The study of Naples has had an uneven history among Anglophones. While the ancient city continues to attract students, medieval Naples enjoyed apparently only passing high interest and activity as many of its best American scholars have moved on to other fields. With few exceptions, early modern Naples is the province of humanist philology and traditional art history. Rigorous study of Naples as an urban entity remains in the learned hands of Italians. We are therefore fortunate to have this collection by fifteen scholars, most at the Università di Napoli Federico II and in Naples' administration, four in northern Europe and one by an American. Many long-standing questions are addressed and considered from inside Naples as agent of its own history, not as ‘other’ or object.
The book offers an up-to-date synthesis of new research findings from the Metropolitana excavations and from careful reanalysis of existing literary, epigraphical and archaeological evidence. Instead of the disparate themes and methodologies offered in many collections, these essays have been carefully curated and divided thematically into three sections: Naples in antiquity, classical Naples' survivals after antiquity and two afterwords. The editors ensured that contributors worked in full knowledge of their colleagues' articles so that the volume progresses fugally with overlapping, often collaborating and sometimes divergent interpretations (e.g. on the temple of the Dioscuri/S. Paolo Maggiore). The essays are well translated and edited to produce crisp, cogent and flowing narrative and analysis. They use footnotes and are well illustrated and cross-referenced. Only occasionally do some murky images disappoint. The book includes a comprehensive, up-to-date bibliography.
Part 1 begins with L. Miletti's analysis of Strabo's establishing Naples' ‘Greekness' and its osmotic tradition, equating its people with their natural surroundings. The Gulf's gentle otium set against its volcanic volatility henceforth became the cliché of Neapolitans' ‘changing’ character. Later Virgilian tradition associated Naples with direct literary citations and with medieval mirabilia around the poet as magician. R. Taylor next introduces Naples' chief classical monument: the temple of the Dioscuri built by freedmen of Tiberius (14–37 c.e.). He offers an important reinterpretation of its destroyed pediment sculpture: the temple as manifestation of Naples itself, commemorating its refounding (c. 490 b.c.e.) as the ‘New City’ to fit the new ideology of the Julio-Claudians.
K. Lomas demonstrates that Naples' ancient Greek heritage was not the survival of a colonial ethnic culture but was a Roman ‘cultural construct’ developed to promote a Panhellenic agenda in conjunction with the emerging imperial cult. A contemporary parallel might be the creation of an Italo-American identity posing as a colonial/ethnic survival that is in reality a conscious construct crafted to meet the needs of a hegemonic American corporate media culture. M. De Nardis underscores this process with his study of Roman magistracies long believed to be survivals of the ancient Greek polis. Using epigraphical evidence, largely later than 90 b.c.e., he concludes that these ‘Greek’ offices were not evidence of local independence but a Roman imposition coinciding with the Sebasta Games, promoting the same imperial Panhellenism.
G. Polara ends Part 1 with a study of ‘cultural forgetting’ in the wake of the Gothic Wars. Relying on Procopius, he rightly notes the destruction of Naples' multi-ethnic culture following Belisarius' conquest and sack. Yet he understates what may be the most pertinent element of Procopius' narrative: the possible dispersion of the surviving Neapolitans (5.10.48) and their replacement with refugees from the siege of Rome and with conquered Goths from Umbria and Tuscany (5.25.1–10, 6.13.3–4).
In Part 2 A. Palmentieri examines the use of ancient spolia in the Constantinian basilicas, in the medieval Pietrasanta and S. Salvatore in insula maris. The wholesale reuse of S. Paolo Maggiore within the forum area also became the focus of deep cultural memory. By the late Norman period, however, such ancient remains were seen less as continua with antiquity than as conscious reclamations by elites, often drawing on established Campanian antiquities dealers, even as the Angevins began abandoning such straightforward usage in favour of the new (Gothic) hybrids criticised by Petrarch. By contrast, Renaissance appropriation of antiquity in the palaces of Diomede Carafa and others underscored the use of public memory to bolster Aragonese legitimacy against Angevin claims.
F. Delle Donne turns to florilegia, which he usefully analyses as textual spolia, and to direct literary borrowing, examining the Virgilian legend as folk memory – recounted, for example, by Conrad of Querfurt – and the intellectual discourse centred at the medieval university of Naples. G. Abbamonte follows this move away from medieval mirabilia to the new approach of prominent humanists like Pontano and Sannazaro at the Aragonese court. B. de Divitiis demonstrates how these scholars matched the classical texts at their disposal with the archaeological remains beneath Naples' tufa to produce a far more accurate and contextualised understanding of its substrata of myth, cultural memory and verifiable history.
H. Hendrix illumines the literary afterlife of Naples' classical associations, beginning with Petrarch and moving on to Pontano, Sannazaro and other members of the Accademia Pontaniana, until this tradition merged with cinquecento topographical and archaeological methods. Throughout Hendrix correctly emphasises the role of foreign observers in this process. Hendrix's over-application of S. Greenblatt's Renaissance ‘self-fashioning’, however, seems to confuse the issue of individual identity creation and the ‘cultural construct’ of Naples' civic image as the embodiment of the classical, Virgilian tradition invoked throughout this volume.
A. Marzano also delineates the theme of ‘foreign’ observers in her analysis of Andrea de Jorio's 1832 La mimica on Neapolitan gesture as – what he asserted was – a living inheritance from ancient Greece. De Jorio actively promoted this heritage as a counterweight to the developing Risorgimento critique of the South as a culturally primitive and politically backward ‘other’.
F. Lenzo returns to the temple of the Dioscuri, reviewing its survival into the cinquecento, its acquisition by the Theatines, Neapolitan civic government's attempts to preserve the site and its ancient materials, and Cardinal Gian Pietro Carafa's role in granting it to this counter-reformation order. The Theatines preserved the pronaos and other elements but seriously undermined the porch by adding a new crypt. This resulted in the temple's near-total collapse in the earthquake of 1688 and the order's subsequent fervour in dismembering its remains as an assertive victory of revived Christianity over paganism. Lenzo's article is a vivid reminder of the destructive impact of all types of zealotry upon the accumulated material past and of new orthodoxies' tendency to erase cultural difference, multivalence and localised memory.
This theme is reinforced by H. in her investigation of the classically inspired backdrops of Neapolitan presepe. She traces their origins from late medieval and Renaissance depictions of the overthrow of the pagan gods through cinque- and seicento Neapolitan painting, to the classic period of Nativity scenes into the late ottocento. More than genre conventions, however, the best presepe contained complex, multivalent symbolic programmes. Today many produced on via S. Gregorio Armeno are less naive popular commerce than highly self-conscious political, social and cultural critique that explicitly invokes Naples' past to comment on its and Italy's present.
In afterwords S. De Caro projects the future of Naples' museums and the cultural, administrative and social issues involved in creating a new multifocal ‘Museo della Città di Napoli’. L. Spina discusses the role of the nearly complete Metropolitana in bringing Naples together above and below, past and future with heterogeneous local, Mediterranean and world cultures.
This volume is essential for scholars of ancient, medieval and early modern Naples and of great value for those of social and cultural memory, materiality and urban survivals. Specialists and generalists alike will find it a rich and fascinating overview of Naples' living relationship to its past.
