NAPLES, 1562–1565
Napoli è tutto il mondo.
Naples is the whole world.
—Giulio Cesare Capaccio, Il forastiero (1634)
If Nola somehow anchored the Nolan philosopher’s sense of himself, Naples provided his first, indelible glimpse of the rest of the world. Thirty years after the fact, he remembered his journey toward the city in the fall of 1562, a model for all the other journeys he would make to unknown places. He captured the effects of that trip on a boy of fourteen by describing how it transformed his idea of Mount Vesuvius. He had always thought that the volcano marked the end of the world, looming over Nola’s southern horizon. Vesuvius had been lying dormant since 1500, but every Nolan knew its history: the burial of Pompeii in ancient Roman times, the airborne columns of ash and pebbles that had branched out like an umbrella pine before molten lava charged down the mountainside like rivers of fire. We can see Vesuvius through the young Bruno’s eyes in his poem On the Immense and the Numberless, where he is sent off to Naples not by his parents but by his rocky confidante, Monte Cicala:
… It was almost as if you extended
Your leafy hand, full of grapes, to my tender hand, and you pointed
With your finger to say to me, “Now take a look southward;
Look at Vesuvius there, in that direction, my brother—
My brother mountain who loves you as well as I: Do you hear me?
Tell me, should I send you off to him? Would you go? For you’ll stay there
Ever after with him.” Then turning my crystalline eyes, and
Gazing upon that formless form, scrutinizing the figure
Of that amorphous heap, I said, “Who, the crookbacked
One? Who, the one with the sawtooth hunchback who splits the
Seamless sky? Who stands back from the whole world isolated,
Smutty with shadowing smoke, ungenerous in his bounty,
Not a grape to his name, nor any fruit worth the mention?
No sweet figs for him; he boasts not one arbor or garden,
Gloomy, obscure, dour, glowering, miserly, grudging.”
Then you said with a smile, “And yet he’s my very own brother,
Always loving to me; he loves you too. Therefore go now.
Without scorning his kindness, I know that he shall do nothing
That might offend you; indeed, you’ll only return most unwilling.”
And yet, as Bruno then observes, the dreadful mountain became less dreadful as he came closer, and thus, his poem suggests, the strangest things in the world will seem less strange the better we come to know them. Just as he learned to acclimate himself to Mount Vesuvius, and then to Naples, and then to the world, he implicitly urges his readers to dare to acclimate themselves to something as strange as an infinite universe by focusing on its familiar aspects: the sun and stars, and the unfailing presence of God.
Thus, as he discovered, the lower slopes of Vesuvius were covered with grapevines just like those of Monte Cicala, producers of a wine no less famous than Nola’s asprinio: Lacrima Christi, “Christ’s Tears.” As in Nola, the volcanic ash that made up the soil of Naples sprouted not only grapevines but lemon, almond, orange, and peach trees, a riot of flowers in the spring and of fruit in the summer. By the time he reached the coast and the flawless curve of the Bay of Naples, Bruno could see that Naples was one of the most beautiful places on earth, basking under what he would one day call a “benigno cielo,” using a word, cielo, that meant both “sky” and “heaven.”
Beneath that benign heaven, however, Bruno found one of the largest cities in the world, 250,000 souls crammed into walls designed to protect an ancient Greek colony with one-tenth of Naples’s sixteenth-century population. To make matters worse, huge tracts of land within the crowded city belonged only to the rich: the gardens, courtyards, and cloisters reserved for a privileged few. We know almost nothing of Bruno’s first years in Naples, but his later portraits of Neapolitan street life suggest that he spent them in crowded student quarters, a solitary teenager plunged suddenly into urban chaos. Surprisingly, rather than leading him to reject his father’s Stoic philosophy of life, his experience of Naples only confirmed it.
In 1562, when Bruno arrived in Naples, only Constantinople, Cairo, Tabriz, and Paris had more inhabitants, and they all lacked the panoramas offered by the long, straight streets, first laid out by the Greeks who settled ancient Neapolis, “the new city,” six centuries before the Christian era. From the hill of Saint Elmo down to the port, one endless street split the city in half; its modern nickname, in fact, is Spaccanapoli, “Split Naples.” In Bruno’s day it was called the Strada del Seggio di Nilo (or Nido), named after the neighborhood (Seggio, or “Seat”) where he would eventually make his home.
In the mid-sixteenth century, these ancient streets were lined by high convent walls and the lofty, close-packed palazzi of the nobles, both local barons and transplanted Spanish grandees, who lived in fabulous opulence off the feudal lands they exploited with legendary rapacity. For years the Spanish overlords of Naples had forbidden construction outside the old city walls, and as a result the city’s sheer density of buildings and people was almost unparalleled in the rest of Europe. The palazzi in turn were dwarfed by the soaring walls, all fashioned in golden stone, of the city’s Gothic churches, at least one for each of the great monastic orders, many of them resting on the ruins of ancient Greek and Roman temples. In the church of San Lorenzo, set atop the agora of ancient Neapolis, the ribald Boccaccio had met his ladylove Fiammetta, and Petrarch had come to worship. San Paolo Maggiore, just across the street, engulfed the ancient temple of Castor and Pollux. A few ancient blocks away, Santa Chiara claimed the tombs of the French kings who had ruled Naples for several centuries before their replacement by kings from Spain. Most powerful of all, San Domenico Maggiore lorded it above the baronial palazzi of the Seggio di Nilo, a huge Gothic barn with a crucifix whose image of Jesus (it was said) had once spoken to Thomas Aquinas.
