Naples Through the Ages

Naples Through the Ages

Despite the grand and beautiful attributes of modern-day Naples, in the 1970s a different, rather seedy image was beginning to emerge: Napoli la terribile. Horror stories abounded about the scippatori, Vespa-riding muggers who yanked purses from unsuspecting sightseers; hospitals so terrible that patients were said to dial 113, the emergency number, from their beds because they despaired of ever seeing the ward nurse; and the juvenile scugnizzi, the street children who would pry off your license plate at one traffic light and sell it back to you at the next. Unemployment reached 30%, the infrastructure was rotting (government subsidies were simply being mett'in tasca -- "put into pocket," as the local phrase had it, by the Camorra, the Neapolitan version of the Mafia) -- and the threat of earthquakes and ever-present gridlock turned sectors of the city into an Italian Los Angeles.

By the early 1980s Neapolitans said Basta -- "Enough!" Baroness Mirella Barracca mobilized the city's rich and powerful into Committee Naples Ninety-Nine, an organization whose mission was to uplift both the city's historic structures and its public image. The turnaround was confirmed with Antonio Bassolino's election as mayor: in the 1990s, he jump-started the city's economic development, threw the cars out of the piazzas, cleaned up the streets, and crowded more policemen than travelers into the main railway terminal. Palaces were restored, churches reopened, city museums refurbished, conferences encouraged; the Camorra was out and art was in. Today, almost two decades later, it is Naples that has erupted in an unending flow of cultural excitement while Il Vesuvio (Vesuvius) slumbers: the city's new state-of-the-art metro system is now a showcase graced with artworks by contemporary greats and young local sculptors; a renaissance of southern Italian cooking is making headlines around the world; and more and more travelers with a been-there, done-that take on Rome, Florence, and other capitals of northern Italy are setting a southward course. Only a few years ago, Naples was a "don't," and almost all of the thousands who entered the city's Stazione Centrale only did so because it was the gateway to Pompeii, Sorrento, Capri, and the Amalfi Coast. Since then, tourists alighting here are pleasantly discovering that Naples is much more than a railway station -- it is a civilization.

Ultimately, the origin of Naples, once called Parthenope and later Neapolis, can be traced to the nearby ruins of Cumae, the earliest Greek colony in Italy, founded around 750 BC. Greek civilization flourished for hundreds of years along this coastline, but there was nothing in the way of centralized government until the Roman Empire, uniting all of Italy for the first time, expanded southward and gradually absorbed the Greek colonies in the 4th century BC. The Romans were quick to appreciate the sybaritic potential of the region, and wealthy members of the empire flocked here to build palatial country residences. Generally, the peace of Campania was undisturbed during the centuries of Roman rule.

Naples and Campania, with the rest of Italy, decayed with the Roman Empire and collapsed into the abyss of the Middle Ages. In 1130 the Norman king, Roger II, King of the Two Sicilies, made Naples the capital of his empire, until Henry VI of Hohenstaufen captured it in 1194; his enlightened son, Frederick II, endowed the city with a university that attracted many scholars and poets. By now the popes had an eye on Naples, and together with the French king Louis IX and Charles of Anjou, the papal troops and the French Angevin government conquered the Hohenstaufen forces in 1268. Charles of Anjou and Robert the Wise sponsored the construction of several important buildings, including the Church of Santa Chiara, which introduced the style of Provençal Gothic to the city. Aragonese rule arrived in 1442 with the siege of Alfonso I of Aragon, but his line was driven from the city in turn by the alliance between King Louis XII of France and Ferdinand of Spain. The nobles who served under the Spanish viceroys in the 16th and 17th centuries, when their harsh rule made all Italy quake, enjoyed their libertine pleasures, resulting in the flourishing of taverns and gaming houses, even as Spain milked the citizenry with burdensome taxes. During this time Naples became second only to Paris as Europe's largest city (and also its most densely populated -- to accommodate the crowds, tenements rose as high as seven stories).

After a short-lived Austrian occupation, Naples became the capital of the Kingdom of the the Two Sicilies, established by the Bourbon kings in 1738. This somewhat garbled kingdom was made up of Naples (which included most of the southern Italian mainland) and the island of Sicily, which had been conjoined in the Middle Ages, then separated and unofficially reunited under Spanish domination during the 16th and 17th centuries. With the rule of the Bourbon kings, the Neapolitan "golden age" began in earnest, as their rule was generally benevolent, as far as Campania was concerned, and their support of the papal authority in Rome was an important factor in the development of the rest of Italy. The rule of Charles III of Bourbon, along with that of his son Ferdinand IV, was influential artistically: both kings not only built many of the architectural showpieces of the city -- the Palace of Capodimonte, Teatro San Carlo, and the Palaces of Caserta and Portici, to name a few -- they also sponsored noted musicians, artists, and writers, who were only too willing to submit to court life in such magnificent natural surroundings. But the modern world came knocking in the person of Napoléon, whose forces dethroned the Bourbons in 1799. The glamour of the Empire style came to the city when Napoléon appointed his brother-in-law, Joachim Murat, as king of Naples. In 1815 the Bourbons returned to power, Murat was shot, and Ferdinand IV exclaimed that poor general Murat had been a better upholsterer than administrator. In 1816, with Napoléon out of the way on St. Helena, Ferdinand once again merged the two kingdoms, proclaiming himself Ferdinand I of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies. His reactionary and repressive rule earned him other, more colorful titles among his rebellious subjects. Finally, Giuseppe Garibaldi launched his expedition, and in 1860 Naples was united with the rest of Italy.