranto and 'of' Anjou) brother of the Angevin King of Naples at the time, Robert. The building still bears the impressive title of Palace of the Emperor of Constantinople, from the fact that Phillip married Caterina di Valois, who had inherited that title from her father. The presumption in the title bears no relation to real life in the mid-1300s; Neither Phillip, nor his wife, nor her father ever ruled Constantinople.

Across the street from that huge building is a small church (#35 on the map), the Church of Purgatorio del Arco, notable for the various examples of the "memento mori" --decorative skulls and bones and other such "reminders of death" built into the facade as admonitions to worry about the hereafter. They were put there in the early 1600s by architect Cosimo Fanzago. Such was the obsession of the congregation with souls in Purgatory that, at one time, 150 masses a day were held.

Just before you get to the large Church of S. Paolo Maggiore you can turn in to the left and take a tour of Underground Naples. You will descend into the Roman aqueduct system that supplied the ancient city. 

Via Tribulali now crosses Via San Gregorio Armeno (described in the last paragraph of the section, above, about the lower Decumanus). This is the main crossroad of the ancient city. The Church of S. Paolo Maggiore  (#33 on the map) is the most prominent building. Across the street are the Church of San Lorenzo Maggiore (#29) and, below that, the  Excavations of  S. Lorenzo Maggiore, the only large-scale excavation of the ancient city that lies beneath the surface of modern Naples.

Continuing east in Via dei Tribunali leads you past a large white church on the left. It is the church of S. Fillipo Neri of the Gerolamini order. The Neapolitan philosopher, Giambattista Vico, lived at number 112 in the square in front of the church from 1704-18, and his remains are interred within the church, itself.

Continuing beyond that crossing along Via dei Tribunali will lead you to Via Duomo, near the Naples Cathedral.

Aragonese Naples

 "I wonder how they got in!" people would say. It had worked for the Greeks against the Trojans and it had even come off once before in this very city of Naples back in the 6th century when the Byzantine general, Belisarius, sneaked his men past the city walls through an aqueduct. Now it was going to work again; Alfonso of Aragon's (13961458) cohorts within the city opened the passage and let the invaders in. And just as under Belisarius, the subsequent sacking and pillaging was atrocious, but Naples was now rejoined to Sicily, unifying the kingdom for the first time in two hundred years. Afterwards, Alfonso went back outside so he could enter the city officially on February 26, 1443 in a golden chariot and sheltered by a canopy held by 30 disgruntled Neapolitan noblemen. That entry is memorialized in the Aragonese victory arch over the entrance to the Maschio Angioino, the Angevin Fortress (pictured below, right). It was a task the nobles did not like, for a king they did not like, at the beginning of a dynasty they would not like. Shortly thereafter, Alfonso left his Spanish holdings to his brother back home and dedicated himself full-time to his own Aragonese dynasty in Italy. (Technically, the kingdom of Naples was part of the Crown of Aragon, a little-remembered term. It was a loosely connected  and vast sea-faring confederation united by allegiance to the king of Aragon. It was short-lived (because the nation state of "Spain" was about to form by the fusion of the houses of Aragon and Castile). (See image, below. Note that the Crown of Aragon extended even into Greece.)   

Neapolitans always considered Alfonso (image, above) a foreigner, particularly because of his habit of surrounding himself with only his own countrymen and giving them the choice positions at court. Apparently, towards the end of his life he changed his mind about this and passed on to his son, Ferrante, a few bits of advice: avoid the Spanish, lower the taxes and keep on good terms with the princes in Italy, especially the Popes. Alfonso was regarded as a cultured person; he founded an excellent library, and artists, poets, philosophers and scholars were an integral part of his court. In the field with his troops, he lived the same life as his men and  exposed himself to danger in battle with no regard for his own personal safety. They say he also went among the common people incognito to find out how things were going. He liked to listen rather than talk and claimed to be a simple person, once saying he would have been a hermit if he had had his choice in life.

 Because of his patronage of the arts he became known as Alfonso the Magnanimous. He also started the total rebuilding of the Angevin Fortress, fallen into ruin since its completion in the late 1200s; he paved the streets of the city, cleaned out the swamps and greatly enlarged the wool industry that had been introduced by the Angevins. In spite of his pretensions to simplicity, he was addicted to splendor. At a Neapolitan reception for Frederick III of Germany, the order of the day to all the artisans in the Kingdom was to give Frederick's men whatever they wanted and send Alfonso the bill. Then they all went hunting in the great crater known as the "Astroni" in the Phlegrean Fields and had a banquet at which wine flowed down the slopes and into the fountains for the guests. Parties, however, did not prevent Alfonso, by the time of his death in 1458, from also having developed the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies into the foremost naval power in the western Mediterranean.

Alfonso's illegitimate son, Ferrante, succeeded him (as Ferdinand I) and, in spite of extreme hostility on the part of the feudal lords in the kingdom (part of which included a long war called the "Barons' Revolt), succeeded in strengthening the monarchy at their expense. He also drove the Angevin fleet from Ischia, their last stronghold in the area. Ferrante countered baronial hostility most violently. To show the barons that feudalism was truly dead he made a lot of them dead, by doing things such as inviting them to weddings and then arresting, jailing and executing a number of them. They say that some were fed to a crocodile that prowled the dungeon. (A skeleton of one such reptile hung over the arch in the Castle until quite recently.) He even mummified some of his late enemies and kept them on display in the dungeon of the Castelnuovo (the alternate name for the Maschio Angioino, meaning, simply "New Castle", thus distinguishing it from the older Castel dell'Ovo, the Egg Castle).

A sigh of relief went up from the landholding class when Ferrante died in 1494 after 28 years on the throne. It had been a time of intrigue which included on-again/off-again relations with the Church and even a short-lived treaty with the feared Turks who were raiding up and down the Italian coasts. The point of the treaty had been to warn the rest of Italy to the north not to take the Kingdom of Naples for granted. (The Ottoman Turks had just overrun the Byzantine Empire and were threatening Rome, itself.)

The French reappeared with designs on the throne of Naples. Under Ferrante's successor, Neapolitan resistance to the French was utterly ineffective and the French, under Charles VIII,  took the city virtually unopposed; indeed, they were welcomed by most of the nobility, who sensed a chance to recoup their losses. Their toadying didn't work. The French pillaged the city, anyway, and dispossessed a number of the nobles. Charles, however, suddenly found himself cut off: The Papal State, Milano, and Venice—which had just let Charles pass through unhindered on the way to Naples—suddenly formed an alliance behind and against him. Charles had to fight his way back home, attempting along the way, and failing, to bribe the Pope into crowning him King of Naples. The jibe by historians is that the French brought two things back from their Italian campaign: the Renaissance and syphilis, one of which history has dubbed morbus gallicus in their honor.

France then tried something else: the proposal of an Alliance to Ferdinand of Spain against Spain's own Aragonese relatives in Naples, by virtue of which the Kingdom of Two Sicilies would cease to exist and be divided between Ferdinand and Charles. This would effectively give them both one less rival realm in the area, as well as squelch the heresy that it wasn't nice to carve up one's own cousins. Ferdinand went for it and even Machiavelli, himself, later said that Ferdinand had certainly needed no lessons from anyone in ruthless princemanship. The pact of Granada was signed on 11 November 1500; the Kingdom was to be divided, with the capital, Naples, going to France. The French reentered Naples in July 1501. It now seemed, however, that both France and Spain had had their fingers crossed at the signing of the original treaty, so they had a war over it and Spain won. In May 1504 Spanish troops evicted the French and entered Naples, ending the Aragonese dynasty. The Kingdom, intact, became a colony of Spain.

Naples was now no longer the capital of its own realm. In a few year's time, with Charles V of Spain crowned Holy Roman Emperor, heir to the Caesars and Charlemagne, it would be part of an empire as it had been more than a thousand years earlier. True, the East had fallen and what was left of Christian Empire was all in the West, but after 1492 'West' meant something monumentally different in human history. The Empire had shifted, spreading from Europe to the Americas and on to the Pacific. The age of Empires on which "the sun never sets" had arrived.  

A book for the summer: Secret Naples

Valerio Ceva Grimaldi- Maria Franchini

Jonglez

Naples is secret even when it is manifest, let alone in its most cursed, metropolitan, dirty places. But it is always a dirt that adds civilization to civilization, a "filth" that ennobles man. Naples is almost 3000 years old: imagine how many things you saw? And so how many things do you know, know, want, satisfy, show?

Ladies and gentlemen: Naples, the best sex you can do!

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Renoir was a French painter and a leader in the development of the Impressionist style. Six of his paintings hung in the First Impressionist Exhibition in April, 1874, in Paris. Other than that, Renoir certainly needs no introduction from me. I note simply that he traveled in Italy between 1881 and 1883. In Naples he visited the National Museum and the ruins of Pompeii, later making mention of his admiration for the frescoes there.

In 1881, he painted the work shown above: The Bay of Naples (Morning), a work that shows why the phrase “sparkling color” crops up in so many descriptions of Renoir's works. Here, even the centerpiece of Vesuvius is reduced to a secondary role by the “impression” of sparkle, even glare. (Your eyes should start to hurt if you look at this too long, exactly as they would if you stood at the spot in person and stared out at the bay.) When I first looked at it, I thought it had been painted from the area along the sea approximately where the Villa Comunale ends and before you get to Mergellina. I wondered why the Castel dell’Ovo was missing —maybe artistic license since castles are notorious for not being “sparkley,” no matter how hard they try. Then it occurred to me that the coast road I was thinking of, via Caracciolo, didn't exist until 1900. The view was probably painted from farther east, the old Santa Lucia road. (That road still exists but no longer has the unobstructed view of the bay it had in 1880.) That would also let Renoir off the hook for leaving the Castel dell'Ovo out of the picture; it would have been behind him.

Vittoria Colonna

Michelangelo's sketch of V. ColonnaMaybe I should be upset at the good folks at the fine New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia, one of the great on-line reference works. They have listed the Italian poet (dare I say "poetess"?) Vittoria Colonna as Vittorio Colonna. Vittori-O is a man's name. Vittori-A is the feminine form —you know, the weaker vessel. If it's just a typo, ok, get Attila the Nun to whack the proof-reader across the knuckles with a ruler. Or —this is perhaps a bit too clever—maybe it's sneaky obeisance to Michelangelo's poem to Vittoria that starts,

Un uomo in una donna, anzi uno dio,

in which the Renaissance master says that Vittoria is not only as good as a man, but as good even as a god. Heady praise, indeed, coming from the man. (Michelangelo's sketch of her is shown here, left.)

In any event, Victoria (in English) Colonna was born in 1492 and died in 1547. In the meantime, she made the friendship of Michelangelo, Ariosto, Sannazzaro, Aretino, and others, composing along the way a body of poetry that would one day have her hailed as the "first great woman poet in the Italian language."

 Ferrante Francesco d'AvalosAlso along the way, she married Ferrante Francesco d'Avalos  (painting, right) in 1509, Marquis of Pescara, a Neapolitan nobleman of Spanish origin, who was one of the chief generals of  Emperor Charles V. Vittoria and Ferrante were married in the fine Aragonese castle on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples and lived there for a number of years.

Ferrante was one of Charles V's generals at the great battle of Pavia in 1525, the climax of decades of war between France and the Holy Roman Empire for control of the Italian peninsula. The battle proved to be the last stand for knights in shining armor, as the French knights were annihilated by the new harquebus design of hand-held firearm used by Imperial forces. During the battle 3000 harquebusiers killed over 8000 French armored cavalrymen.

Ferrante was then involved in an anti-imperial conspiracy that might have wrested the Spanish vicerealm of Naples away from Spain and put himself on the throne of Naples with Vittoria as his queen. We'll never know, since (1) he died from the wounds incurred at Pavia, and (2) he is said to have given up the idea because his Vittoria told him that she would rather be the wife of an upright general than the consort of a king who had backstabbed his way to the throne.

After Ferrante's death, Vittoria went into religious seclusion and wrote poetry to her dead husband. English translations of much of her poetry are available. Here is one prose translation by George R. Kay. It is in his Penguin Book of Italian Verse (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1958):

Vivo su questo scoglio orrido e solo,

quasi dolente augel che 'l verde ramo

e l'acqua pura abborre; e a quelli ch'amo

nel mondo ed a me stessa ancor m'involo,

perchè espedito al sol che adoro e colo

vada il pensiero. E sebben quanto bramo

l'ali non spiega, pur quando io 'l richiamo

volge dall'altre strade a questa il volo.

"I live upon this fearful, lonely rock, like a sorrowing bird that shuns green branch and clear water; and I take myself away from those I love in this world and from my very self, so that my thoughts may go speedily to him, the sun I adore and worship. And although they do not try their wings as much as I wish, yet when I call them back, they turn their flight from other paths to this one."

The same people (the New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia) that called her "Vittori-O" says that she was "undoubtedly greater as a personality than as a poet." I disagree. They can't even get her name right.

Quite recently, an unknown booklet of lyric poetry by Vittoria was found at the Vatican. The booklet includes 109 compositions. The discovery was made by researcher Fabio Carboni, who describes the finding in an essay published in Aevum, the review of the historical, linguistic and philological sciences of the Humanities Department of the Catholic University of Milan. 

Giambattista Della Porta 

One hundred years ago, the Neapolitan historian and philosopher, Benedetto Croce, wandered up to the hilly part of Naples, an area called the "high Vomero", specifically to the "Due Porte"—the two gates (entrances to caverns) to see what was left of the premises where one of the first scientific societies in European history had convened centuries earlier. That is, by 1580, well before the Academy of the Lynxes or the Royal Society of London, Giambattista Della Porta's Academia Secretorum Naturae was meeting to uncover the "secrets of nature". They nicknamed themselves the Otiosi (Men of Leisure), and in order to join you had to have contributed a new discovery or fact in natural science. (Later in life, Della Porta helped establish the Academy of the Lynxes, which counted Galileo as its most illustrious member.)

In the days of Della Porta, Naples was in the middle of the great Spanish rebuilding of the city under viceroy Toledo, but the city didn't even have a population of 200,000 (nevertheless, large for the time). This part of the "high Vomero" was, indeed, a hamlet near Naples, known as the area of the washerwomen and of one particularly nasty witch. When Croce visited the place, it was still far enough outside of town to count as a pleasant holiday retreat in the summer—a good view from the hillside (about 1000 feet) fresh air, no traffic. He found and described the ruins of what was left of this One-Man Renaissance Manhattan Project. He lamented that little remained.* Yet, there was much more than today; traffic and the post-WW2 building plague have pretty much done in any claim to being "bucolic". On the plus side, the concrete apartment house that now stands over the old inner sanctum isn't far from a stop on the new metro line. (That's bogus, too. I've just walked it and it's still hard to get to. The perfect place for secrecy.) [See also: Urban Expansion of the Vomero.]

[BUT! — later comment from June 2014 — Selene Salvi of Naples Underground points out to me that there is considerable controversy about whether or not the site referred to in this entry is, indeed, the meeting place of Della Porta's Academy of the Secrets. The assumption that the area Due Porte is somehow, itself, related to the name Della Porta is almost certainly wrong. There really are two entrances.  Also, there are sources from the 1700s that, while acknowledging the widely-held view that "up here somewhere" is where Della Porta had his Academy, no one seems to know where it was.  The name Della Porta did not appear to be connected, even historically, to any of the known villas. Item #2, below, sheds some light on what else the site might have been.]

