Naples

views updated

NAPLES

Naples is a city burdened by powerful images and implacable stereotypes that have survived unchanged through the centuries. "A city full of thieves and tricksters," wrote the Italian natural philosopher Giambattista della Porta in 1606. A people "suddenly inflamed, suddenly moved," observed the Italian economist Ferdinando Galiani in 1779. The French traveler Augustin Creuzé de Lesser positioned the city at the frontier of civilization itself when he said in 1806, "Europe ends at Naples." It is almost impossible to find a representation that is not exaggerated and does not slip into the fraught category of exceptionalism. Naples always seems exceptional, a "paradise inhabited by devils," and a great open-air museum, a place of superstitions and enlightened humanists, of aristocracies and bootblacks.

More prosaically, the city is atypical in an Italian context above all because of the very particular association with its past. While the identity of cities such as Milan or Turin is mainly rooted in the economic and social history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, even in the early twenty-first century Naples reveals traces of a far more remote past that took shape in the thirteenth century during the Angevin era and was consolidated under first Aragonese and then Spanish domination in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This was when the city became identified with political power, became the center of a complex government bureaucracy, was granted conspicuous financial privileges, and was provided with cheap grain from the farms of the Neapolitan kingdom. All of southern Italy, an ill-defined hinterland that stretched as far as Apulia and Sicily, already gravitated toward the capital. From these provinces, Naples imported agricultural products and artisan and manufactured goods, while its merchants busied themselves selling oil, silk, and wool from the provinces to the rest of Italy and Europe. The city became a great marketplace, but also a parasitic center. It consumed more than it produced, and as a result began to attract a continuous influx of immigrants from the countryside, and this gave the city the characteristic that is still evident in the early twenty-first century: exceptional population density. At the end of the sixteenth century, Naples was the most populous European capital, alongside Paris and London. In the first decades of the seventeenth century, it was struck by the severe demographic and political crisis that beset the kingdom, and the terrible plague of 1656 cut its population in half. But by the start of the eighteenth century, the long recession seemed to be over, heralding the prospect of better times.

On 10 May 1734, at eighteen years of age, Charles of Bourbon arrived from Spain with a splendid following of courtesans, soldiers, and knights, and twenty-four chests filled with gold. The monarch summoned to his side at Naples the cream of the southern nobility, families from Calabria, Abruzzi, and Apulia, who abandoned their own estates to their tenants and lived in their sumptuous urban residences on the revenues from their land. Meanwhile, the new dynasty launched an ambitious political program that aimed at reforming the government, including its administration, fiscal system, and commercial regulations, while at the same time seeking to emulate the style of a grand European court and endowing the capital with rich and grandiose architectural patrimony. From the theater of San Carlo to the enormous royal palace (Reggia di Caserta) with gardens that stretched out of sight, from the Capodimonte Palace to a poor house designed to house eight thousand vagrants, the 1740s and 1750s were an age of dynastic gigantism, where costs were incongruous with the city's social problems. For Naples remained seriously overpopulated, and the terrible famine of 1764 that killed thousands of citizens highlighted the grave limits of the system of production and markets. The Bourbon metropolis had become (to use the famous image of the eighteenth-century Italian jurist Gaetano Filangieri) a massive head attached to a shrunken body. The capital was politically and demographically out of proportion to its kingdom, a place that absorbed too many material and human resources and—as the Italian economist Giuseppe Maria Galanti said at the end of the eighteenth century—threatened to turn the rest of southern Italy into a desert. Yet it was a city that depended in both economic and political terms on its own territory: the Jacobin Parthenopean Republic that was created in the city in 1799 in the wake of an invading French army was drowned in blood by a monarchist uprising sprung from the provinces of the kingdom.

The city's problems were destined to worsen in the nineteenth century. With every chance of self-driven modernization gone by 1848, when its reactionary rulers betrayed the constitution and its supporters, Naples seemed to lose any sense of forward movement. In 1851 the young English politician William Gladstone denounced the Bourbon government as "the denial of God," and then at the beginning of September 1860, in the face of Giuseppe Garibaldi's advance, revolt in the provinces, and the plots of the Great Powers, the young king, Francis II, abandoned the royal palace. Naples became an ex-capital, although with its four hundred thousand inhabitants it remained by far the largest city in the new Kingdom of Italy. The city preserved many of the sociological and cultural characteristics of the period of Bourbon hegemony—numerous members of the nobility, bureaucrats, and clerics; throngs of lawyers; and fifteen thousand domestic servants, cooks, washer-women, gardeners, and coachmen. In the context of the new nation-state, however, ancient privileges and political protections were destined to diminish. The Italian government imposed new taxes, abolished the religious orders, reduced the garrison by two-thirds, and released or pensioned off a number of city employees. Meanwhile, the city's historical domination over the rest of southern Italy began to slip as new free-trade policies removed the city's commercial privileges and ruined its important industries. The year 1861 marked the start of a period of intense deindustrialization and a sharp decline in maritime trade, and it soon became clear that the city was incapable of transforming itself from the capital of a vast state into a regional metropolis. It failed to impose an economic and cultural unity on its hinterland, as Milan was doing in Lombardy, and Turin in Piedmont, Bologna in Emilia, and Bari in Apulia. But it was also unlike those midsized cities that retained strong physical and social continuities with their rural surroundings and that became the stimulus for modernization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It never became, in short, a provincial hub, and it could not find in its province the cultured and enlightened landowning bourgeoisie that in parts of central and northern Italy were promoting new forms of social and economic development.

