NEAPOLIS, the ‘new city’, was one of the major centres of the ancient world, and the tight grid of streets at the heart of the conurbation preserves that of the Greco-Roman town. Naples flourished as a major port, supported by the fertile volcanic soil of the hinterland over which Vesuvius broods so majestically to the east. In the sixth century the city became a Byzantine outpost, achieving independence as a duchy in 763. With the Norman conquest of 1139, her significance waned. Charles of Anjou, who seized the kingdom of Sicily in 1265, made Naples his capital. Under his successors, Anjevin and Aragonese, Spanish and Bourbon, the last supplanted by the French in 1798 and 1805–15, Naples retained this status until 1860, when the kingdom which had controlled the south of Italy from the river Garigliano in the west to the Abruzzi in the east was annexed to the new kingdom of Italy. Medieval Naples was already one of the larger cities of the Mediterranean, and by the mid-seventeenth century with a population of 450,000 the city was, in this respect, the biggest in Europe.
Despite the best efforts of the Savoys, Naples was in many ways a victim of the Risorgimento. But almost heroic work in recent decades by the state, the region and such private bodies as Napoli Novantanove has transformed the visitor’s experience of the city. The demands of a large population on a restricted site has meant that the development of Naples was closely packed.
The patron saint of Naples is San Gennaro (Saint Januarius), whose great cathedral was built by Charles II of Anjou to the eastern section of the former Roman town. The building is now a palimpsest. What draws the pilgrim is the saint’s chapel, the second on the right, a great domed space designed by the architect Francesco Grimaldi. The decoration of this was one of the major projects of Seicento Italy. Domenichino began work on his frescoes in 1631, and these constitute a glorious and cerebral climax to his career, astonishing still in their clarity of colour. He died in 1641, enervated by artistic rivalries, and two years later was followed by Lanfranco, whose Paradise in the cupola is of visionary conviction. The splendid altar, sculpture and furniture play their part in a consistently impressive programme. There is much else in the cathedral, but it is to the chapel that one inevitably returns.
Leaving the cathedral, turn left – south – and take the first street to the left. After a hundred metres on the right is the Monte della Misericordia, in the church of which is a seminal masterpiece of Caravaggio. Painted in 1607, The Seven Acts of Mercy still astonishes, a manifesto of Christian charity by one of the most deeply committed and visually persuasive of religious artists. A whole generation of Neapolitan painters, notably Giovanni Battista Caracciolo and Mattia Preti, were galvanized by Caravaggio’s example.
Return to the Via del Duomo and continue, to turn right at the first significant intersection, the Via San Biagio – the ‘Spaccanapoli’, successor of the ancient decumanus, narrow and atmospheric. Palace follows palace, and side streets entice you to others. On the left is the small Sant’Angelo a Nilo, with the Brancaccio monument by Donatello and other Tuscan sculptors. Almost opposite is the Piazza San Domenico Maggiore, off which is the Cappella Sansevero, famed for its veiled statues by Antonio Corradini and Giuseppe Sammartino, virtuoso highpoints of the Neapolitan late baroque. Further on, the Spaccanapoli reaches the Piazza Monteoliveto, with its quintessentially southern guglia of the Immaculate Conception of 1747–50. To the south is the vast mass of one of the great monuments of Anjevin Naples, Santa Chiara, with its Gothic dynastic tombs. To the north, appropriating the diamond-studded façade of the earlier palace of the Sansevero, is the Gesù Nuovo of 1584–1601, with a constellation of baroque pictures and, on the entrance wall, Francesco Solimena’s energetic Expulsion of Heliodorus. The Spaccanapoli continues, to intersect the main street of the old town, the Toledo, named after the Spanish viceroy who caused it to be constructed on the line of the former moat outside the Anjevin walls.
Chiesa di Pia, Monte della Misericordia: Caravaggio, The Seven Acts of Mercy (1607).
The heart of Naples with its teeming churches and spectacular palaces deserves to be explored in detail. Major works by such artists as Mattia Preti, Francesco Solimena and Sebastiano Conca are to be found in context. One is always aware of the proximity of the sea, and the importance of the port explains why Charles I of Anjou built his Castel Nuovo beside it. Most impressive from the outside, this was reconstructed by Alfonso I of Aragon. His entry to Naples in 1443 is celebrated in the reliefs of the triumphal arch above the main entrance. To the west is the ponderous Palazzo Reale, the façade of which is answered – in a particularly happy example of neoclassical urban design – by the basilica of San Francesco di Paola.
The perfect vantage point from which to survey Naples is the Certosa di San Martino, to which the energetic can walk from the Toledo. The visitor comes first to the church, completed by Cosimo Fanzago, which was adorned by some of the greatest masters of Seicento Naples. Above the entrance is Massimo Stanzione’s noble Deposition of 1638; the vault frescoes are by Lanfranco, while the Prophets between the side chapels are by the Spanish-born Jusepe de Ribera. Stanzione was also responsible for the second chapel on the left. In the presbytery is Reni’s late unfinished Nativity, wonderful not least in its tonal restraint. To the left is the sacristy, through which one reaches the Chapel of the Treasury with Ribera’s deeply felt Deposition, and on the ceiling Luca Giordano’s enchanting and airy Triumph of Judith. Further rooms to the right of the presbytery lead to the Great Cloister that seems to overhang the city, which is literally laid out at the spectator’s feet, the port to the right, the wide silhouette of the volcano beyond. There could be no more appropriate place to house the museum of the city of Naples.
Castel Nuovo.
Naples has long been famed for its museums. The Museo Archeologico Nazionale is on its eponymous piazza off the northern continuation of the Toledo. This houses two collections of major importance: the Roman marbles inherited by the Bourbons from the Farnese, including the Bull and the Hercules, which exercised so profound an influence on post-Renaissance masters; and the extraordinary haul of Roman finds yielded by the royal excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum, finds that transformed the Enlightenment’s understanding of classical art. The bronzes, the detached murals and, not least, the remarkable mosaic of the Battle of Alexander which was inspired by a Hellenistic prototype are of the finest quality, while the more intimate objects are of equal interest.
The royal palace of Capodimonte is, as its name implies, on a hill, to the north of the city, set in a splendid park, begun in 1735 and only completed a century later. It is built round three linked internal courtyards. On the first floor is the major sequence of staterooms, with portraits of the Bourbons and indigenous furniture. The collection of pictures falls conveniently into two sections. The Bourbons inherited the Parmese collection of the Farnese, including Correggio’s Zin-garella (the Gipsy Madonna) and an unrivalled group of Parmigianinos, as well as nine Titians, of which the disturbing portrait of Pope Paul III with his nephews is the most remarkable. The Farnese also owned Bellini’s breathtaking Transfiguration. Capodimonte’s holding of Neapolitan pictures and those painted in or for Neapolitan patrons is without rival, ranging from Simone Martini’s Saint Louis to a constellation of Seicento masterpieces: Caravaggio’s late Flagellation, Bernardino Cavallino’s Saint Cecilia and remarkable holdings of both Preti and Giordano.
Capodimonte is a ponderous structure. So too is the great palace begun in 1752 for King Charles III by Luigi Vanvitelli at Caserta, magical as is its park. It is an earlier, if unfinished, palace that haunts the imagination, Fanzago’s Palazzo di Donn’Anna, built about 1642 for Anna Carafa, wife of the viceroy Felipe Ramiro Guzman. Most Claudian of architectural conceptions, hanging above the sea, this is best viewed from the Via di Posillipo to the west of the city, begun in 1812 by the adventurer Joachim Murat, whom Napoleon had installed as King of Naples, but only completed after his expulsion.