*note: Selene also informs me that the Croce expedition to the purported Della Porta site is recounted in Vita di Pietro Giannone scritta da lui medesimo, edited by Fausto Nicolini, Naples, Pierro, 1905.

In his first famous publication, Magia naturalis [Natural Magic], Della Porta indicated what "magic" meant to him in those days: "I think magic is nothing less than a survey of the whole course of nature." That is the Renaissance context in which moderns must understand the word: everything in the universe is connected and a Renaissance Man must study—and at least try to know—everything. In those days, that meant writing:

—the massive (20 volumes) Magia naturalis (Natural Magic) (written and expanded

upon from 1558 to 1584);

—miscellaneous works on astronomy, chemistry, optics, hydraulics, architecture,

mathematics, and how to improve your memory;

—an agricultural encyclopedia;

—a description of a potential steam engine;

—14 prose comedies and 2 dramatic tragedies.

Della Porta also started a private museum of natural science, full of specimens collected during his wide-ranging travels in Europe; it was an important innovation and became an imitated prototype. He also claimed to have beaten his younger contemporary, Galileo, to the telescope. (Be that as it may, one thing is certain: Della Porta got into Galileo-type trouble with the watchdogs of the Roman Inquisition* for his "secret academy". The Inquisition closed it down in 1578, and Della Porta's works were banned from publication between 1594-98.) In his spare time (!), he published De Furtivis Literarum Notis, a work on cryptography, admired even in modern times. 

*[The Roman Inquisition is not to be confused with the Medieval Inquisition or the Spanish Inquisition. See those links.)

Recent archaeology has revealed such items within the ruins of 

   Della Porta's" academy of secrets" as this  fresco of  the Egyptian 

    God, Set, and Isis (on the left) nursing the infant Horus.

photo: Napoli Underground (NUg)

(see item 4, below)

 Giambattista Della Porta was born in the village of Vico Equense on the Sorrentine peninsula and was well educated at home by his father and private tutors. His father was in the service of Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. From all accounts, Giambattista was a prodigy; he may have written the first four books of Natural Magic when he was 15 years old. The entire work was virtually a compendium of science since the time of the ancients down through Della Porta's own day; it covered geology, cosmology, plant products, medicines, poisons, distillation, the magnet and its properties, gunpowders, and ciphers. It also covered things such as demonology, astrology, occult philosophy, women's cosmetics, and transmutation of metals, none of which are considered particularly scientific today, but in the late 1500s everything was fair game. (Indeed, a glorious age!) In short, whatever you wanted to know, Della Porta had written about it or was in the process of doing so. It was an immediate best seller and was translated almost immediately from the original Latin into Italian, French and German; an English translation was published in the 1650s. Even in Latin, however, the work was accessible to all European scholars when it was written.

Della Porta lived in a strange time—the tail-end of the age of "pre-science". To put things in perspective, young Giambattista's father remembered (!) Leonardo Da Vinci. Della Porta worked a generation before Galileo and Bacon (both inspired by Della Porta's tenacious will to investigate nature), a half century before Kepler and Descartes, and a full century before Newton. It was an age that still clung to the Renaissance vision that one good person with drive, time, and a very large brain could learn everything there was to know. He mixed valid work in optics and botany (two of many examples) with nonsense about fortune-telling and the "philosophers' stone". He also soft-pedaled his brash curiosity when the Inquisition told him to. But even Galileo did that.

Della Porta joined the Jesuit order towards the end of his life. That disqualifies him, in the minds on many, as being counted as an early scientific rebel like Galileo. And maybe he wasn't. Maybe he was just a man who wanted to "survey the whole course of nature". That has to count for something. He was interred in the family tomb within the church of San Lorenzo in Naples.

[Significant and recent archaeology on the premises of the Academia Secretorum Naturae has been done by the organization, Naples Underground. See this link.]

[Dec. 2009 update: Larry Ray, who writes English-language material for Naples Underground, has written and posted an article on the "Academy of the Secrets" at this link.]

[Also see Academies of the Middle Ages]

(2)

update May 2014:  Fulvio Salvi of Napoli Underground (NUg — the second link directly above) has suggested an alternative to the traditional view that the site in Naples was Della Porta's academy. Below is my translation of his article that appears on the NUg website. Used here by kind concession.

Academy of the Secrets—or “simply” a Garden?

by Fulvio Salvi  

photo courtesy of NUg             

 About 25 years ago two geologist friends and I were hunting around on the slopes of the street named Due Porte all'Arenella in an attempt to pinpoint the locations of some caverns that historical sources place in that area. I came across a small grotto that at first left me perplexed. There were three spaces connected by tunnels and corridors; on their surfaces you could still see frescoed plaster, reconstructed columns, semi-cylindrical niches and traces of engraved plaques.

It had all been altered in some way. You could still make out part of the fresco representing three subjects: a woman seated on a bench holding a child in her lap, and a human figure with a damaged face holding out a tray of offerings to her (photo in the main entry, directly above this one). Very probably the artist had intended to depict in Egyptian fashion the goddess Isis nursing Horus. In the same space (a corridor about ten meters long) on the side walls, the plaster had been frescoed to simulate opus reticulatum [a Roman reticulated pattern of diamond-shaped bricks]; there were also four or five semi-cylindrical niches that were empty but led us to believe that they had once held statuary or similar. At the end of this passageway was a single wooden door that led to the outside. We later discovered that this was the bottom entrance to the grotto.

The next chamber (the first room) was jammed with building materials; the walls were covered with panels that hid the surface of the wall in back. In any event, you could see a circular column in the room inscribed with an elongated numeral 8 like a kind of infinity symbol except that it was vertical. A low tunnel led from this room into a second space. The entrance to the tunnel had also been shaped to resemble a large numeral 8.

After a couple of meters the tunnel came out in the second room; the walls still had traces of frescoed plaster but the images were so degraded that you couldn't make out what they were meant to be. In this space there were two fake columns (made of brick and plaster); one was circular, the other was square. There was a horizontal niche on one wall that originally must have been sealed by a plaque, traces of which were still visible. The back wall was of brick and irregular-shaped tufa blocks; a series of openings (a door at the bottom and some spaces for oil lamps higher up) gave the impression that it was meant to represent a face or perhaps a skull (photo, above. Courtesy of NUg). This last wall separated this space from a small parking space behind; it was of recent manufacture and belonged to the building on the surface above. Yet another short passage led to a third room almost totally filled with dumped earth, probably hauled in from a well on the surface. There was a hole high up on on the side of the second room that led to a narrow and steep stairway made of brick that, in turn, led to a garden on the surface. It had been from these stairs and then by lowering ourselves from the hole in the wall that we first gained entrance to this underground chamber.

Obviously, we were amazed at first glance by all of this. We had explored hundreds of spaces beneath Naples, but this was the first time that we had found something like this! We made sketches and took some photos of the grotto. With these in hand we tried to attract the interest of the Superintendency of Naples, but to no avail. Given the difficult access (we had got in only by lowering ourselves through a hole in the wall) and the fact that this particular space really wasn't part of our original research plans, we put it off for another few years.

Another decade passed and I found myself talking with engineer Clemente Esposito (a veteran of Neapolitan speleology) about how the whole thing had sort of gone back into oblivion. Thanks to his insistence and that of my daughter, Selene, I contacted the owner of the property to get permission to enter the premises once again. We reached an agreement. Thus, years later we went back into the grotto, this time by the more comfortable lower entrance. Everything was as it was when we had seen it for the first time. We took more photos and made a video. But the question remained: What could this space have been that no one seemed to know anything about and only old-timers in the area still knew as the teatrino (little theater)?

The Dessau-Wörlitz Garden Kingdom in Germany           

photo: Doris Antony            

 Esposito was of the opinion that the cavern might have been the laboratories of Giambattista Della Porta, a secret place where meetings of his famous Academy of the Secrets were held. The residential quarters that surrounded the grotto must have been the summer homes of the Della Porta family. 

But was it really? Or was it rather nothing more than a sophisticated and fascinating garden structure, part of the property of the ancient casale [a large country estate] that we find on the Duke of Noja map, perhaps torn down in order to make room for more modern cement buildings?

In the 1700s and 1800s a number of aristocratic villas and royal residences in Naples took up the fashion of building those famous “English landcape gardens” that had so much success elsewhere in Europe. I am thinking, among the many examples, of the Capodimonte Wood with its fake dovecotes near the so-called Grottoes of  Maria Cristina di Savoia, and of the fake ruins within the grounds of the Villa Floridiana, or the gardens of the Caserta Palace, or the villa Heigelin (known as the “English villa”), where the gardens, rich with grottoes, ruins and statuary, contained a true Masonic path laden with esoteric symbols. The rest of Italy had its own examples. Among the many, there was the hypogeum [underground chamber] of villa Francescati in Verona, the vaulted entrance of which is so similar to the one at Arenella. Further, there is the curious structure of the Dessau-Wörlitz Gartenreich (Garden Kingdom) in Germany (photo above, right), considered the first English park built in continental Europe in the 1700s. It holds a “stone island” and next to that a reconstruction of William Hamilton's villa at Posillipo in Naples. The stones were meant to simulate the pyrotechnical results of a fanciful eruption of Vesuvius! Here, too, there is a vault with wide-open eyes and mouth, similar to the Neapolitan hypogeum... did Naples take the idea from Germany...or perhaps the other way round?

[translator's note: It certainly was the other way round. Wörlitz Lake in the Garden Kingdom (photo, above), near Magdeburg in Germany, features Europe’s only artificial volcano. When Leopold III (1740-1817) of Anhalt-Dessau went on a grand tour of Europe in the 1760s, he visited Naples and saw a smouldering Mount Vesuvius. Twenty-two years later, he set about building a bit of Naples in Germany. The inner brick building is five stories high and covered with local boulders. At the top, a hollow cone was made and contained a high chamber, complete with three fireplaces and a roof with an artificial crater that could be filled with water. He then constructed a lake around the volcano. Artificial eruptions were a regular garden feature; that feature has been revived in recent years.]

Naples Under the Double Eagle

 The great Spanish Empire founded shortly after the discovery of the New World came to an end in the year 1700 when Charles II of Spain died without an heir. He was a Hapsburg, but willed his throne to the grandson of the French King, Louis XIV, of the House of Bourbon. This potential fusion of Spain and France into a single dynasty so threatened the balance of European power that virtually all of Europe took up arms in the War of the Spanish Succession, a term so dry that it rather sounds like a description of gentleman barristers dickering over the Rule of Perpetuities. It was, however, as wars go, the real deal, the first widespread European conflict among modern rival nation states, true kin to the Napoleonic Wars of a century later and the aptly named World Wars of our own times. 

Naples, as a Spanish possession, was affected by the War of the Spanish Succession. While the war raged from 1700-1713 in northern Europe, Naples fell under the domination of the Austrians when that state successfully moved to take over Spanish territory in Italy. Naples, meaning all of southern Italy, thus became an Austrian dominion, ruled by the Hapsburgs of distant Vienna through a succession of Austrian viceroys stationed in Naples. That state of affairs lasted until the Austrians, as part of the treaty ending the War of the Polish Succession, ceded Naples to Charles III of Spain in 1734, at which time Naples became a sovereign kingdom of its own. 

 The period from 1700-1734 is somewhat neglected in the history of Naples. (There is, however, a statue in Piazza Monteoliveto (photo, left) of the above-mentioned Charles II, the last Hapsburg king of the Spanish Empire. He was known as the "Reuccio," meaning the "Little King," so dubbed because he ascended the throne at the age of four.)  Compared to the great Spanish period before and the equally great Bourbon period afterwards, the few years under Austria are, perhaps, less important, yet not insignificant; they produced interesting social changes and were a time of great art, music and philosophy in Naples. 

Naples in the year 1700 was almost dead in the water. Spanish rule, innovative and dynamic in the 1500s and early 1600s, had become harsh and corrupt in its last decades, and the city of Naples, itself, had just been through the mother of all wringers—the plague. The ferocious pestilences of 1656 and 1691 had reduced the population of the city from 450,000 to 140,000, and by the first decade of the 1700s Naples still had only about 200,000 inhabitants. It was a loss that crippled the working and merchant classes; sketches of the layout of the city in the early 1700s look the same as half–a–century earlier—no new buildings, no new streets. There had been no growth. 

This, then, was the Naples that the Austrians inherited when they entered the city in 1707. The plight was aggravated by two factors that had traditionally been another sort of plague in Naples. One was baronial power, a feudal system of local lords wielding virtually independent power throughout the kingdom, paying but lip service to the central authority of the king. The second problem was land grabbing by the Church within the city. Some estimates set the number of clergy in the city as high as 16,000 in the early 1700s, which would make one out of every 15 persons a cleric! That many clergy needed a lot of land and even a brief trip through the Naples of today sheds light on the problem of three centuries ago: a faithful church-goer in Naples can change houses of worship once a week and probably run out of Sundays before Naples runs out of churches. Early Austrian critics of the church/state relationship in Naples spoke of a "church–state within a state," a situation made worse by the centuries-old tradition of sanctuary—the premises of a church and even the surrounding area becoming ‘safe houses’ and havens for outlaws. Entire quarters of Naples were, thus, off–limits to the authorities. 

In their brief time in Naples, the Austrian viceroys at least held their own against baronial privilege, a dying societal structure anyway, but one that would not crumble until Napoleon dismantled feudalism a century later. The Austrian stance against the Vatican is worthy of note, however. It was the first time in the history of Naples that the authority of the state openly challenged the Church’s presumptive right to large untaxed land-holdings. The Hapsburg emperor in Vienna rather enjoyed antagonizing the Pope in this manner, since the Vatican had been openly on the side of the French in the War of the Spanish Succession. Austrian rule made it much more difficult for the Church to wheel and deal in Naples as it had done over the centuries. 

Additionally, Austrian revision of tax laws encouraged the beginning of planned rebuilding in Naples after the stagnant period at the turn of the century. The Austrians also instituted reform in the University, and, perhaps most importantly of all, encouraged the formation of a iureconsultus, a body of experts in matters of the law, experts—lawyers—who would advise the state and the people when necessary. Even those who love lawyer jokes will see how revolutionary that concept was in an age of absolute monarchy. 

As far as the physical plant of the city goes, the Austrians built coastal roads from the city out to the slopes of Vesuvius, roads which eventually led to modern expansion of Naples in that direction.

. It was home to great painters of the Baroque, such as Luca Giordano and Francesco Solimena (self-portrait, left). The latter's works adorn churches in Naples, Rome and Vienna and are on display in museums in Britain and the United States. His studio in Naples became a workshop for numbers of northern European painters who made the trip south just to study with him. They coincidentally got in on the beginning of the great age of the Grand Tour: northerners coming to Italy to study antiquity; for it was under the Austrians that Naples began the rediscovery of its own Greek and Roman past.

