This collection of essays evolved out of a four-day interdisciplinary and multimedia conference on Naples held in New York in 2011 and co-organised by the Hofstra Cultural Center and the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò at New York University. As Pellegrino D'Acierno notes in his introduction, the conference had ‘sought to create a counter-requiem’ (p. 1) to the doom-laden images of Naples that were circumnavigating the globe at the time. The present book takes a step further by attempting to systematically grapple with the conceptual and experiential challenges posed by the cultural life of Naples, ‘a city’, according to D'Acierno, ‘that at once demands and resists interpretation’ (p. 6).
The volume consists of 25 contributions by US and Italian scholars and writers, nine of which are republished from elsewhere. These are arranged in six sections. ‘Learning from Contemporary Naples/Writing as a Neapolitan’ comprises the opening chapters from Erri De Luca's autobiographical Napòlide (2006), which meditates on the Neapolitan author's physical and psychological estrangement from Naples, and Francesco Durante's Scuorno (2008), one of the more sober reflections among a flurry of popular commentaries on the state of the city published during the immediate post-Gomorrah era. ‘The View From America’ includes an essay by the artist B. Amore, who produced a series of collages made from items found on the streets of Naples and New York for the 2011 conference; essays by the writers John Domini and Robert Zweig, who both recount their life-changing encounters with the city; and an article by Simona Frasca on the Neapolitan songstress Gilda Mignonette, who found international fame in New York. The third section, ‘History, Memory, and Mercy’, includes a discussion by Patrizia La Trecchia of Naples’ cultural and geopolitical position as a Mediterranean crossroads; essays by the art historians J. Nicholas Napoli (on the Neapolitan Baroque in the Certosa di San Martino) and Salvatore Napolitano (on the Neapolitan Enlightenment in the awe-inspiring Sansevero Chapel), as well as an entertaining excerpt from Terrence Ward's book about discovering Caravaggio's masterpiece The Seven Acts of Mercy and simultaneously meeting Angelo, the painting's assiduous guardian. The fourth section, ‘Malanapoli: From the Lazaronitum to Gomorrah/Camorra’, consists of the introduction to Jason Pine's excellent ethnography on the neomelodica music scene in Naples and its indeterminate rapport with organised crime, and an essay by Valerio Caprara on Neapolitan films produced between 2000 and 2010 (some of which are not actually about the Camorra). The next section, ‘Writing and Singing Naples’, features essays on Anna Maria Ortese's pained relationship with Naples; Eduardo De Filippo's play Filumena Marturano; Matilde Serao's writings on the nineteenth-century Neapolitan lottery; and a personal sketch of the history of opera music in Naples by New York musician Joseph Rescigno. ‘Omaggi or Parole d'Ammore’ completes the book, with homages to the late Australian writer Shirley Hazzard, who spent most of her life in Naples; John Turturro's film Passione on Neapolitan popular music; and former Hofstra professor Thomas Belmonte, author of the classic 1970s ethnography on lumpenproletarian family life in Naples and a key inspiration for the original 2011 conference.
The book is testament to the editors’ deep love for the city, something that emanates from D'Acierno's engaging introduction. The collected essays, however, are somewhat uneven and do not always adhere to the ‘critical and celebratory’ approach (p. xiii) or the ‘rigorous analysis’ (p. 3) augured by the editors at the start. The book certainly provides snapshots of notable scholarship – such as Pine's nuanced reading of the Camorra's presence in Naples – as well as some thoughtful personal reflections on the city. Other essays are marred by platitudes and factual errors about Naples. This is particularly the case with those that discuss contemporary international migration to the city – John Domini, for instance, makes the outlandish claim that the Camorra ‘can arrange a landing [down the coast of Campania] free of Coast Guard interference’ (p. 99). A few contributions are simply baffling, such as the diary entry of two Italian professors who accompany a group of US primary school students to Pompeii, and a series of poems in Neapolitan dialect with parallel translation in English by Charles Sant'Elia, a New York lawyer and international delegate of the Neo-Bourbon movement.
The book's main title recalls, even if it does not directly cite, Rem Koolhaas’ Delirious New York (1978) in which the Dutch architect similarly sets out to articulate his fascination with Manhattan. The subtitle, however, is misleading: rather than ‘a cultural history of the city in the sun’, the book works better as an exploration of Neapolitans’ and Italian Americans’ divergent encounters with Naples and their subsequent attempts to write about the city.
The editors’ decision to embrace a range of registers and perspectives is indeed admirable and I agree that there is a need to engage more critically and broadly with cultural experiences of Naples. Besides a handful of essays, the book unfortunately does not provide many clear signposts to how such an endeavour might be approached or contextualised in relation to local history and society. Moreover, there is no general bibliography or index, which is especially frustrating for a tome of this size. While the decision to juxtapose scholarly interventions with the musings of enthusiastic visitors may make for a ‘delirious Naples’, the absence of any serious reflection about how such multivocality might contribute to a more measured and probing understanding of the city is perhaps the book's main weakness. In sum, there is much to enjoy and learn from this text, but there is also sometimes a nagging sense that, when it comes to Naples, almost anything is permissible as long as it chimes with ‘porosity’ or is suitably ‘delirious’.
