I owe too many people in Naples too many things, and over too long a time, to feel easy about making formal acknowledgements. Sometimes the names themselves have receded from mind over more than thirty years, unlike faces, voices, ways of being. The book itself is the residue of a passion. It took a long time to write—an even longer time to start—and nearly didn’t get written at all, from out of an accumulated mass of thoughts and memories. The journey from desire to a very partial fulfilment changed direction more than once.
Anyone looking—however casually—into the long, long past of Naples owes incommensurably much to the historians, archivists and chroniclers who over the years and the millennia have set it down. Nearly all of them are Neapolitans themselves and their work is informed by a shared love of place. From the happily living—I’m thinking of Francesco Barbagallo, Carlo De Frede, Romeo De Maio, Antonio Ghirelli and Aurelio Musi among many—constellated around the great opposed figures of Giuseppe Galasso and Rosario Villari—and Ferdinando Bologna if we add a third from art history—the names go back in time over the last hundred years or so from Coniglio and Doria to Schipa, Spampanato, Capasso and the overbearing and lovable Benedetto Croce, who was never more happily himself than when laying out new findings from the archives of Naples.
Beyond these the list goes back forever, past the great writers of the Neapolitan enlightenment, past the chroniclers of the seventeenth century’s upheavals, past Camillo Porzio and the unknown author of the Chronicle of Parthenope, back to Tacitus and Suetonius and Strabo and ultimately to Homer. Many years ago I was honoured to translate a paper for Giuseppe Galasso to be delivered at the Castel dell’Ovo: it was a miniature history of Naples ab ovo for the use of outsiders and maybe it planted the seed for the present production.
The ancillary figures to this reading are the booksellers of Naples, new, used and antiquarian, too vastly numerous and variously helpful over the decades to be summoned in parade now. They are booksellers who would share their coffee with an unknown client buying nothing, or hand the unknown client a rare edition on trust, with directions to a bookseller friend several streets away who knew how to handle payment by credit card. Two names stand here for the innumerable, Tullio Pironti and Rosario Würzburger, whom I also thank for gifts. Tullio’s was his own memoirs of life as a champion boxer and publisher, Rosario’s a rare pamphlet on Tommaso Campanella’s revolution in Calabria.
Some way through work on this book I found in amazement and delight that all the extant entries in the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, now after fifty years at its seventy-third volume and a good halfway through the alphabet, are now freely accessible online at www.treccani.it, an extraordinary gift from the publisher to anyone with an interest in the Italian past. For this reason, some of the notes on Dizionario sources give only the website and not an entry’s individual volume reference. The purpose of these and other notes at the end of an unacademic and eclectic book is to give minimally the sources of the phrases and passages I’ve quoted—with a few gaps—and the locations of the paintings mentioned—and occasionally, where it wasn’t obvious in the text, the translation of a word or phrase. Unattributed translations in the book are my own.
In Australia the friends of the Kings Cross Library have over a long time been unfailingly courteous and helpful, even and especially when I didn’t deserve it. From their unlikely present location on the main drag between Striperama (sic) and the heroin injecting room and directly across from the adult lingerie showroom, whose wares are viewable on lifesize models from the children’s section on the first floor, they have retrieved books and articles from the collections of libraries all over Australia. Once they invited me to a champagne party. Others who have helped with getting and preserving words and putting my own into material form are Tricia Dearborn, Clara Finlay, Jane Palfreyman, Andrea Rejante, Jaclyn Richardson and Roberta Trapè and I thank all of them.
Art history is a more recent practice than life history. The writings of Neapolitan art scholars over the last few decades have driven that larger rediscovery of the extraordinary images painted in Naples in the first half of the seventeenth century. It was a flowering that began when Michelangelo Merisi from Caravaggio arrived in Naples in 1606 for two short and transforming stays. The incomparable Roberto Longhi, who brought Merisi’s work to modern attention, was also the scholar and critic who first revealed the marvellous work of Merisi’s contemporaries and followers that was still mostly hidden in the dim churches, dusty little museums and crumbling homes of Naples.