Music in the early 1700s in Europe was greatly shaped by the powerful influences of Neapolitan composers, primarily Alessandro Scarlatti, one of the innovators in early classical music, as important as his contemporary, J.S. Bach, and even as important as Mozart almost a century later. Also, the prodigious Pergolesi changed the face of opera by composing La serva padrona, the first internationally successful piece of Neapolitan Comic Opera, music that greatly influenced Mozart and subsequent operatic and symphonic music. [For an item on Mozart and the Neapolitan Comic Opera, click here] 

 Intellectual life in Naples in the early 1700s was active. Naples was the home of the misunderstood and obscure philosopher, Giovambattista Vico, whose cyclical view of history was quaint even when he formulated it. It was certainly to be overshadowed by the powerful thoughts of Hegel and Marx in the next century—their idea holding that history evolves through conflict to ever new and higher states in the human condition. It may well be that Vico’s quaint idea of a returning age, say, of great mythic heroes will never come to pass; yet, on the other hand, it doesn't take whatever passes for a rocket scientist among historians to notice that Karl Marx has been having his problems recently, too. So maybe the jury is still out.

That, then, was Austrian Naples: a brief and interesting period, with one foot in the future, a time that set the stage for the Bourbon take-over in 1734 when Naples would finally become a modern European nation. 

Naples is a Paradise Inhabited by Devils

There are any number of encyclopedias of quotations. I particularly like lists of misquotes —that is, expressions that everyone (except me) cites incorrectly: for example, it's not "Money is the root of all evil," but "The love of money...etc." (1 Timothy 6:10). Churchill did not say "blood, sweat and tears" but rather "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat." *1 And detective fiction's greatest sleuth Sherlock Holmes never said "Elementary, my dear Watson." (It was close, but no cigar.) (I stress "fiction" because a recent poll in Britain shows that a lot of people apparently think Sherlock Holmes was a real person: "Dude, like he's the guy that caught Bob the Ripper! Awesome!"

There are also many cases of accurate quotes attributed to the wrong person. I have had at least one German tell me that "To be or not to be" was by Goethe, and the other day a Neapolitan woman told me that it was by Luigi Pirandello. The expression "Naples is a paradise inhabited by devils" is in this category somewhere.

First of all, Napoli è un paradiso abitato da diavoli is a very well known expression in Italian and especially in Naples. The first time I came across it was in the English version; it was in something by Mary Shelley. I don't remember what, but she spent time in Naples and was always writing about it, even in surprising ways (see Frankenstein). I remember thinking what a clever turn of phrase it was, and I assumed that she had originated it. Not so, though the phrase in English (through Shelley) is still quite current; in 2010 the Swiss composer, Christophe Terrettaz (alias Ozymandias, after Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem of that name) and singer Kelli Ali released an album called A Paradise Inhabited By Devils that, according to the promos, was "inspired by the short stories of Mary Shelley." The phrase also pops up in academic writing (see A Paradise Inhabited by Devils: The Jesuits' Civilizing Mission in Early Modern Naples by Jennifer D. Selwyn, from 2004). The author cites Benedetto Croce as having made her aware of the phrase. (Discussion, below.)

Who actually coined the phrase? No one knows. Really, it's that simple. It's amazing, though, how many Neapolitans assume that it must have been Goethe. There are B & B's along the Amalfi coast that have in their promotional literature: "As Goethe once said, 'Naples is ...etc.etc.'." Letters to the Editor in newspapers are pretty much the same thing: "Goethe once said about our city that..." They all know that he wrote a long-winded travelogue called Italian Journey (Italienische Reise) and that he said witty things about Naples, so he must have said that thing about paradise and devils, no?

No.

I don't know if Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ever uttered the phrase or maybe wished he had invented it, but he never wrote it down and —as absolutely no one ever once said in German (Zeig mir das Rindfleisch!—show me the beef!).*2 In the entire Italian Journey, Goethe uses the expression "Naples is a paradise" only once and in a different context: on March 16, 1787, he wrote "Neapel ist ein Paradies, jedermann lebt in einer Art von trunkner Selbstvergessenheit. Mir geht es ebenso, ich erkenne mich kaum, ich scheine mir ein ganz anderer Mensch." ("Naples is a paradise. Everyone lives in a kind of drunken absent-mindedness. It happens to me, too. I barely recognize myself. I seem to be a very different person.") What can I say? That happens to me, too. I barely recognize myself. I seem to be a very different person. Goethe is stingy, in general, with the word "Paradise". Sometimes the trees outside his window are "paradise" and a certain "Angelika" is "paradise, but Johann is too much of a gentleman to expand on that and we are too discreet to press the issue.

The only thing certain is that when Goethe and, a bit later, Mary Shelley were here, the phrase was current. It was on the lips of any and everyone on the so-called Grand Tour, but the phrase has a much older origin by at least a couple of centuries. Benedetto Croce, historian, philosopher and enthusiastic logophile set his considerable skills to work on the problem and produced a delightful book in 1923 called, of all things, Un Paradiso abitato da diavoli.*3  Croce has a couple of good leads, including a 1539 letter by Bernardino Danièllo (1500-1565), an Italian scholar known for commentaries on Dante and Petrarch, in which Danièllo says that nature, in order to make up for having granted the city such beauty, decided "di dare questo paradiso ad habitare a diavoli" ("...to give this paradise to devils to inhabit"). Croce has an even earlier reference to one Piovano Arlotto, (pseudonym of Arlotto Mainardi [1396–1484], a Florentine priest known for jests and facezie (witty anecdotes).*4  Arlotto wrote that the air of Naples is all good, but that the people are bad. If it weren't for the people, Naples would be a Paradise! Croce concludes inconclusively; that is, the expression probably arose in the 14th century among the "foreign" (that is, from northern Italy) communities of merchants in Naples. 

Galasso, who wrote a commentary on the Croce book, is also the author of his own L'altra Europa, Per un antropologia storica del Mezzogiorno d'Italia (The Other Europe, towards an historical anthropology of Southern Italy).*5 One chapter is called Lo stereotipo del napoletano e le sue variazioni regionali (Stereotypes of the Neapolitan and regional varaiations). He discusses the expression and says, essentially, that Croce's two early examples are interesting but don't really pin down the expression. Again, close but no cigar. (Gee, I wonder who said that.)*6

Even Croce's book causes confusion. In February, 2012, the choir now known as "I Turchini di Antonio Florio" (formerly called by the historic name, the Choir of the Pietà de’ Turchini) from Naples gave a concert in Hamburg called Angels and Demons, Comic and Serious opera in the 18th century. A blurb-promo for the concert traced the title to "Croce's phrase" that Naples was a paradise inhabited by devils. He didn't say that. I didn't either (although it is the title of this article). At least they didn't claim Goethe said it.

All this reminds me that I had a friend in the army whose favorite quote was "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." He was always quoting it. I don't think he understood the irony, especially since he claimed it was by Schopenhauer. (We were a well-read band of brothers. We threw books at the Commies in the Cold War.) Apparently, the phrase is by Ralph Waldo Emerson, but don't quote me on that.

notes: 

—1. The Churchill quote is a bit more complicated. He made it famous, but it was originally used in English by Theodore Roosevelt in an address to the Naval War College on June 2, 1897, following his appointment as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and Teddy got it from Giuseppe Garibaldi, who, according to various sources, rallied his troops during the defense of the Roman republic in 1849 by telling them "Non ho null’altro da offrirvi se non sangue, fatica, lacrime e sudore". ("I have nothing to offer you but blood, toil, tears and sweat.")^up

—2.The expression 'Show me the beef!' is a variation of 'Where's the beef?' an advertising slogan for Wendy's® in a 1984 TV commercial. The ad agency was Dancer Fitzgerald Sample. The ad was written by Cliff Freeman.^up

—3. Reprinted with a forward and comments by Giuseppe Galasso. Piccola Biblioteca, Adelphi, 2006, 3rd edition, ISBN: 9788845920363.) ^up

—4. See Facezie del Piovano Arlotto, commentary by G. Baccini, Firenze 1884. Also see Wit and Wisdom of the Italian Renaissance by Charles Speroni. University of California Press. 1964. ^up

—5. Alfredo Guida, Napoli. 2009.  ISBN 978-88-6042-631. ^up

—6. No takers on this one, but the expression probably originates in early 20th-century US carnivals where they commonly gave away cigars as prizes at fairway games. If you came close but didn't win, they said "Close, but no cigar." The first use in print appears to be by Joel Sayre and John Twist in the published version of their screen play of the 1935 RKO George Stevens film, Annie Oakley,  a scene in which Annie Oakley (played by Barbara Stanwyck) says to Col. William Cody (alias Buffalo Bill, played by Moroni Olsen), "Close, Colonel, but no cigar!"  ^up

My thanks to Selene Salvi, a young lady who eats archives for breakfast!

The Villa Comunale & Dohrn Zool. Station/Aquarium

 acquariumThe Villa Comunale is the most prominent and visible park in the city of Naples. It stands on reclaimed land, for, as early prints show, the sea once came right up to a rather swampy area, the site mostly of fishermen's houses. It wasn't until the 16th century, the beginning of the Spanish viceroyship, that a general campaign was undertaken to make the land suitable for the construction of the fashionable villas that sprang up in the 1600s along that section of the sea front. (Click here for a related item.) 

The Villa was the result of the wishes of King Ferdinand IV, who, in 1788, decided he wanted a large wooded area along the sea for members of the royal family to stroll in. The park, thus, was open to the public only one day a year, for the Festival of Piedigrotta. They say that many marriage contracts of the day even stipulated the husband's duty to take his wife to the gardens on that day each year. The park was opened to the general public on a permanent basis in 1869 after the unification of Italy. The seaside road, via Caracciolo, which now lies between the aquarium and the sea, is another, more recent reclamation project added to the topography of the city. Until 1900, the sea rolled up to the villa, itself, and coach traffic passed along the Riviera di Chiaia, the road now bounding the inner side of the park. 

The Villa Comunale houses the Anton Dohrn Aquarium (photos, above and right). In 1870 Anton Dohrn (1840-1909), German zoologist and disciple of Darwin, requested and got permission to build a “Zoological Station”—an aquarium—in Naples. He was given a site within the Villa Comunale; the project was begun in 1872 under Oscar Capocci and finished by the German architect Adolf von Hildebrand. Interesting artwork within the Florentine Renaissance building include murals by the German artist Hans von Mareès, who drew inspiration from characteristic fishing scenes of the Mediterranean, especially Naples and Sorrento. Since its inception, the aquarium in Naples has not only served as an exhibition of marine flora and fauna, but has also been a working research facility in marine biology. 

Looking Back at the Dohrn Zoological Station

When the Dohrn Zoological Station opened in 1870, it was immediately seen as a major innovation in marine biology. In June 1883, Science, the journal of the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) hailed the..."use  of the best modern methods, with all the material that these rich southern regions can supply, all the help that may be had from a well-furnished library, all the aid that can be obtained from well-trained attendants and subordinates, and all the stimulus that consciously and unconsciously comes from the intercourse of many minds giving their best powers to the same work..." (the image, above left, is from that issue). The station thrived in the final years of the 1800s and well into the 1900s. Even the First World War did not have a serious physical effect on the workings of the station although international cooperation among former colleagues in science (and now deadly enemies) was stifled. That passed, but then came WWII. When Italy made a separate peace in September 1943, her former Axis ally, Germany, punished the city of Naples by wide-spread destruction of the physical infrastructure and even the mindless destruction of intellectual facilities such as libraries, large portions of which were set ablaze. Fortunately, the station itself was not destroyed and workers had removed the books and some of the equipment out into the countryside for safekeeping.

As the war moved north and away from the city of Naples, itself (after Sept. 1943), Science reported in a letter to the editor in March 1944...

...that the station was in limited working order [but that] the library has now been returned, with the loss of a very few volumes. Since the libraries of the various university institutes have suffered great damage, the value of the station library is greater than ever before. It is being used considerably by the scientific workers from the laboratories of biochemistry in the American military hospital. Unfortunately, some of the important instruments have been damaged. Dr. [Reinhard] Dohrn indicates that the establishment of contacts with former workers at the station would be greatly appreciated and that expressions of interest by friends of the station would constitute valuable spiritual help.

Finally, Science from Sept 23, 1949, was able to print a letter from a local university professor that said...

The Zoological Station survived the war without heavy damages. The laboratories and library lost some apparatus and books, but the building was not seriously damaged. The devotion of the personnel and the intelligent cooperation of allied military authorities are the main factors responsible for this fortunate circumstance.

The writer comments on the quantity and quality of new equipment and says further that...

...The library is also in very good shape. The gaps in the files of journals have been almost entirely filled, and subscriptions are running regularly. This is most important since so many biological laboratories in Europe have been destroyed... It would be impossible to mention here all of the people and organizations who have helped and are still helping the institution towards its rehabilitation. The cooperation of the friends from all over the world has been the directorial staff's greatest reward.

The entire Villa Comunale underwent remodeling a couple of years ago. There seem to be fewer trees than before. Some call it "pruning back". Some call it firewood. I haven't made up my mind. 

 Elia Mannetta, the engineer from Baltimore who built the new aquarium in Genoa, will be in Naples in a week or so to help decide if the city of Naples needs a new aquarium and, if so, where to put it. There are three candidates: (1) in San Giovanni a Teduccio, a suburb of Naples just to the east along the coast; (2) Bagnoli, where a new aquarium would fit in nicely with the pedagogical ambitions of the Science City exposition and fair grounds as well as with a general rejuvenation of the area after decades of decay; (3) in the Villa Comunale, where a new aquarium would take the place of the older one, the Anton Dohrn Aquarium, in place since the 1870s. Choice number 2, Bagnoli, is probably the strongest candidate. 

Very few Neapolitans would like to see the Villa Comunale dug up and closed again (as it was a few years ago for restoration) or see the current aquarium demolished. It fits in with the general old-fashioned atmosphere of the park—classical statues, fountains, gazebo/bandstands, etc.—though that, too, has changed a bit since the recent overhaul. Not only did they chop down a lot of trees but they replaced a number of 19th–century metal scrolls and curlicues along the fence with more modern bulletoid metalwork that has already midwifed an entire repertoire of suppository jokes. 

 I get suspicious when they start chopping down trees in Naples, as they are about to do once again in the Villa Comunale, the large public park along the sea-side (see entries directly above this one). Thirty-one trees are destined to be removed "in the interest of public safety," according to a spokesman for the city. Most of those trees are either diseased or unstable; those that are neither, but that are precariously close to buildings in the villa (such as the large Dohrn aquarium, visible in the photo) will, says the city, not get the axe, but just the shovel and be moved, if possible, to a safer location.

The last time they did this was a few years ago when they remodeled the villa (item 1, above). To my, admittedly, non-expert eye, all they did was make a quaint 1890s bit of charm a lot less green and a lot more metallic. On the other hand, they tell me that in the tough times after the end of WW II in Naples, the park was totally denuded of anything that could be used as firewood, after which, however, the park again prospered and staged a fine comeback. And, of course, at one time (in the 1600s) there was no park there at all. It was scraggly and brackish beach. So I suppose things could be worse.

