NUOVO NAPLES
The mean streets of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels are an illusion dispelled by the beauty of the city and the energy of its residents, writes PAOLA TOTARO.
The mean streets of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels are an image dispelled by the beauty of the city and the energy of its residents, writes Paola Totaro.
I’ve been returning to Naples, city of my birth, for more than 40 years, drawn irresistibly by the same mix of life-affirming chaos and beauty that has bewitched travellers, artists and writers for millennia. Yet for decades, sharing plans to visit Naples would elicit warnings about pickpockets and violent street crime or an assumption that the city was merely a stopover on the way to Amalfi, Capri or Pompeii.
That still happens, but there’s also a growing awareness of Naples’ revival. Frustrated by the glacial response of sclerotic state authorities, an entrepreneurial generation of artists, architects, writers, chefs and environmentalists are finding original ways to open doors to their city.
Architect Roberto Fedele, director of the Ezio De Felice Cultural Foundation, has been instrumental in opening the Baroque theatre inside Palazzo Donn’Anna, a 17th-century seaside palace and one of Naples’ most photographed sites. It has some of the city’s best views, sweeping from Vesuvius over the Gulf to Capri and the Sorrentine peninsula. It’s privately owned and has been off limits to the public until recently.
The old theatre, fashioned into a working studio by architect Ezio De Felice in the mid-20th century, is now the venue for public seminars on art, history and architecture, and a simple phone booking secures access to the studio via the palace courtyard and through to its jaw-dropping vistas.
Introducing Naples’ cultural treasures to a wider audience is one of the foundation’s most important aims, says Fedele. “Naples’ artistic and architectural patrimony is enormous. As a city it is full of extraordinary treasures, but we Neapolitans have not always been very good at valuing them or showing them to the world,” he says. “There is a new spirit now in which it is the Neapolitan people themselves who, sick of waiting for the authorities, are exploring fresh and exciting ways to show it off.”
One of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities, Naples’ recorded history began in the 7th-century BC as a Greek colony and, nearly 3,000 years later, it remains a palimpsest of cultures. A walk almost anywhere in the city, from the northern coastline to the narrow streets of the old centre, reveals evidence of waves of invasion and conquest, from Greco-Roman origins to the opulence of Spanish and Bourbon rulers.
The runaway success of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels has piqued global interest in Naples, although the mean streets inhabited by her protagonists aren’t representative of the city that most travellers encounter. Fancy a pop-up dinner in an art gallery or an apéritif on the terrazzo of a private seaside palace? Peruse the list compiled by the enterprising Hom Eating network of houses and apartments whose owners host dinners (homeating.com). Listen to a concert or see a play in a Roman amphitheatre at twilight (suggestioniallimbrunire.org); navigate a Bourbon tunnel beneath the city on a raft (galleriaborbonica.com) or pace the vast archives of the Bank of Naples, founded in 1539 and one of the world’s oldest, and search for the signatures of Michelangelo da Caravaggio, Giuseppe Verdi and other luminaries (www.ilcartastorie.it)
Here are more of my favourite Neapolitan treasures.