Few cities have been written about with more passion than modern Naples. Beginning in the Romantic period and continuing into the contemporary era, a long list of famous poets, writers, journalists, and intellectuals have provided vivid descriptions of its people and culture, and depicted its triumphs and tragedies in the most eloquent terms. This book represents an attempt to encapsulate that testimony in the form of a continuous historical narrative. Overall, it contains 229 documents. Many appear for the first time in English and have been selected with both the general reader and the scholar in mind. Among them are travellers accounts and private letters, newspaper articles and official declarations, ambassadorial reports and governmental legislation, and excerpts from the numerous memoirs, diaries, and statistical surveys of the time.
In presenting these documents, I make no claims to be comprehensive. Indeed, given the abundance of materials available, any such suggestion would be disingenuous at best. Instead, I have tried to select those documents which, in my opinion, are most expressive of the forces that have shaped the last two hundred years of Neapolitan history, and given disproportional weight to those political and economic factors that have had the greatest impact on modern Neapolitan life.
About the Author
John Santore is a professor at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, and a historian of modern Europe.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
"In size and number of inhabitants," the English author and diarist John Chetwode Eustace wrote in 1813, Naples "ranks as the third city of Europe, and from her situation and superb show may justly be considered as the Queen of the Mediterranean." This judgment, made at a decidedly difficult moment in Neapolitan history, fairly summarizes the general consensus among European writers and intellectuals on Naples at the start of the 19th century. At the time that it was written, the city s status as one of the premier metropolises of Europe seemed incontestable. The capital of the largest independent political kingdom in Italy, its population in 1791 was estimated at over 400,000 people, and its reputation as an intellectual and artistic center was nearing its height. Writers and scholars came from all over Europe in order to experience its beauty and vitality, and tales of its extraordinary physical setting and the liveliness of its people circulated throughout the Western world. In February 1787, the great German poet, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who probably more than any other writer helped to establish the later myth of Naples as a "happy land" full of "carefree people" wrote during his first visit to the city:
1. One may write or paint as much as one likes, but this place, the shore, the gulf, Vesuvius, the citadels, the villas, everything defies description . One can t blame the Neapolitans for never wanting to leave their city, nor its poets for singing the praises of its situation in lofty hyperboles. I don t even want to think about Rome. By comparison to Naples free and open situation, the capital of the world on the Tiber flats is like an old wretchedly placed monastery. [J.W. Goethe, Italian Journey, 1786-1788. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962, pp. 186-90.]
Goethe s description of Naples was typical of the almost lyrical way with which most early 19th century Romantics responded to the city s unique architectural design and dramatic topography....