Trees that have to be moved because they endanger buildings and passers-by —well, that is reasonable; trees or tree branches can fall on people, injuring and even killing them. (The most famous case in Naples that I remember is this one.) In the case of diseased trees, that is still a problem that Naples and other Mediterranean cities are struggling to cope with. The tree pest (the red palm weevil, Rhynchophorus ferrugineus) still exists in the city and, to my knowledge, no miracle cure has presented itself. That insect attacks only certain kinds of palm trees, but oak and pine in the villa are also set upon by certain wood-boring insects.  So you save some and lose others. It's not an easy battle. (For more on the tree pest, see this link.) 

Unstable trees are a peculiar problem because the causes are not clear. At least a few geologists have speculated that construction of the  number 6 train line of the new Naples subway (adjacent to the park on the north side) may be responsible. Faulty engineering interfered with the underground aquifer in the area, causing the collapse last year of a building along the proposed route. Work on the train line has since been halted; a major street on the surface next to the park has been closed and traffic has had to be rerouted. It may be that underground work also blocked the natural flow of fresh rain water into the soil of the park, water that nourishes tree roots. In the place of fresh water, there is now sea water seeping in from the landfill beneath via Caracciolo on the other side of the park and rotting the roots.

*Woodman, Spare that Tree is the title and first line of a poem by American poet and song writer, George Pope Morris (1802-1864) first published in the January of 1837,  under the title The Oak. It was then set to music by Henry Russell.

5 Neapolitan songs about five shades of love

Fall in love with Naples ... With Neapolitan songs

Romantic love - 'O Marenariello

Neapolitan songs and a young love: 'E Spingule Francesi

Fall in love in Naples with a tormented love: Malafemmena

A great love of the Neapolitans: 'A tazz 'e cafè

Neapolitan love but at a distance - Era de Maggio

Piedigrotta 

 In a culture that abounds with famous place names such as "Santa Lucia" and "Vesuvius,"  "Piedigrotta" still stands out as one of the best-known names among Neapolitans, themselves. The name, itself, means "at the foot of the grotto," referring to the nearby Roman tunnel that leads beneath the hill in back of the church of Santa Maria di Piedigrotta; that grotto connects the section of  Naples known as Mergellina at the west end of the bay with Fuorigrotta—"beyond the grotto," today a thriving and large suburb of Naples. The old Roman tunnel was bypassed many decades ago by a modern traffic tunnel on the right of the church. 

Piedigrotta is connected in popular Neapolitan culture with the famous Festival of Piedigrotta, a celebration on September 8, a spectacular parade led by viceroys and Kings, passing along the entire length of the seaside road, Riviera di Chiaia, and winding up at the church, itself. The parade was a yearly affair in the 1600s under the Spanish (who built the road leading to the church as they expanded the city to the west) and in the 1700s under the Bourbons. The parade was still held during the 19th century and into the 20th. In some fashion or other, there is still a celebration today.

Beginning in the 1830s, the Festival of Piedigrotta held a song-writing contest for composers of Neapolitan songs and is responsible for providing us with such songs as "Funicuì-Funiculà" (the winner from 1880) and many others. Much more recently, although there is still a celebration at the church, the parade is no longer held. 

The church of Santa Maria di Piedigrotta is first mentioned in a document from 1207 and is mentioned prominently by both Boccaccio and Petrach in the 1300s. Over the centuries, the church has been redone and expanded many times. The current façade of the church is from the 1850s. There is also an adjacent monastery that now serves as a military hospital. Also, near the entrance to the grotto behind the church is a monument billed as Virgil's Tomb. 

Perhaps the most interesting thing, historically, has to do with the site, rather than the church. That is, the grotto led to the fabled Phlegrean Fields, the mythological entrance to Hades, and thus lent itself well to mysterious carryings-on. Pre-Christian religions almost certainly used the site near the present church as a place for their rituals. One speculation by no less than the great Neapolitan dialect poet, Salvatore Di Giacomo (citing "scholarly sources"), is that here was the setting of Petronius' Satyricon, that great bit of pornography from the first century a.d. Di Giacomo starts to cite the passage about the three young men out for a good time going into the cave and running into a band of women. Then, he blushes to continue. As do I.

Bernardo Tanucci (1698-1783)

Just to be sure, I checked to see if there is a street or square in Naples named for Bernardo Tanucci. Good, there is indeed a street at the east end of the great Royal Poorhouse, the Albergo dei Poveri. Bernie deserves at least that small honor, for if the history of nations had been slightly different, he might be remembered as the astute statesman that he was, on the order of Cavour and Bismark of a later time. Instead, he is a footnote in history texts, a big fish in a dried-up pond, the curious Kingdom of Naples, as real to most today as, oh, Asturias or Austrasia. (Who?!)

Depending on what sources you read, you will get different opinions. Roman Catholic sources will tell you that Tanucci was an anti-clerical zealot responsible for establishing the supremacy of the state over the church in southern Italy in the mid-1700s. Precisely for that reason, say others, he helped bring enlightened government to the Kingdom of Naples right on the heels of the French Enlightenment —a perfect time for it. Your call.

Tanucci was born in Arezzo in Tuscany and educated in Pisa where he became a law professor. At the beginning of the Bourbon rule of the kingdom of Naples in the 1730s, he found his way into the service of the first monarch, Charles III. Tanucci became first councilor of state, minister of justice, foreign minister, and then in the 1750s, prime minister. He provided skilled and shrewd council to the king, who truly valued Tanucci’s service. He was especially valuable when Charles abdicated in 1759 to return to Spain, leaving the throne to his nine-year-old son, Ferdinand, a numskull kid who matured into an oaf and who would eventually rule until well after the Napoleonic wars (!) having established himself as the Re lazzarone (roughly, “Beggar King”) one of the least capable European monarchs in history. Tanucci was the regent, providing valuable service to the child king as he had to the father. Tanucci was so good at what he did that Ferdinand—even after he reached majority and was allowed to make his own decisions—left government pretty much in the hands of Tanucci, who remained in constant contact with Charles back in Spain.

Tanucci was the mainstay in the kingdom of Naples of the Enlightenment commitment in much of Europe to diminish the power of the Church. The balance of power between Church and State in Europe lasted more than one-thousand years (from the establishment of the Papal States in 756 to their demise in 1871) and is beyond the scope of this entry; suffice it to say that by 1760, the power of the church was in severe decline.

In Naples, Tanucci was zealous in abolishing the feudal privileges of the Church and restricting its legal jurisdiction and prerogatives. He closed convents and monasteries, reduced the taxes to be forwarded to the pontifical Curia, and was pivotal in the expulsion of the Jesuits from the kingdom in 1767, an episode that resulted in his being ex-communicated (at which point, he closed two more monasteries). He was also responsible for reforming the legal code of the kingdom by setting up a commission of jurists (whom, today, we would call “a bunch of lawyers”, but in the mid-1700s it was a progressive move). It was an age of “benevolent absolutism” and Tanucci help shape Naples in that mold and break the mold of the kingdom as a fief of the Holy See. It was under Tanucci’s guidance that the local version of the Enlightenment flourished, people such as Gaetano Filangieri and Antonio Genovesi.

In 1774, Queen Caroline joined the Council of State (as her marriage contract specified she might do as soon as she bore an heir to the throne). Tanucci, then 76 years of age, was no match for the energetic and ambitious Caroline. He retired in 1777 and died in Naples in 1793. His enemies claim Tanucci and people like him paved the way for revolutions. That's what his friends say, too.

Dialect Theater, Opera Parodies and the San Carlino Theater

 Dante's la Divina Commedia (1300) pretty well established the linguistic future of literature in what would one day be called "Italy." No matter what variety of neo-Latin you wrote or spoke at home, if you wished to write for a general audience from among the various states on the Italian peninsula, it would be in Dante's language (still called "Tuscan" as late as the 1700s). That didn't mean that vibrant local languages would die out; they continued to provide pleasure for theatergoers in a great many places in Italy, including Naples.

Neapolitan comic opera and theater well into the early 1700s was often in Neapolitan, although Alessandro Scarlatti in 1718 got in on the future with his The Triumph of Honour. It was advertised as "in Tuscan" and "not dialect." By the time of Piccinni's La Cecchina in 1760, it is fair to say that dialect in Naples (and, indeed, in dialects everywhere in Italy) had been relegated to a sort of "counter-cultural" role in the path of the oncoming juggernaut of one Italian language. The most popular comic operas of the early 1800s are those of Rossini, many of them composed in Naples, and they are all in Italian.

In the late 1700s and early 1800s, comic opera served not just as random light-hearted entertainment, but as specific comic relief from serious operatic fare. There are many examples where the Neapolitan comic opera, in Italian as well as Neapolitan, makes fun of serious opera and customs of the serious opera goers. The best-known example from the late 1700s is probably Paisiello's Socrate immaginario, a parody of Gluck's Orfeo.

Romanticism in music was well-geared to the new fire of the times in Italy—the move towards national unity, a movement known in Italian history as the Risorgimento, up and running at least twenty years before Cavour's newspaper of that name was first published in 1848. Even Rossini got in on that; his William Tell (1829) is a fiery revolutionary opera about the birth of a nation (Switzerland). Verdi's Nabucco (1842) was so patriotic that both he and the opera became forever linked with Italian unity. Through all of this, comic opera in standard Italian in Naples became irrelevant. Italian was now the vehicle for the task of creating a nation. That was no laughing matter.

Yet, dialect survived. The most famous dialect theater in Naples was San Carlino. It started life as the Cantina di San Giacomo (St. James' Cellar), built in 1740 near what is now the city hall. The original name referred to the fact that the theater was adjacent to and below the church of San Giacomo. The founder of the theater was Tommaso Tomei, head of a roving troupe of actors. (The detailed history of that troupe as well as others of the mid-to-late 1700s is found in Croce, below.) Note the date. It is immediately after the construction of the San Carlo opera house, at the beginning of the Bourbon rule of Naples. Unlike the opulent San Carlo, the Cantina really was a cellar, little more than one room—a loud, noisy and dirty place with a stage for actors. The theater was closed by order of the king on 1759 "for moral reasons" (Croce) and then rebuilt in 1770 with the new name of San Carlino. For a few decades it presented a ragbag of assorted plays and music, both light and serious, with no real sense of direction. It ran into financial difficulties and closed for a few years at the turn of the 1800s. It reopened in 1814 with programs of both prose plays and music. In 1820 the first Neapolitan comic troupe was formed there under Silvio Maria Luiz and, until its demolition on May 6, 1884, San Carlino remained the most important vehicle for dialect works in Naples. Among the important names associated with the theater as playwrights or actors in the mid-1800s were Pasquale Altavilla, one of the great Neapolitan dialect playwrights of the century; the father and son team of Salvatore and Antonio Petito, first one and then the other as the best-known stage players of the Neapolitan masked figure, Pulcinella; and later Eduardo Scarpetta, a name synonymous with Neapolitan theater from the late 1800s. Interestingly, there is also a name not normally associated with comedic dialect theater, that of Salvatore Cammarano (1801-1852). Di Giacomo (below) laments the decline of the dialect Neapolitan opera buffa at mid-century, supplanted by the new maestri of music such as Donizetti and Verdi. Di Giacomo mentions Cammarano as one of those dialect wordsmiths who passed over to the music of Romantic opera to write libretti in the one language of Italy. Cammarano was from the best-known Neapolitan theatrical family of the 1700s and early 1800s. He contributed, as had his father and grandfather, to the comedic repertoire of San Carlino. In 1835 he heard the call of the new music and went on to write libretti for Donizetti (Lucia Di Lamermoor), Verdi (Luisa Miller, il Trovatore) and others.

When we say "theater," we include musical theater. Operatic parody in dialect at San Carlino was very popular from about 1850; many of them were parodies of works by Verdi. Send-ups in the 1850s included versions of il Trovatore and something called il Traviato (a parody of la Traviata—the gender change from -a to -o indicates that the man, not the woman, is "traviated". The word, itself, may be translated as "seduced," but more precisely it means "led astray" or, in the case of the opera, "The Wayward Woman."  The title of Verdi's opera so shocked Neapolitan censors in the 1850s that they changed the title to Violetta, the heroine's name. They apparently did not interfere with the title of the parody.) San Carlino often employed singers from San Carlo, itself, just a few blocks away. In some sense, the musical parodies at San Carlino were an extension of the earlier comic operas in Naples, those by Paisiello and Cimarosa, many of which were in standard Italian and, in any event, were old hat in the age of Romanticism. So, while some were watching Aida premiere at San Carlo in March, 1873, two months later in May others were down the street watching Aida dint' 'a casa 'donna Tolla Pandola (Aida at home with donna Tolla Pandola), considered the greatest of all such parodies done at San Carlino. The author was Antonio Petito of Pulcinella fame; the work starred Scarpetta in drag as Aida. It played 28 consecutive nights, a number chosen (as a tribute?) to correspond to the number of curtain calls Verdi had taken at the San Carlo premiere of the real Aida a few months earlier.

The theater ran into financial difficulties and was closed for months in 1880. It reopened briefly and was finally closed for good in 1884. Scarpetta, played there for the last time on the Tuesday before Easter of that year. The theater closed the next day. There is a cork model (photo, above) commissioned by Scarpetta of "his theater" (from artist Michele Castiglione) along with other physical items from the theater and a large photo collection in the theater display at the San Martino museum.

The date of the closure cannot just be coincidental. The theater was having problems—yes, but... Plans for the Risanamento (urban renewal by gutting large portions of the city) had already been drawn up; Piazza Municipio (where the theater was located) had to be dug up and rebuilt; and cholera was already in the city and about to strike devastatingly hard later in the same year (1884). Naples was now part of a new Italy and who is to say that that did not influence—not the affection for native dialect among the people—but at least the official attention paid to parochial dialect in an age where we were all now one people?

It is hard to say whether spoofing Verdi in Naples in the 1850s (when Naples was still an independent kingdom) was necessarily an anti-unitarian political statement. There might have been some of that, but the fact that the spoofs continued well after unification might mean that dialect parody of standard works was, again, simply a counter-cultural safety valve, a way to resist the linguistic and political juggernaut. You can have your large-scale national opera, but we're still here. Pzzzzzzttttt!

Opera parodies in Naples did not die with San Carlino. Indeed, Scarpetta presented his version of La Boheme in 1896 at the Bellini Theater. He had received permission from the composer of the original, Giacomo Puccini, who was on-hand for the performance and enjoyed it!

sources:

—Carteggio [Letters, correspondence] Verdi-Cammarano (1843-1852). (2001) Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani, Parma.

—Croce, B. (1891) I Teatri di Napoli, secolo VV-XVIII. Luigi Perro, Naples.

—Di Giacomo, S. (1891) Cronaca del teatro San Carlino 1738-1884. Bideri, Naples.

—Minervini, R. (1948) "Da San Carlo a San Carlino" in Cento Anni di Vita del San Carlo, 1848-1948. Ente autonomo del Teatro di San Carlo, Naples.

—Sapienza, A. (1998) La parodia dell'opera lirica a Napoli nell'Ottocento. Istituto Universitario Orientale Press, Naples.

—Viviani, V. (1992) Storia del Teatro napoletano, preface by Roberto De Simone. Guida ed. Naples.

MERGELLINA

Mergellina is the "other" port in Naples. It is at the west end of via Caracciolo before the coast starts its long curve out to Posillipo. Once, Mergellina was a quaint fishing village and the subject of folksong and myth. Today, it has developed as an important harbor for pleasure and tourist boats, including those that make runs to Capri and, indeed, to all of the small secondary ports in the Campania region, from Bacoli at the extreme top end of the Bay of Naples to Sapri, many hours to the south.