The overcrowded Tyrrhenian metropolis was entirely different, more similar to the extreme cases of Western urbanism, the Paris lamented by Victor Hugo, the Victorian East End of London, the noisy crowd of Manhattan. Naples was marked by profound fractures. Nobles, rentiers, and professionals lived at times in the same neighborhoods with the lower classes, and indeed in the same buildings (the elites in the expensive apartments of the middle floors, and the poor in the eaves or at the bottom), but they remained "two nations," separated by a material and cultural abyss. In a city where by 1880 there was a university with 3,000 students and libraries frequented by 250,000 patrons every year, the rate of illiteracy surpassed 60 percent, and the living conditions of the populace grew ever more straitened. For their part, the elites proved reluctant to modernize. At the end of the nineteenth century, there were few of the public associations that elsewhere had wide public support. Of the few clubs that did exist, many, such as the "Whist Circle," remained closed to non-nobles. Social life took place predominantly in domestic circles. The family continued to monopolize the entire process of socialization, looking to preserve occupational continuity from father to son, regulating the matrimonial choices of the young, and preserving familial patrimonies undivided by means of testamentary practices that privileged men over women. Little wonder, then, that the liberal institutions of the new Italy struggled to take hold, that abstention from voting was extremely common, and that it became difficult even to constitute a court of assizes because of continuous resignations of the jurors. Nobles, property owners, and merchants sought to avoid every public responsibility, while the middle classes constituted only a small minority. In 1874, although the criteria for registering for the electoral rolls were far from stringent, only 3 percent of the population had the right to vote.

At the same time, the city was crisscrossed by a thick and continuous circulation of resources that

gave rise to many forms of material and cultural communication between the "two nations." Naples was a great marketplace, the greatest in Italy at the time. Packed, dusty, often informal, this marketplace was composed of an array of tiny shops devoted to the production and sale of merchandise and used, often, as the residence of the shopkeeper. Similar exchanges, often accompanied by lengthy negotiations over prices, also occurred on the street, in the public squares, and on the beaches. They involved not only foodstuffs and manufactured goods but also money. Networks of credit were capillary, and were often run by nonprofessionals, usually women, who in this way could make a profit on the dowries they received at marriage. This was typically a risky business, given the difficulty of recovering loans, and which, given the vertiginous increase of interest rates, easily slipped into usury. In order to survive, meanwhile, the lower classes were compelled to take on endless chains of debt. Or else they could turn to the innumerable public and private pawnshops: in the second half of the nineteenth century, Naples was the only Italian city with a pawnshop that accepted, as security for small loans, even pannine (domestic linens). For extreme cases, there was also the thick network of charitable institutions, which strove to alleviate poverty by offering beds, medicines for the sick, dowries for girls, soup, bread, and alms.

In the teeming urban market, however, other and less common resources were also exchanged. In 1901 a parliamentary commission found that it was impossible to obtain any service in the city from public administrators without a personal recommendation and the payment of a certain sum. The corruption of government offices was universal and gave rise to an unending cycle of illegal practices. At the same time, Neapolitans were accustomed to buying protection for their families and possessions from the all-powerful organization known as the Camorra (the local mafia), which profited from the weakness of the state by imposing, unchallenged, the rule of intimidation and violence. Great or small, extortion afflicted merchants, shopkeepers, commercial institutions, gambling parlors, coachmen, prostitutes, and even the indigent.

For many different reasons, by desire or necessity, hundreds of thousands of characters frequented the great city bazaar every day. The city had scarce resources, and lived in a condition of chronic uncertainty. It was incapable of discovering self-sustaining initiatives for economic development, but its scarce resources circulated nonetheless with intense frequency, never stopping, passing from hand to hand, fragmenting continually, and giving the impression of a multiplication of loaves and fishes. And, day after day, these operations brought into contact different social groups, upstanding citizens and criminal clans, living in aristocratic neighborhoods and slums, engaging in activities licit and illicit. It was this ceaseless circulation of people and goods that created, if such a thing existed, the culture of the city.