Among those now in Naples writing on art, I’ve had pleasure and instruction from conversations with Vincenzo Pacelli, Renato Ruotolo and Nicola Spinosa. Their writings, along with those of Ferdinando Bologna, the late Raffaello Causa and Stefano Causa—and from an earlier time Ulisse Prota-Giurleo’s—and studies by Jonathan Brown, James Clifton, Brigitte Daprà, Giuseppe De Vito, Gabriele Finaldi, Mary D. Garrard, Pierluigi Leone de Castris, Christopher Marshall, Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez, Wolfgang Prohaska, John Spike, Michael Stoughton and Thomas Willette have always shed light, though seeing what follows, these authors might wonder. Mina Gregori and the late Francis Haskell gave time to conversation some years ago and I’m grateful to them. Everyone must be grateful to Raffaello Causa and Nicola Spinosa for making Capodimonte in Naples one of the great art galleries in Italy, in Europe and the world.
Percy Allum, Francesco Barbagallo and Michelangelo Cocco shared some bleak and hard-won insights into the way things are evolving now in Naples. So did Raffaele Morino and Franco Roberti of the Procura di Napoli. And I wish I could have had more than a couple of short telephone conversations with Roberto Saviano before he was blasted by fame.
I have a very specific acknowledgement to make to John Spike. His article ‘The Case of the Master’ conceals under its Jamesian title a succinct resolution of the uncertainties about the identity of the great Neapolitan painter who represents the culmination of what follows in this book. John Spike’s article on Bartolomeo Passante seems to me—an art-historical outsider who can nevertheless recognize a tightly argued case—to be definitive until any new discoveries are made in the archives. It was published nearly twenty years ago and remains unanswerable, though as its author has remarked more recently, academic debates, once entrenched, often take on a life of their own. I’m very grateful to him for sending me a copy.
A book that circles the objects of its attention rather than heading directly toward a conclusion is going to exasperate a lot of readers. I hope to persuade mine that time in Naples is not linear, that the past is more present in Naples than in other cities, that some things in Naples have been happening for thousands of years and that only by indirection can you arrive at their connexions. For moments of greater confusion the chronology at the end of the book lays out some of the events mentioned in the order in which they happened.
For splendid hospitality on my last visit to Naples I thank Maria Teresa Chialant, Maria Rosaria Cocco and Ovidio Butti, Francesco and Oletta Lauro and Vincenzo and Paola Pacelli, these last especially for the several local varieties of mozzarella di bufala. For several decades of nourishment I thank Mario Silvestri, a child of Ponza in the sea beyond the bay, who grew up among the political opponents of Mussolini confined on that island and is now paterfamilias in Amalfi. Over the greater part of half a century Mario has provided—among much else—a pignatta maritata I’m sure as good as any made in Naples four hundred years ago. I have known him as long as I’ve known anyone in Naples—first flanked by Michele and Ciro and Natale and Gennaro in the times of don Antonio Casillo’s now-vanished Dante e Beatrice, and now a few meters away among a more refractory clientèle al 53—and he’s always the first friend I see when I return.
From a long time ago, and always remembered with intense feeling, is the kindness of the grand old man of the sea Pippo Dalla Vecchia and his late wife Anna Maria, of his sisters Adriana Dotoli and her husband Mario and Rosetta Nitti and her husband Francesco. And of Luigi and Teresa De Prisco. And of the late Giusto Barbini. More recent, and on another side of the world, is the hospitality of Dick and Maggie Denton at Pittaedie, looking out at the Pacific and down on a small curve of sand, a rocky promontory breaking the surf and a hillside of fragrant bird-filled Australian bush. Sometimes a boat at anchor below reminds me of the Canopus.
Peter Robb