It is, however, still a working port for fishermen. 

It is not immediately evident from studying the modern lay-out of the coast between the Castel dell'Ovo and the harbor of Mergellina just how isolated Mergellina was from the rest of Naples through a long history that stretches from the days of the Greeks to the present. It is true that the city of Naples, itself—the historic center and the immediate surroundings—is the oldest continuously inhabited center of large population in Europe. It is, however, equally true that many of the names that one associates with Naples, such as Mergellina (and even Santa Lucia, much closer in towards the city than Mergellina) were, until the 1500s, "quaint fishing villages on the outskirts of Naples" (and I copied that phrase from an early tour-guide to the area, which so described Santa Lucia, the area around the Castel dell'Ovo). 

Mergellina is yet another mile to the west along the waterfront. Today, Santa Lucia and Mergellina are connected by via Caracciolo, a road from the late 1800s. 

If, in the mind's eye, you strip that road away, you have the modern Public Gardens, the Villa Comunale, which can still be said to connect the two ends of the long stretch of waterfront between Santa Lucia and Mergellina. Those gardens were built in the 1780s. Before that park was put in place on reclaimed land, the whole stretch was a beachfront with water rolling up approximately to where the road, Riviera di Chiaia, now runs along the inside of the gardens, 100 yards from the modern seafront. 

And that road, Riviera di Chiaia, was laid in the 1600s to accommodate the new and exclusive Spanish mansions that were wending their way ever to the west towards Mergellina. The first villa —at the east end of the Villa Comunale, still a mile from Mergellina— was the Palazzo Ravaschieri di Satriano, a building from 1605 (photo, left). It was prime beachfront property 400 years ago. (Much later, Goethe mentions the building with fondness in his Italian Journeys. He speaks of a lovely and enigmatic woman. He discreetly avoids detailing his notorious womanizing but he is probably talking about donna Teresa Filangieri, the wife of Filippo Ravaschieri, owner of the villa at the time. (In this photo —on the hill in the background Castel Sant'Elmo is on the left and the museum of San Martino on the right.) Drawings of the area from the 1680s show a lovely coast-line with a long string of villas starting at this mansion and a single long road, Riviera di Chiaia, lined with trees. That was how one got to Mergellina from Naples in the 1600s.

Mergellina itself, before that date, was pretty much isolated, except by sea and a single road leading down from the Posillipo height directly above, a twisting and steep affair called the Rampe di San Antonio. That road comes out near the modern Mergellina train station. In the days before trains, all you saw when you got to the bottom was the Roman tunnel (still in use in those days) called the "Neapolitan Crypt", in the area called Piedigrotta, the church of that name being one of the most famous in Neapolitan tradition. The modern road, via Posillipo, that leads from Mergellina west to the very end of the Posillipo hill was not completed until the French rule of Naples under Murat, although the Spanish did build a short stretch in that direction to get from Mergellina to Villa Donn'Anna. The Spanish, then, are the ones who started the development that would eventually incorporate Mergellina into "greater Naples". That development was continued under the short, but productive, period of the Austrian vicerealm and then, of course, the Bourbons. 

Sannazzaro

portrait of SannazzaroMergellina's favorite son is, no doubt, the poet Jacopo Sannazzaro (1458-1530). (There is historical documentation that the correct spelling of the surname is Sannazaro, i.e. with one z). He was born in Naples and raised in nearby Nocera de' Pagani. He gained fame and favor as a poet with the court of Naples and was rewarded in 1497 by Frederick II of Aragon with a home, the Villa Mergellina, a large property still in existence (though subdivided many times over) that today holds the church of Santa Maria del Parto, which Sannazzaro founded and where he is entombed.  

Sannazzaro wrote at an interesting time in Italy. In spite of the enormous influence of Dante's Divina Commedia (written in the vernacular), men of letters and, generally, all educated persons, were expected to have a command of Latin. Scholarly writing was still all in Latin, throughout Europe. Poetry and other literature —well, that gave you a bit more leeway.

Sannazzaro wrote his De partu Virginis in Latin; it is little read today, but at the time, it earned him the nick-name of "the Christian Virgil." He also wrote in Italian (called "Tuscan" at the time, since Dante was from Tuscany), as in Arcadia (1504), a masterpiece that instituted the theme of Arcadia, an idyllic land, in European literature. That work had an enormous influence on subsequent European literature. He also recast Neapolitan proverbs into Italian and published them. Sannazzaro was a member of the famed Accademia founded by Giovanni Pontano and wrote under the pseudonym of Actius Syncerus; he eventually headed the Academy. His verses in Italian are part of the body of literature that helped form that language in the Middle Ages. A main square, one block from Mergellina harbor, is named for him.

Underground Naples Portal

The Ancient Naples Collection in the National Museum

The “first Naples,” the city of Parthenope (named for the siren in Greek mythology) was located on the Pizzofalcone hill (alias Mt. Echia and Monte di Dio), overlooking the sea and the small island of Megaris, upon which the Egg Castle would later be built. Actually, Parthenope still is down there somewhere, although you can't really find it anymore; the hill today is totally overbuilt and overgrown with 2500 years of everything--roughly 100 human generations of stuff. (That would be your great-great-great...uh, you can do the rest.) It is not evident—but it makes sense—that these ancient Parthenopeans should have had cemeteries somewhere. Important: Ancient grave sites contained a multitude of artifacts such as jewelry, pottery, and other items that shed light on the ways of life of ancient peoples. Such sites on the Pizzofalcone hill began to be excavated in about 1950, and thus the National Archaeological Museum in Naples contains a collection entitled Ancient Naples. It holds, arranged in chronological order, some of the most important finds from the cemetery of Parthenope, as well as from some other ancient grave sites. 

Evidence from these sites as well as from some ancient literary sources suggest that the first settlement was founded by colonists from either Rhodes or nearby Cuma; Parthenope seems to have been occupied from the mid-seventh century to the mid-sixth century BC, more than a century before the adjacent “new city” of Naples was founded, probably by Athens and Syracuse with the support of Pithecusae (the Greek settlement on Ischia). (Yes, you--or most likely someone else--really can tell all that from studying ancient pottery!) Evidence from cemeteries and from coins has supported the idea that the second city, Naples, itself, was founded in the years immediately following the naval battle of Cuma (474 BC) in which Cuma and its allies, together with Syracuse, defeated the Etruscans. Recent excavations, however have brought to light a stretch of fortification wall in vico Soprammuro a Forcella (off of via Duomo, not far from the current coast line) datable to around 500 BC. This pushes the traditionally held date for the foundation of the city of Naples back a bit earlier, to at least the late sixth century BC (that is, between 550 and 500 BC). In any event, Parthenope and Naples eventually grew together to form a single urban unit.

 The collection in the museum opened in 1999 and is based, in part, on discoveries at the cemeteries mentioned above. The evidence from such sites is understandably fragmentary, and it has not been possible to reconstruct exactly how it all fits together; yet the fragments are interesting and are of both Greek and native Italic/Campanian origin. The room also contains pottery fragments found in the street, Via Chiatamone, directly below Pizzofalcone, items that very probably simply slid down the hill. 

The collection also has fine intact examples of Attic (Athenian) pottery found in the cemetery of Castel Capuano, the old law courts of the Aragonese city, as well as from other early sites in Naples. The pottery on display in the Ancient Naples rooms include an Attic red figure lekythos (oil flask) with Eros and a girl dating to the end of the fifth century BC. There is also a particularly beautiful Attic red figure amphora (image, left)  showing the birth of Helen from the egg with her brothers the Dioscuri - Castor and Pollux, dated to the late fifth century BC. The item comes from a burial in which it functioned as a container for the ashes of the dead. The main side depicts the birth of Helen. Apart from the shape of the vase and the stylistic characteristics of the decoration, the dating is also based on the chronology of Euripides’ Orestes which deals with the subject and was performed at Athens in 409 B.C.

The same room also contains ceramic female busts and heads probably connected to the cult of Demeter from Sant’ Aniello a Caponapoli (an area and church near the high NW corner of the ancient city, where the acropolis stood--almost across the street from the modern National Museum) datable to between the late fifth century BC and the late fourth century BC. The Greek phase of the cemeteries is extremely interesting, in particular the monumental tombs, dating to between the fourth and third centuries BC, excavated from the tuff of the hill that rises up towards Capodimonte. As well, the collection shows that certain non-Greek customs spread to Naples, such as that of placing the crater -- the vase used to mix wine for the funeral ceremony -- by the feet of the deceased. This custom was alien to the Greek world and can be traced to Etrusco-Campanian peoples, highlighting the mixed cultural models caused by the presence in the city of different ethnic groups, those of both Greek and native Campanian origin. 

Neapolitan Trips

Palazzo Ricca — the Bank of Naples & the Historical Archives

Palazzo Ricca (photo) is located at via Tribunali 213. One story goes that in the mid-1500s some lawyers loitering on the stairs of Palazzo Capuano, the Hall of Justice cum debtors' prison, were flagged down by an inmate. He was waving his coat and wanted to "loan" it to them for five carlini, the sum he needed to get out of jail. They agreed. With that, the grand and benevolent institution of the pawn shop in Naples was born, with said enterprising legal fleagles opening up shop right there in the prison. The business soon moved into new premises and opened as the Monte e Banco dei Poveri. 

That colorful story may or may not be true. The Bank of Naples, itself, has this to say about its own history:

The origins of the Banco di Napoli date back to the public banks in religious locations, which emerged in Naples in the 16th and 17th centuries. One of the first charitable institutions to go into banking was the Monte di Pietà, founded in 1539, whose philanthropic purpose was to provide interest-free loans on pawned goods. Later, the Monte di Pietà opened a depository bank that was recognized with a viceregal proclamation in 1584.

Another seven institutions were then opened [in Naples]: the Sacro Monte e Banco dei Poveri (1600); the Banco Ave Gratia Plena or Banco della Santissima Annunziata (1587); the Banco di Santa Maria del Popolo (1589); the Banco dello Spirito Santo (1590); the Banco di Sant' Eligio (1592); the Banco di San Giacomo e Vittoria (1597); and the Banco del Santissimo Salvatore (1640). These eight banks prospered for over two hundred years.

(Such institutions in Naples were in the tradition of the many such church-run non-profit pawn houses that had started to open throughout Italy in the mid-1400s in order to combat usury.) In 1616, the original Monte di Pietà transferred to Palazzo Ricca and in 1632 became a public institution. The adjacent Palazzo Cuomo was added to the premises in 1787. The name Banco dei Poveri would remain until a consolidation of all such public banks in 1794 by Ferdinand IV of Bourbon produced the "Banco Nazionale di Napoli," then becoming the "Bank of the Two Sicilies" in the early 1800s. After the unification of Italy (1861), the institution became, simply, the "Banco di Napoli".

I was kindly reminded a few days ago that August 7 is the feast day of St. Cajetan (San Gaetano in Italian) (1480-1547), one of the promoters of the original Monte di Pietà in 1539. The saint was born Gaetano dei Conti di Tiene (also Thiene) and founder of the order of the Clerics Regular, better known as the Theatines. (He should not be confused with his contemporary, Cardinal Thomas Cajetan, prominent theologian of the Counter-Reformation.) San Gaetano is the patron saint of the unemployed, gamblers, job seekers and good fortune. His remains are in the Theatine church of San Paolo Maggiore in Naples. The church is at the precise center of the old historical center of the ancient city (#33 on this map). The square is, indeed, named Piazza San Gaetano and there is a prominent statue of the saint in the square. The statue is from the years 1657-70 and was the work of the indefatigable Cosimo Fanzago. Originally, it was to be an obelisk, a "plague column" like others in the city, but was never finished.

 My main interest in the Bank of Naples is that it was recently bought out and is now called the Sanpaolo Banco di Napoli. When I first saw that name, I thought: "Hmmm, San Paolo is the name of the Naples soccer stadium. My bank has been bought by a football team!" Even worse, the Naples club is wallowing in the nether realm of the C league (as Minor League as you can get). What does this mean for my money? As it turns out, Sanpaolo is also the moniker of some high-powered northern Italian manipulator of mammon, so I was wrong. On the other hand, I tried to use my Sanpaolo Banco di Napoli piece of plastic in a Sanpaolo Banco di Napoli on the island of Sardinia, foolishly figuring that since the island is part of Italy, there would no problem:

"We can't take that."

"But it's your bank! It's my bank! It's our bank," I said, deftly angling for some solidarity.

"Yes, but only in Naples."  (That is an exact quote). So, maybe I wasn't wrong.

 My secondary interest in the bank has been that it maintains a library and historical archive, one of the most exhaustive of its kind in the world, documenting centuries of  financial life of Naples and Southern Italy. I have never used the archive. (It is housed at the original site, Palazzo Ricca. The bank, itself, is now on via Roma/via Toledo, photo, left.)  My plan is to flash my Sanpaolo Banco di Napoli card at them and see if works in lieu of the letter of recommendation from a university or research institute, signed in sextuplicate with attached urine sample just to get in and read some newspapers from the 1600s.

Due to the above-mentioned consolidation decreed by King Ferdinand in 1819, the archive contains historical material from all of the early banks in Naples. All documents from eight public banks, founded between 1463 and 1640 were then archived together in Palazzo Ricca. It became the "General Archive"; since 1950 it has been called the "Historical Archive".

After various incarnations as hock shop, bank, credit institution, juggernaut of greed, limited company and whatever else, the bank has now created a separate Instituto di Napoli Foundation, which is responsible for running the archive. From the Foundation's published description of itself:

Through the Historical Archive, with its Library and Newspaper and Periodical Section, the Instituto di Napoli Foundation recognizes its link with the past and the bond with its tradition...the institution pursues social objectives and promotes economic and cultural development...it undertakes activities in the fields of scientific research, education and training in the humanities and economics...safeguarding and enhancing the national heritage and activities related to the arts, archaeology, museums and the environment...

The archive is housed in approximately 300 rooms on four floors of Palazzo Ricca and contains almost three million items, ranging from liability records to client records and other bank instruments such as loan records, investments in national debt certificates, real estate transactions, etc.  Again, from their own description: "The detailed payment information...housed in the  Historical Archives allows [the tracing of]...events that took place in Naples and its provinces, as well as throughout Italy and in some cases even Europe and America."

The Istituto also runs the library with its Newspaper and Periodical Section, also on the premises of Palazzo Ricca. Currently, the library consists of approximately 32,000 legal, economics and financial essays and monographs, as well as 17,000 miscellaneous works and 48,000 Italian and foreign financial newspapers and periodicals. Additionally, there are a total of 250 "relics", most of which are made of silver and gold, marking some of the most significant stages in the history of the Banco di Napoli. These relics include plaques, commemorative medals and gold coins from 1806 onwards.

Being and Nothingness : Giambattista Vico

If you were born shortly after the death of Rene Descartes, you came of age during the great blossoming of Rationalism and the study of the natural sciences. If you were interested in philosophy, it would not be at all surprising if you had turned out to be a true child of the Enlightenment, one whom history might group into that vast body of thought encompassed by  such thinkers as Descartes, Spinoza and Voltaire. Giambattista Vico, however, did not quite fit in with the spirit of his times, and that is precisely why he is interesting. 