At the same time, Naples, even the Seggio di Nilo, was packed to bursting with houses and hovels for the working poor: the fishermen, seamstresses, vendors, porters, laundresses, carpenters, sausage makers, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and water sellers who went barefoot in the mild climate and lived largely on bread and figs (among the urban poor of Europe, Neapolitans enjoyed an unusually healthy diet). Scruffy neighborhoods linked the port of Naples to its chief marketplace, Piazza del Mercato, an open space crammed with eight and more ranks of shopkeepers’ stalls and the lean-tos that served as housing for the poorest members of the Neapolitan lower class—beggars, day laborers, cutpurses, prostitutes—when they did not simply live on the street. The gallows in the middle of the square, by contrast, was a sturdy permanent structure, one of three the Spanish viceroys maintained in different areas of the city as symbols of their authority.
In the mid-sixteenth century, Naples, finally squeezed to bursting by its prosperity, had expanded along a new boulevard outside the walls, the Via Toledo, named after the touchy little viceroy who had sponsored its construction, Don Pedro de Toledo. Since 1539, the road had swept from the small market square just beyond San Domenico down to the seashore and the viceregal palace. Straight as the ancient streets but several times as broad, the Via Toledo perfectly set off the opulence of the coaches that had become the latest fashion in transportation for royals, nobles, churchmen, and anyone else who wanted to travel in style. Along its course, behind a showy rank of new Renaissance-style palazzi, new neighborhoods were springing up, most importantly the dense little blocks of apartments that housed the Spanish garrison, a whole community of soldiers poised to sweep down the Via Toledo en masse at any sign of trouble.
Trouble there was, and often: Naples resented its Spanish overlords for their arrogance and greed, with good reason. The kingdom handed over its wealth of goods and money to the distant Spanish monarchs and received precious little in return; the Via Toledo project was a grand exception. In 1562, just as Bruno arrived, the Spaniards threatened to introduce the Spanish Inquisition, which permitted arrests on the basis of a single accusation rather than the two witnesses required by Roman law. It was the second time Spain had tried to impose Spanish rules; the first attempt, in 1547, had led to street riots and two thousand deaths.
There were other threats to safety as well: the fall of 1562 brought on a year of strange, clammy fogs and an epidemic of the disease Neapolitans called “the influence,” influenza. On the viceroy’s orders, smudge pots burned in the streets night and day to drive off the dangerous air—while creating noxious fumes of their own. In 1563, a band of Turkish pirates took brief control of the suburban area at the foot of the hill called Posillipo—garbled Greek for “Care’s End”—a brisk walk down the seaside from the Via Toledo. There were reasons that the city wall of Naples extended straight across its splendid shoreline, blocking the view of Sorrento and Capri for everyone in the lower-lying districts.
The view of Naples we have from Bruno himself is pure hindsight, although its source, a play from 1582, is one of his earliest surviving works. Like Plato, who had tried his hand at writing tragedy before turning to philosophy, Bruno first tried to communicate his ideas about philosophy through drama. But unlike Athens, Naples was no place for tragedy; the city had already begun to develop a form of street theater that would eventually be known as commedia dell’arte. Inevitably, perhaps, the Nolan philosopher introduced his philosophy to the world through a huge, riotous comedy, Il candelaio (The Candlemaker), written in a pungent Neapolitan vernacular. Bruno took pride in his plain speech, but it was plain speech Italian style—that is, a triumph of rhetoric:
To whom shall I dedicate my Candlemaker? To whom (O grand destiny!) would you like me to entitle my handsome groomsman, my excellent chorus leader? To whom shall I send what the heavenly influence of Sirius, in these scorching days and torrid hours that we call the dog days, has made the fixed stars precipitate within my brain, the pretty fireflies of the firmament drill into me from on high, the dean of the zodiac blast into my head, and the seven planets whisper in my ears? To whom is it addressed, I say? Toward whom does it look? To His Holiness? No. To His Imperial Majesty? No. To His Serenity? No. To His Highness, His Most Illustrious and Right Reverend Lordship? No, no. By my faith, there is no prince, or cardinal, king, emperor, or pope who will take this candle from my hands in this most solemn offertory.
In keeping with this lowly dedication, the characters of The Candlemaker stand barely clear of poverty: they are grammar-school teachers, students, go-betweens, apothecaries, ruffians, thieves, artists, alchemists, soldiers, and loose women. Yet Bruno wrote his riotous black comedy not for these people but for the French royal court. He used The Candlemaker’s knowing glimpses into Neapolitan low life to tell these sophisticated readers another story altogether about survival, the city, and himself. As the play’s comic figures make their way through the streets of Naples, Bruno’s dedication looks far above their heads to an August star shower, those “pretty fireflies of the firmament” that we call the Perseids (and can no longer see within our light-saturated cities). What inspires him to write, at least so he claims, is a vision of the heavens. However chaotic its streets and variegated its people, then, Naples, perhaps precisely because of its hugeness, its beauty, and its brutality, was the crucible in which this young man from Nola, Filippo Bruno, began to forge the life of a philosopher.