He was born on the street in Naples known as 'Spaccanapoli' and lived there most of his life. After his university studies and a few years of travelling around teaching, he wound up as a professor at the University of Naples, a post he held until his death. His thoughts are contained primarily in his Autobiography and in Principles of a New Science of Nations. 

Vico was at odds with the prevailing climate of the eighteenth century, which felt that  truth about the universe could be arrived at rationally. This idea of a 'clockwork' universe, a mechanism entirely accessible to human understanding, remained so persuasive that by the late 19th century prominent scientists were all set to dot the last 'i' of the last law of physics and declare that discipline defunct. Then along came our own century with such things as Relativity, Uncertainty Principles, Quantum Indeterminacy, and Gödel's Theorem. Kurt Gödel showed that mathematics—and, hence, logic—was not the perfect standard of precision that it had appeared to be. 

Two centuries earlier, Vico, completely out of step with his contemporaries, had not been comfortable with the Aristotelian ideal of perfect deduction from first principles and had said that even mathematics did not—could not—contain the certainty that philosophers such as Descarte would have liked. The so-called "truths" of mathematics were true only because the rules governing mathematics were man-made and arbitrary. Thus, Vico was somewhat of a harbinger of revolutionary twentieth-century scientific philosophy. 

Something else that made Vico different from his fellow philosophers was the emphasis he placed on the study of history. To someone like Descartes, history was little more than a messy collection of human absurdities, hardly the stuff worthy of true scientific enquiry. To the extent that Enlightenment philosophers worried about the nature of society, it was, again, to discern the "natural laws" that governed human beings, just as, indeed, natural laws governed the movement of the planets. 

Vico, on the other hand, felt that the only way to understand what we are and are to become is to study what we have been, not by trying to mold humanity into rigid preconceptions of what is or isn't natural. Vico believed that societies pass through stages of growth and decay, recurring cycles of barbarism, heroism, and reason, from whence the cycle begins again. Each historical stage has its own kind of language: poetry, for example, being sensuous and metaphoric, is connected with the age of heroism (the epics of Homer, for example), while prose only enters during an age of reason, such as our own. The study of history gives us, thus, a certain power of prediction over our future; that was an idea that foresaw the historical determinism of later philosophers such as Hegel and Marx. 

Even the literature of the 20th century owes a debt to Vico, from as cumbersome a tome as Finnegans Wake, the last page of which runs cyclically into the first page again, all the way to the science fiction of Asimov, whose Foundation novels are based on the premise that the proper study of history and human behavior can be used to predict tens of thousands of years into the future. 

HOLIDAYS IN NAPLES: The Jewish Catacombs

There was a very good article in the New York Times today entitled "In Italian Dust, Signs of a Past Jewish Life," by Andrée Brooks. It was about the excavation of Jewish catacombs in Venosa in Puglia, east of Naples, and also mentioned some of the early Jewish artifacts

in the National Museum and National Library of Naples. 

The article reminded me that I had read a while ago about the existence of Jewish catacombs in Naples, itself. The source was Guida Insolita ai misteri, ai segreti, alle leggende e alle curiosità di Napoli Sotteterranea (Unusual Guide to the Mysteries, Secrets, Legends and Curiosities of Underground Naples) by Giovanni Liccardo. (Newton & Compton editori, Rome, 2000.) The author talks a bit about the history of the Jews in Naples in the seventh century and cites Pope Gregory the Great's admonition to Bishop Pascasio of Naples in the year 602:

...et de suis illos solemnitatibus inquietari denuo non permittat, sed omnes festivitates feriasque suas, sicut hactenus ... tenuerunt, liberam habeant observandi celebrandique licentiam. 

The catacombs were discovered in 1908, and another find was made in the early 1930s during excavations for a military barracks. Both finds are in the same area, along the street called via Malta, near the intersection of via Lahalle. That is in the eastern part of the city—though well outside of the ancient city of Naples as it existed in the seventh century. It is an area that has undergone intensive construction in the last century: the military barracks, mentioned above, as well as a new elevated roadway leading up from the presumed site of the catacombs to the Naples Tangenziale, the highway that skirts the northern edge of the city. Both sites are described as having been found at about nine feet below the present street level. They both had more than a single tier of tombs; some were covered by a tiled roof. Inscriptions indicate that they are from the fifth or sixth century AD. 

After the 1931 find, Neapolitan archaeologist, Amedeo Maiuri remarked that they were extremely important in terms of learning about the "early demography of Naples". The bad news is that I couldn't find a trace of them just a few hours ago—I went down there, map in hand. There is a huge barracks overarched by the elevated roadway, mentioned above. I didn't expect a site open to the public the way the Christian catacombs of Naples are (item 1, above), but there wasn't anything, not even an historical marker. I then called up Aldo, a 90-year friend and one of the oldest members of the Jewish community in Naples. 

He said, "Do you mean the old Jewish cemetery? I know where that is." 

I said, "No. I mean catacombs from right after the fall of the Roman Empire." 

He said, "Never heard of them."  

THE NORTHERN QUESTION: Risorgimento, Anti-Risorgimento & Bandits

The risorgimento is the name given to the 19th-century movement in Italy to unite the entire Italian peninsula into a single nation. The term covers philosophy, politics, social unrest and military events in Italy from the early 1800s through the last of the wars of unification, including Italian participation in WWI, which added Trieste and Trento to the nation. The most striking military episode was Garibaldi’s (image, left)conquest of the South, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1860, an event that led to the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861. Psychologically, however, Italy was not really unified until her “natural” capital, Rome, was restored, which took place in September, 1870.

The word risorgimento, itself, means “resurgence” and was the name of Cavour’s newspaper (Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, 1810–1861, the first prime minister of Italy) first published in November, 1847. The paper aimed to “reform the economic conditions in Italy” and work for Italian “independence” and for “social and economic cooperation” among the various Italian states in existence at the time. There is a certain inevitability in the word risorgimento. In the words of Mazzini, the philosopher of the risorgimento, similar ‘language, custom, tendencies and capacity’ are the elements that produce a unified national culture. The standard canon passed down to generations of Italian school children is, thus, that the risorgimento was a noble and successful movement to produce that national culture.

The other side of the story, the anti-Risorgimento, is not widely known nor transmitted as part of the canonical version of the unification of the nation. The great Austrian diplomat, Metternich, referred to “Italy” as “little more than a geographical expression.” Even Massimo d’Azeglio’s famous line (uttered in the 1860’s after the Kingdom of Italy had been proclaimed)—“We have made Italy; now we have to make Italians”—can be seen as a concession that the similarities of northern and southern "language, custom, tendencies and capacity" might be profoundly tricky to work with. They were —and still are.

Who was against the unification of Italy? Obviously, the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, with its capital at Naples. It is true that King Ferdinand II of Naples sent troops to help the Savoy Kingdom of Piedmont and Sardinia against Austria in 1848 (in what is called the First War of Independence), but he had second thoughts and recalled them, leaving the northern armies to go it along and lose. Ferdinand probably changed his mind because of the presence of another great and powerful anti-Risorgimento party, the Vatican States. In those days, that did not mean a tiny bit of land with a nice church (ok, it’s more than nice) on the banks of the Tiber. It meant most of central Italy. The Vatican States were a thousand-year-old powerful nation, had fielded armies in the past and, later, carried on modern diplomacy. The head of state, the Pope, could make or break kings and emperors and often did. This was “the temporal power of the church,” a power that Ferdinand was unwilling to confront; he would not help bring about the end of that “temporal power,” which was necessary if Italy was to be united. Obviously, the Vatican, itself, was against any movement that might lead to its demise as a powerful state, as were the Catholic nations, Spain and France. To all of these parties, the Risorgimento was not at all a high-minded attempt to create cultural unity, but a gigantic land-grab by the Savoy Kingdom of Piedmont and Sardinia. To them, the new Kingdom of Italy was simply the result of an invasion by a usurping power, as illegitimate as Napoleon had been. Thus, for a number of years in the 1860s, until the annexation of Rome, itself, to the nation, there was a strong anti-Risorgimento "legitimist" movement centered in Rome, where the Pope was king and where the ex-Bourbon court of Naples still conducted a government in exile, waiting to be restored.

Much of the 1860s in Italy was taken up with the task of combating “banditry” (or brigandage) in the south in order to solidify the unity of the nation. That is the version handed down to generations of Italians, but the decade remains obscure in the minds of many. Since one man’s “bandit” is another man’s “resistance fighter,” it’s a good idea to know just what “bandit” meant in late 19th-century Italy.

First of all, there have always been real bandits in the south, bands of roving criminals who lived outside the law. Whether they were Robin Hoods resisting an evil king or simply evil bastards who liked to rob and kill is irrelevant. They have always existed and, indeed, for centuries have often sold themselves to the highest bidder in one war or another. But “combating bandits in the south in order to solidify the unity of the nation” didn't mean those people; it meant anyone who resisted the unity of the new nation.

Who were they? For one, the exiled Bourbons. After capitulation at the siege of Gaeta in February 1861, the king and queen, many in the government as well as a number of officers and soldiers in the Bourbon army went to Rome where they lived as guests of the Pope. (The ex-king of Naples, Francis II, disbanded his government-in-exile in 1867.) [See these entries: (1) and (2) on the presence of the Bourbon royal family in Rome.] Then, there was the large body of peasants in the south, those who had welcomed Garibaldi as an egalitarian revolutionary and who looked forward to an end of the last absolute monarchy in Europe as well as the end of the almost feudal agrarian system where the absentee elite owned the land and peasants worked it for them. Garibaldi handed over his conquests (all of southern Italy) to the king, Victor Emanuel II of Piedmont and Sardinia, and went home, no doubt thinking that political rulers of the new Italy would keep his egalitarian promises for him. (Garibaldi was a superb commander of men on the field of battle, but all he knew of politics was that he was pretty sure it started with the letter “P”.) Then, you had the real bandits, many of whom had fought for Garibaldi and who now hoped for commissions in the new Italian National Guard. None of that happened, and, thus, you had an angry population, disappointed with the outcome of the revolution, encouraged by Bourbons in exile, themselves bolstered by the wishful thinking of the Vatican and Catholic nations of Europe that the new Italy would not last.

Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano & the Last Caravaggio

Palazzo Zevallos, the site of the main Intesa Bank on via Toledo has a remarkable history, both architecturally and culturally. You'd really need one of those H.G. Wells The Time Machine time-lapse gizmos so you could watch a film of all 370 years of the existence of the building in a few minutes. You'd see workers scurrying about in a blur to put up the prolific Cosimo Fanzago's original Baroque marvel back in 1639—the ornate facade, sumptuous portal in marble and piperno, the tiered internal courtyard, etc.; then see all the changes—the fires and reconstruction on two occasions (Masaniello's Revoltin 1647 and the 1799 Neapolitan Republic) and see all the architectural add-ons and take-aways as the building changed hands a dozen times in all those years.

The most significant change was in the 1920s, when it became the property of theBanca Commerciale Italiana (now Banca Intesa). Architect Luigi Platania adapted the building to its new function as a bank: the internal courtyard was transformed and made into a public reception room; the mezzanine was opened up with a series of art nouveau-style balconies, and the large empty space was covered by a glass roof in the floral style of the time. Outdoors became indoors. The only part of the building that retains the 17th-century Baroque characteristics of the original Fanzago design is the splendid entrance (image, right). Recent work has restored the 1920s remake of the interior: veined marble, wood, explosive colors. There really is a soft glow to the place as you walk in.

Culturally, the most important change is that the piano nobile of the building (no, not a royal musical instrument, but rather the floor above the ground floor in large old buildings in Italy, where the view was better!) has been transformed into an art gallery. There are significant works by Gaspar van Wittel and landscapes by Pitloo of the Posillipo School; the centerpiece of the collection, however, is the last work of that unhappy and angry genius, Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio.

The work is Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, done in 1610 in Naples. It depicts the brutal murder of Ursula by the king of the Huns. The truly interesting thing in the painting—that which draws the eye away from even the central act and grisly theme of the painting, itself—is that it contains another of Caravaggio's self-portraits; he has gone from his youthful rendition of himself as a delicate Bacchus, and later as the severed head of Goliath, to this—witness to a foul crime. He is one of only five figures in the painting, seen standing behind Ursula with utter anguish on his face, in torment to the point, perhaps, of only wishing release from the travail that was, indeed, his own life. That came to pass a short time later when he died ill and alone on the way to Rome.

The painting ended up in the collection of the Banca Intesa after many years of wandering, indeed after many years of debate over whether or not it was even a genuine Caravaggio. As recently as 1963 it was displayed in Naples with a question-marked ascription to Mattia Preti. Scholarly opinion has now decided that it is the real thing. (I'm not sure what the problem was; maybe Ursula looks too serene—stunned but serene.) Restoration was done in 2003/4 at the IstitutoCentrale per il Restauro in Rome. It confirmed the painting’s authenticity beyond doubt and restored the original dimensions (modified by an enlargement carried out probably in the 18th century).

Martyrdom of Saint Ursula is on permanent display in the Banca Intesa, but has toured to other locations, notably theBorghese Gallery of Rome, the National Gallery in London, the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya in Barcelona, and theRijksmuseum of Amsterdam.

The Church of Gesù Vecchio

The church of Gesù Vecchio (old) is not nearly as well-known or as visible as the almost homonymous Gesù Nuovo (new) near Santa Chiara. Gesù Vecchio is, indeed, not all that easy to find, yet it is worth the hunt. Construction was started in 1554, and in 1624 it was finished—church, Jesuit college, and refectory. A number of architects oversaw the work during those years. Subsequently, various well-known architects of the Neapolitan Baroque made additions to both church and college, including Cosimo Fanzago. The facade of the church was rebuilt in the late 1600s by Giovan Domenico Vinaccia, and a  library was added in 1700. The Jesuit order was expelled from Naples in 1767; the college and much of the premises were then converted to a Royal College and then made part of the Frederick II University of Naples.

Today, the main entrance to the university library is from via Mezzocannone, the main north-south street leading up the hill to Piazza San Domenico Maggiore. You enter into a large courtyard lined with statues; that courtyard was originally part of the original Jesuit college. New university buildings were added to the north along via Mezzocannone in 1897-1908 such that, from a distance, the entire street looks lined by a single solid building on the east side. The original entrance to the Jesuit premises are on what is today a little used back parallel street to the east in back of the main university building; the entrance to the church of Gesù Vecchio, itself, is on that same street, adjacent to the original courtyard.

(Idid say it was hard to find!)

The church houses art work by Battistello Caracciolo, Marco Pino da Siena, Girolamo Cenatiempo, and Cesare Fracanzano, among others. The main altar (photo, above) is a striking display of the Neapolitan Baroque: there are ten sculpted figures seated on the balustrades of a double stairway with their gazes directed at St. Francis Borgia at the top, one of the early Superior Generals of the Society of Jesus (the "Jesuits") and the one to whom the church was dedicated. The entire display was the work of two sculptors from Carrara in about 1670, Bartolomeo and Pietro Ghetti. (The former is not to be confused with the Renaissance painter of the same name).

Interestingly the "old" church is newer than the "new" church. The church of Gesù Nuovo was consecrated as a house of worship in 1601 (it had earlier been a private residence). Gesù Vecchio opened to the faithful in 1625, but didn't start calling itself the "old" church until the 1700s, maybe because it was in the old historic center, while Gesù Nuovo is just outside of it. Maybe they flipped a coin. I don't know.

THE ISOLYMPIC GAMES

The somewhat less than irresistible force of underground train construction in Naples has once again run into the immovable (but not indestructible) object of an ancient Roman archaeological site. So far it’s a tie, but I suspect than when the dust has cleared, the new Duomo metro station at Piazza Nicola Amore will incorporate (as the metro has done elsewhere) at least part of the old ruins, in this case, the monument complex of the Isolympic Augustan Roman Italic Games. Construction now seems to have picked up again, and a lot of archaeological pieces have been moved to the small metro-museumbeneath the main National Archaeological Museum.

Historian Strabo mentions the games of Neapolis and says that they "rivaled the most famous games of Greece." The recent excavations have uncovered parts of the portico and temple associated with the games, which were started by Augustus Caesar in 2 AD. Those structures were found on top of earlier ones put up in the second century BC as part of a general renovation of the stretch of beach before the old southern wall of Greco-Roman Naples.

Suetonius tells us that the August One was quite a fan:

...he watched the proceedings intently; either to avoid the bad reputation earned by Julius Caesar for reading letters or petitions, and answering them, during such performances, or just to enjoy the fun, as he frankly admitted doing. ...His chief delight was to watch boxing…

The prefix iso- means “same as” and thus proclaims the importance of the games by declaring them equal to those of the Greeks. Indeed, archaeologists have actually found the inscription, "We are the Roman Augustan games equal to the [games] in Olympia." The inscription was one of 400 pieces of Greek-inscribed marble recovered from in front of thetemple of Augustus.

Augustus chose the very Hellenic town of Neapolis for the games. They were held every four years and featured equestrian, athletic, and musical contests. The equestrian contests included horseback races, and races of chariots drawn by teams of two and four horses. The athletic contests included stadium races, pentathlon, wrestling, boxing, pancratium (mixed—anything goes—combat), an armed race (I’m afraid to ask!), and acrobatics. The athletes, who came from all over the Mediterranean, competed in their age groups. Women also took part in the contests.

The winners in the athletic contests received a wheat-stalk wreath, but there were also prizes in money for the musical and theater contests, which included flute, kithara (or ‘cithara,’ a seven-stringed lyre; the name is the origin of the word ‘guitar’), poetry, comedy, tragedy, and pantomime. The Isolympic games were still being celebrated in the second half of the third century AD, when the temple and the portico were renovated for the last time.

There are three slabs on display in the museum (photo, above) and date from the late first century AD and bear lists of winners of several editions of the games. The winners came from Asia Minor and Egypt. The only Neapolitan winner may have been one Julius Valerianus —“from Neapolis” (although other towns named Neapolis existed in the Greek and Roman world).

On the first slab, one can still read the year in which the games were held (94 AD) and the names of the agonothetai(the presidents and organizers of the games). The second slab lists winners of athletic games. The program includes, as well, a female contest. On the third slab, the name of the reigning emperor (Domitian?) stands out in a list of authors of eulogies to Augustus and his successors.

La Bersagliera restaurant in Neapolitan movies

La Bersagliera restaurant is the location of some movies where, Ingrid Bergman in “Viaggio in Italia”, Marcello Mastroianni and Jack Lemmon in “Maccheroni”, had dinner.

In the movie “Viaggio in Italia”, Katherine and Alex Joyce, an english couple arrived in Naples  to sell a house inherited. The couple had a short time of crisis and looked around individually the reality: she looked for the historical assets, while he looked for the entertainment. An altercation brought them near to divorce. They had a short tour in Pompey where Katherine was shocked by the exhumation of a couple interred into the lava. They were coming back home when they came across in a religious procession and were lost; They looked around and finally they met up again

in a hug that introduce the new course of their relationship.

La Bersagliera restaurant is located in one of the most suggestive place of Naples. In 1919 madame Emilia Del Tufo, the bersagliera, started with the restaurant. She cooked for her family and sailors, very soon she earned the taste of many customers.

La Bersagliera restaurant has become one of the most famous restaurant of Naples and not only is hosting habitual customers but also very important person.

Via Antiniana & a Roman Bridge to Vomero

In Naples, one expects to find Roman and earlier Greek ruins at sea level; indeed, the discovery of large-scale structures and even of ships in the ancient Roman port has led to considerable delay in the construction of the new underground train line, the metropolitana. (It was, of course, that construction that led to the discoveries in the first place.)

It is less known that the Romans built on the Vomero hill above and behind the main body of the city. Before the Romans cut through the Posillipo hill with the tunnel now popularly called the “Neapolitan Crypt” for an easy (once you got the tunnel dug!) sea-level passage out of the city to the west, the only road from Naples to Pozzuoli was the Via Antiniana (the etymology of the name is unknown). It was a hill climber and a major demonstration of something the Romans did very well in their Imperial Age —road building.

At the Neapolitan end, the via Antiniana started at the center of Neapolis and passed through a gate in the western wall. (All of the following points of reference are modern names.) It then climbed the steep salita [ascent] Tarsia, went pastPiazza Mazzini and up via Salvator Rosa and its extension, via Cerra; it skirted around and below the highpoint of the hill (where the Sant’Elmo castle stands) and moved across in a straight line to the ridge along via Belvedere and along the top of Vomero, east to west, to drop down at the other end of Vomero onto the plain that led to the via Domiziana and Pozzuoli. The Via Antiniana was rebuilt as late as 100 A.D. There are still visible remnants of the roadbed (basolato) on the Vomero (at Piazza degli Artisti), and some paving stones, called basoli, have been used over the centuries in structures built in the area, including the villa Salve (also known as the villa Winspeare). At the bottom of the Vomero on the Pozzuoli side, several bits of the road are preserved in the excavated thermal baths on via Terracina near the Fair Grounds (theMostra d’Oltremare) and on the grounds of the Mostra, itself.

During the excavation for the Salvator Rosa metro station (approximately half-way up the hill on via Salvator Rosa), remains were found of a bridge-viaduct of the Via Antiniana (photo, top). Some of that structure has been restored as an archaeological site and may be viewed. The structure is believed to have consisted of seven arches. It was built in reticulated brickwork; the lintels of the arches consisted of slabs, called bipedal bricks, (60 cm—23.6 inches—on a side) clamped into the back vaults. The barrel vaults were built with a cast of cement in a wooden framework supported by centerings. A system of large brackets in piperno rock anchored to the high part of the walls was used to hook scaffolding for the maintenance of the viaduct. Parts of the bridge were actually incorporated into an 18th-century building, itself torn down during the excavations for the new train line.

City Walls, Piazza Mercato, Carmine Church & the Porta Capuana Castle

If by "city walls" you mean the ancient Greek or Roman ones that surrounded Neapolis, there is nothing left of those above ground in modern Naples. There are, however, some fragments that have been excavated and left open for viewing; the most prominent one is the section of the Greek wall visible at Piazza Bellini. The rest has disappeared under—in some cases—natural catastrophe, such as mudslides (a prominent one occurred in the sixth century), or was simply torn down or built over in the typically palimpsest approach to urban planning that has characterized Naples in its long history. 

The medieval walls are a different story. Starting with the Angevins in the 14th–century and continuing well into the Spanish and even Bourbon periods in Naples, the protective wall around Naples was constantly under some phase of construction and renewal. That changed in the late 19th– and early 20th–century, during the Risanamento—the great urban renewal of the city. Massive portions of the medieval walls were torn down; some bits were left standing as historical markers, and segments of the wall were simply incorporated into modern buildings. 

The most obvious historical marker is the part of the wall, fortress and pillars (photo, left) at what used to be the south-east corner of the city wall across fromPiazza Mercato and the Church of the Carmine (photo below, left). There is not much left of the fortress, and the ruins you see are often referred to simply as "part of the old wall down by the port". In reality, this is what remains of the Castello del Carmine, now on the main road that runs east along the industrial port of Naples. It was built by the Angevin ruler, Charles III of Durazzo, in the 1380s. It was a true fortress and at the center of battles during the Angevin and subsequent Aragoneseperiod. It was expanded, as well, under the Spanish in the 1560s. It was also one of the strongholds of conspirators during Masaniello's revolt, which led to a very short-lived (5 days!) first "Neapolitan Republic" in 1647. It played a strategic role, as well, in later military campaigns, namely the Neapolitan revolution of 1799 and the Bourbon resistance to the army of Garibaldi in 1860. The pillars seen in the photo are all that remain of the Carmine Gate, one of the main entrances into the city along the south wall in the late Middle Ages. The structure was demolished in the early 20th century to make room for road expansion along the port.

Directly across the street is Church of Santa Maria del Carmine (photo, left) at one end ofPiazza Mercato (Market Square), one of the most historic sites in Naples. The church itself was founded in the 12th century by Carmelite monks driven from the Holy Land in the Crusades. The historic name of Piazza Mercato is Piazza Moricino. It was the site in 1268 of the execution of Corradino, the last Hohenstaufen pretender to the throne of the kingdom of Naples, at the hands of Charles I of Anjou, thus beginning the important Angevin reign of the kingdom. In 1647 the square was also the site of battles between rebels and royal troops during Masaniello's Revolt, and in 1799 the scene of the mass execution of leaders of the Neapolitan Republic. 

Church of the Annunziata

Neapolitan folk tradition says that the origin of the surname "Esposito" is to be found in the past participle of the verb "esporre", that is, "esposto", meaning "exposed" or "put out for display". Thus, originally, so the story goes, abandoned children—left perhaps in a church—were "exposed" and those with that surname can be traced back to a foundling at some point. 

Generally, infants who were abandoned in Naples were left on the premises of the Church of the Annunziata (photo) in the old section of town, not too far from today's Piazza Garibaldi and the main train station. Indeed, there are also a great number of people in the Naples phone book with the surname "Annunziata," so that, too, may have a similar etymology. I have also heard the strange, quaint (?) —definitely weird—tale that on the premises of the Church of the Annunziata, which included a large orphanage, there was at one time a small, revolving Ferris-wheel-type affair with basket-cribs in place around the perimeter that each held a child. Periodically, the wheel would be put out and if you wanted a child, you could "spin the wheel," so to speak, and look at what was available. (I don't know if that is a true story, but that is the way I heard it). 

[As a matter of fact—this written some time later—that is not true, but the real story is just as fascinating. See #2, below.]

The Annunziata, itself, goes back to the early 1300s and has always been, in one form or another, an orphanage. By the mid 1600s, it was a full-fledged home, church, hospital, and school for such children. In the 1750s, under Charles III, the entire premises were completely remodeled by a team of architects that included Ferdinando Fuga, who built the giantRoyal Hospice for the Poor, and Luigi Vanvitelli. The façade of the church is by Vanvitelli, as is the dome. The church interior is highly ornamental and includes works, for example, by Giuseppe Sanmartino, the sculptor of the famed Veiled Christ within the Sansevero Chapel in Naples. 

Traditionally, children raised by the Annunziata, surviving the staggering infant mortality rate of earlier times, were called "children of the Madonna" and, in a sense, there attached to them a certain aura of privilege—as if they lived in a state of grace. I have read that the Annunziata continued to function as an orphanage until the 1950s, at which time state social services took over the task. 

Above, I refer to the Church of the Annunziata and a "revolving Ferris-wheel-type affair with basket-cribs in place around the perimeter that each held a child"—well, that was wrong. Close, but wrong. 

I went to the Church of the Annunziata this morning and was happy to note that it is now the site of a quasi-permanent historical display sponsored by the cultural powers-that-be in the city government. As well, the church and premises have been "adopted" by enthusiastic and diligent pupils of two local elementary school. (This is not uncommon in Naples. The Church of the Incoronata is another such example.) The children have filled the entrance to the Annunziata with large displays boards of snapshots, drawings, poetry, handwritten stories of the church, explanations of the traditions surrounding the long history of the church, papier maché models of the façade, and even one almost life-sized cardboard replica of the item I misdescribed earlier, called la ruota—the wheel. 

The "wheel" (photo) in question is actually a revolving single-basket contraption—somewhat like a "lazy Susan"—contained within a wooden frame about the size of a large chest of drawers. It was embedded in the wall of the front of the church with one side open to the street and the other within the church, like an automatic teller machine (to make an utterly inappropriate comparison!) Women who wanted to leave a child could open, from the street side, the compartment with the revolving basket, then put the infant inside and turn the device so that the basket moved around to the inside of the church where a nun was waiting. The current display in the room inside the church shows the "wheel," a small wash basin where the new arrivals were bathed, and a register—a book open to pages from the 1600s, the entries of which note the arrival and the sex and general physical condition of the infant. This unusual set-up guaranteed the anonymity of the woman since there was a wall between her and whoever accepted the infant on the other side. It was also, presumably, a kinder way to abandon a newborn child—that is, directly into the hands of someone who would care for it.

Naples, a Haven of Hand Work

NAPLES, Italy — In a basement room on a street where motor bikes and honking horns drown out even the insistent church bells, Davide Tofani is working on a typical Neapolitan soft jacket. “When I make a suit, it is like shaping a second skin of my customer,” the tailor says. “I cannot imagine making a suit without knowing the body that will use it.”

Over the last century, the personal tailor, working one to one with a client, has become as symbolic of Naples as its Roman sculptures and Baroque churches. Many men socializing with friends on the city streets or sitting on public benches wear elegant jackets, in tweed or linen, lightweight, unstructured — and indisputably tailor made.

And the Neapolitan tailors seem to be more successful than the chaotic city itself in moving further into the 21st century. Like the waters of the bay that rise and fall along the coastline, they have had good years and bad. But, today, the bespoke suit is back and doing well, even against the challenge of factory-made ready to wear.

To show that the tide of tailoring has turned, the big names in Naples have opened stores around the world. They also fly experts to their clients or offer them a home-away-from-home welcome in Italy.

Rubinacci is one of those names. The store here is above Via Chiaia in part of the historic Palazzo Cellamare, with its imposing staircase and history of lodging the artist Caravaggio. The tailors, who work by hand in rooms above the shop, have views of the vast stone building right down to the swell of the sea in the bay.

Next on THE NEW YORK TIMES

THE CRYPTA NEAPOLITANA

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Oplontis

Greek historian and geographer, Strabo (63 BC – 24 AD), wrote that the stretch of Italian coast from Cape Miseno to Sorrento—the Gulf of Naples—seemed a single city, so strewn was it with luxurious villas and suburbs of the main city of Naples. The eastern end of the bay, before the land swings out to form the Sorrentine peninsula, is of course known today as the site of two towns that met their doom in the great eruption of Vesuvius in 79 a.d., Pompeii and Heculaneum.

There is a third, lesser–known, and little–excavated town: Oplontis. It lies beneath the modern–day town of Torre Annunziata, such a short distance from Pompeii that it was almost certainly a suburb of that larger town and probably the port for Pompeii, so close is it to the sea. 

The only large, significant excavation at Oplontis is the "Villa of Poppaea," referring to Poppaea Sabina, Nero's second wife. That is at least a possible conclusion from an amphora fragment bearing the name "Secundus," one of Poppaea's servants. In any event, it was almost certainly an imperial residence, opulently equipped as it was with a 60 x 15-meter swimming pool, a large number of rooms, intervening gardens and courtyards, and murals on the walls that are still splendid. Some of the extant murals are beautiful examples of the so-called "second Pompeian style," depicting artificial architecture on the walls; that is, painted windows opened onto painted sea or landscape or onto painted rows of columns that fade away from the viewer through the use of perspective, all to give the illusion of space. It was, no doubt, one of the villas that impressed Strabo so much.

The existence of such a regal residence is, in fact, noted in the Tabula Peuteringiana, a medieval copy of a Roman road map. The villa and whatever other structures made up the small town of Oplontis were buried in the great eruption, however, and it wasn't until the 1500s that the Spanish rulers of the Kingdom of Naples came across the ruins of the villa while building an aqueduct. And it was not until the mid-1700s that further excavation was undertaken in the same wave of archaeological interest that spurred Charles III and then his son, Ferdinand IV, to lay bare such antiquities as Pompeii and Herculaneum. Yet, Oplontis remained, and remains, relatively unknown; the swimming pool wasn't uncovered until the 1970s and the site, itself, was not open to public visits until the early 1980s. The excavation is not complete and never will be, since Oplontis, like Herculaneum, sits beneath a modern town. To get into the site, you walk down a ramp until you are at ground level, 79 a.d. (about 30 feet below the modern streets and buildings that surround Oplontis). 

By far the most striking thing about Oplontis is what you don't find —human remains. And there are no lava molds of people huddled together in death, as there are at Pompeii. The Villa Poppaea was deserted when Vesuvius erupted. In the wake of an earthquake that damaged the town and villa severely in the decade before the great eruption, people had moved away so reconstruction could take place. Presumably, the residents were elsewhere, making typical complaints about how it took the Egyptians less time to build the pyramids than it does for us Romans to put a few bricks back in place, when real disaster struck. 

CAPODIMONTE: National Art Gallery of Naples

The current collection of the Capodimonte National Art Gallery of Naples comprises some 1700 paintings and other objects of arts, including works by Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Raphael, Caravaggio, and Botticelli. As noted above, the premises started life as one of the four Bourbon Royal Palaces. It was a royal residence, but one particularly well stocked with art since the first Bourbon monarch, Charles III, inherited a vast collection from his mother Elisabeth Farnese. (That collection, in turn, had been assembled from various Farnese estates in Parma and Piacenza and the Palazzo Farnese in Rome, and that latter collection had been started by Alessandro Farnese (later Pope Paul III - 1468-1549). Some portions of the inherited Farnese collection are elsewhere in Naples at the Archaeological museum.) The Farnese collection plus later additions under the Bourbons are the nucleus of the gallery.

During the period of French rule under Murat (1806-1815) the entire collection was moved to the premises of what was then the Frederick II university (now the National Archaeological Museum). At the unification of Italy in 1861, Bourbon properties, including the Capodimonte palace, "defaulted" to the new dynastic rulers of united Italy, the House of Savoy, who donated it all (premises plus works of art contained therein) to the state in 1920. The museum houses, as well, many items not part of the original core collections, such as Egyptian, early Italic, works moved from other Bourbon palaces (such as the palace at Portici), donated private collections, a number of religious items from churches in southern Italy and Sicily, modern works of art (such as Andy Warhol's "Vesuvius") as well as a significant number of works of the so-called Neapolitan School of the 19th century. There are also sections for armor, gold- and silverwork, and examples of other decorative arts, including Capodimonte porcelain. Structurally, the building is enormous (image at top of page), with dozens of exhibition spaces and mezzanines spread over three floors

ARCHAEOLOGICAL PARK OF THE FLEGREI FIELDS

List of cultural institutes and places and other properties and / or complexes assigned:

- Amphitheater of Cuma - Bacoli (Naples)

- Amphitheater of Liternum - Giugliano in Campania (Naples)

- Flavian Amphitheater, Puteoli - Pozzuoli (Naples)

- Cento Camerelle, Bauli - Bacoli (Naples)

- Cave of the Dragonara, Misenum - Bacoli (Naples)

- Grotta di Cocceio - Pozzuoli (Naples)

- Hypogens of the Caiazzo Fund, sector of the Puteoli necropolis - Pozzuoli (Naples)

- Archaeological Museum of the Phlegraean Fields in the Castle of Baia - Bacoli (Naples)

- San Vito Necropolis, sector of the Puteoli necropolis - Pozzuoli (Naples)

- Necropolis of Cappella, Misenum - Monte di Procida (Naples)

- Necropolis of Via Celle, sector of the Puteoli necropolis - Pozzuoli (Naples)

- Archaeological Park of the Terme di Baia - Bacoli (Naples)

- Archaeological Park of Cuma - Pozzuoli (Naples)

- Liternum Archaeological Park - Giugliano in Campania (Naples)

- Underwater Archaeological Park of Baia - Bacoli (Naples)

- Monumental Park of Baia - Bacoli (Naples)

- Piscina Mirabilis, Misenum - Bacoli (Naples)

- Sacello degli Augustali, Misenum - Bacoli (Naples)

- Stadio di Antonino Pio, Puteoli - Pozzuoli (Naples)

- Roman Theater, Misenum - Bacoli (Naples)

- Temple of Diana, Baia - Bacoli (Naples)

- Temple of Venus, Baia - Bacoli (Naples)

- Temple of Apollo, Lake Avernus - Pozzuoli (Naples)

- Temple of Serapis, Puteoli - Pozzuoli (Naples)

- Tomb of Agrippina, Bauli - Bacoli (Naples)

Info:

Director: dott.ssa Anna IMPONENTE - Interim 

Municipality: Naples 

Province: NA 

Region: Campania 

Telephone: .... 

Email: pa-fleg@beniculturali.it 

Certified email: mbac-pa-fleg@mailcert.beniculturali.it 

 find out how to get there

The aim of this map is for planning achaeological trips ad learn about Phlaegraean Fields roman's remains. All places of interest were taken from the official documentation of the Superintendence.

Legend: RED: Public and urban structures

BLUE: Submerged/Flooded structures

CYAN: Water ducts and cisterns / tanks

YELLOW: Suburban villas

PURPLE: Necropolis, tombs and grottos 

Bourbon Tunnel

Conceived of by Ferdinand II in 1853 as an escape route from the Royal Palace that was never completed, the Bourbon Tunnel is part of the Carmignano Aqueduct system. Built in the early 17th century, the aqueduct supplied water to the Monte di Dio district until 1866. During WWII, this cavernous structure served as an air raid shelter and military hospital, providing aid and protection to some 10,000 Neapolitans. After the war, the tunnel was used an impound lot until the 1970s.

The Bourbon Tunnel was opened to the public in October 2010 after five years of cleaning and restoration work by the Associazione Culturale Borbonica Sotteranea. Visits to the Bourbon Tunnel are by guided tour only.

Guided Tours of the Bourbon Tunnel

Standard Tour

Where: the tour starts at both entrances, Via Morelli, 40 (inside Morelli car parking) and Vico del Grottone, 4. Tours starting at Vico del Grottone will descend approximately 30 meters via an 18th century staircase.

When: Friday through Sunday and Holidays at 10:00 – 12:00 – 15:30 – 17:30

Duration: Approximately 1 hour and 15 minutes

How Much: €10,00

Reservations are not required

Adventure Tour

This tour takes visitors by raft through the waters of the lowest part of the aqueduct. Children under 10 not allowed.

Where: Via Morelli, 40 (inside Morelli car parking)

When: Saturday and Sunday at 10:00 – 12:00 – 15:30 – 17:30

Duration: Approximately 1 hour and 20 minutes

Reservations Required

Speleo Tour

For more adventurous visitors and caving enthusiasts, with their own own lighted helmet, overalls and gloves, visitors will crawl along the ground through aqueduct tunnels to reach the most beautiful cisterns still full of water. Then, with a personal harness, visitors can fly upon a cistern via a zip-line. Children under 18 are not allowed and the tour is not recommended for claustrophobic people, persons with motor disabilities, or anyone weighing over 100 kg.

Where: Vico del Grottone, 4

When: Saturday and Sunday at 1100- 1600

Duration: Approximately 2 hours and 30 minutes

Reservations Required

Bookings for all tours can be made online or to +393662484151 – 0817645808 or mail@tunnelborbonico.info

Open-air museum "tours through art"

The strong religious tradition is really obvious from the number of big and small churches that you find one after the other, each with their own special atmosphere and individual architectural style. 

Naples itself is a real open-air museum. The ancient buildings that people still live in, the thousands of churches and the museums leading from the centre to the outskirts trace a historical and cultural profile which is unique to this city. 

There are lots of different tours you can take. The site suggests an itinerary that takes you through the old part of the city but stops at various points to admire reminders of a much more recent past. 

Arco Felice, Old & New

There really is a part of Naples called Arco Felice (Happy Arch!). It's actually part of the town of Pozzuoli and is adjacent to Bacoli along the beach almost to Baia as you approach the western end of the Gulf of Naples along the sea-side. It was, in fact, a port in ancient times, serving Cuma. Currently, the population is about 10,000. Arco Felice is smack in the middle of all the Flegrean lakes of mythology: Fusaro, Averno and Lucrino. 

The old arch, itself (photo, right) is a strange item. I have passed beneath it many times, and I think I must have been under the impression that it had been at one time part of a Roman aqueduct, but that is not the case. (That the road beneath such an ancient structure is still kept up and used is, in itself, remarkable.) 

The arch spans an artificial gap in Mt. Grillo. That gap was one of those works planned by emperor Domitian in 95 AD as part of general construction of the Via Domiziana road to connect Rome and Naples. Road construction in ancient Rome (and, indeed, in modern Italy) worked on the principle of "Why go around it when you can go through it? Thus, they banged through part of the mountain and built two sturdy cement sustaining walls in order to support the steep sides of the gap. To connect one side with the other, they built a wall lined with brick, with cement supports and with an internal passage and arched vault. The imposing structure is 20 meters high and 6 meters wide. 

Again, nothing has been found along the arch or in the walls on the hills on either side to indicate that the passage was ever used to convey water. Immediately on the right as you pass the arch there is an entrance to an underground space. There are additional such spaces on the left. The base of the arch still conserves the ancient Roman basalt. Farther into the valley on the left side of the road you can also see the Cuma-side entrance to the Grotto of Cocceius. The arch is no longer really that close to the part of town called Arco Felice; the arch, itself, is best approached from the large via Domiziana highway as it passes by Lake Averno. There is a turn to the left, and you follow signs directing you to Cuma. The arch was a portal to Cuma in Roman times; the Romans got to Cuma the same way —leave Naples, go up the Domiziana, hang a left after the lake and go through the arch.

I don't know how those 10,000 Happy Archers feel about themselves; that is, are they happier than residents of such places in Italy as Belgioioso (Beautifully Joyful)? Or of the many towns in the world called, simply, Happy Valley? Or of Intercourse, Pennsylvania? Who knows, but presumably, those folks are all happier than the people in Hell (in the US state of Michigan), Gravesend (in the UK), or Purgatorio (in the Italian province of Salerno). Whatever the case, the 10,000 are very optimistic, for they have chosen to live on the slopes of Monte Nuovo (New Mountain) (photo, right), the youngest volcano in Europe. It was born in a matter of days, beginning on the morning of September 29, 1538. It has not been active since that time, and they tell me that if you call the Seismic Jitters Hot-Line, you get a reassuring recording that says, "What are you worried about? Nothing can go wrong...go wrong...go wro....

Naples, the Historic Center

Visiting Naples's historic center means traveling through twenty centuries of history. The design of its streets, piazzas, churches, monuments and public buildings and castles constitute a jewel box of artistic and historical treasures of exceptional importance, so much so that together, they earned their spot on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1995. 

Extending over 720 hectares, the historic center of Naples is the largest historic center in all of Europe, and includes testimonies from diverse styles and periods – from its foundation in the 8th Century B.C. as the Greek colony Neapolis, to its subsequent domination by the Romans, and from the Swabian-Norman era to the Reign of the Anjous, and finally from its time under the Aragonese Empire, the Kings of France,  to the period of Unification under Garibaldi and the resulting Kingdom of Italy. 

Very little survives today of the original Greek city, although such remains traceable in the defensive walls of the northeastern section of the city, and in a few other points of interest, among which is Via Mezzocannone. More numerous, then, are the archaeological remains from the Roman Age, when the new city Neapolis was built next to the old city, Paleopolis. Cemeteries, catacombs and various finds can be seen in the museums and archaeological sites of Naples, including in the area of San Lorenzo Maggiore. 

The fall of the Roman Empire saw the eventual construction of imposing churches like the Basilica of San Gennaro in the colorful Sanità neighborhood. San Gennaro was constructed around the 5th Century, near the Catacombs that are also named for the city’s Patron Saint. 

The most famous structure from the Swabian-Norman period is, on the other hand, the majestic Castello dell’Ovo, which was planted on top of a previous Roman villa, that of Lucio Licinio Lucullo to be exact. Situated on the Island of Megaride, today the Castle is the seat of important expositions and cultural events, offering, among other details, a splendid view of the Bay of Naples, dominated by the Volcano Vesuvius. 

The next epoch – that of the rule of the Angevin Dynasty – was one of great expansion,and  bequeathed to the city of Naples works of immense beauty. Many of them are in the Provincial-Gothic style that predominated at the time. Of these, visitors should not skip seeing the new Cathedral that preserves the celebrated Chapel of the Treasury of San Gennaro; the Churches of San Lorenzo Maggiore, San Domenico Maggiore and Santa Chiara, with the magnificent Cloister of the Clarisse; the Castel Nuovo (also called “Il Maschio Angioino”); the fortress and noble residence of Castel Capuano; and the Palazzo of the Prince of Taranto. 

The Aragonese dominion brought with it important defensive fortifications, as well as the Palazzo Reale or Royal Palace, which rose up sometime after 1600. The Palace is one of the elements framing Piazza del Plebiscito and the Basilica of San Francesco di Paola, parts of which resemble Rome’s Pantheon. Today it houses one of the largest libraries in southern Italy, the Vittorio Emanuele III National Library; before, several Spanish and Austrian Viceroys had inhabited it, as had the Bourbon rulers and after, the Savoys.  The Palace is, obviously, the geographic and symbolic center of power and of some of Naples’s most important historical happenings. 

The 19th Century added to the city’s endowments with a far-reaching reorganization of spaces and of the city’s “floorplan,” which helped to render Naples the modern metropolis that we know today. It is a metropolis that, like no other, knows how to fuse the ancient and modern, along with its artistic and historic treasures, with the unforgettable beauty of its natural scenery, in which the city’s entirety is framed. What this city does not know, with its unique, peculiar, and ancient soul, is time, or boundaries.

Superb reconstruction of 3D Vesuvius eruption of August 24, 79 dC

Magnífica reconstrucción de la erupción del Vesubio en 3D del 24 de agosto, 79 dC

Hervorragende Rekonstruktion von 3D Vesuv Eruption vom 24. August, 79 dC