An Odyssey in the Second Year of the Plague – Street Fight in Naples

 

My fascination with Naples continues from a distance... after the initial shock of the place followed quickly by being seduced by it (see this blog An Odyssey in the Year of the Plague – 10: 8-14 September 2020 and An Odyssey in the Year of the Plague – 11: 15-21 September 2020), I can't read enough about it.

And my appetite was only increased by reading Street Fight in Naples by Peter Robb, a dazzling dollop of Neapolitan history told mainly through works of art.

Two paintings in particular justifiably draw a lot of attention from Robb – and encapsulate the lightness and darkness of Naples. Both are of the city's Piazza Mercato, both are stunning and both are by Domenico Gargiulo... and they were painted within a few years of each other.

The sun-filled one from around 1654 is a massive crowd-scene masterpiece somewhere between photojournalism and Where's Wally? "The radiant sky and the purple hulk of the mountain [Vesuvius] invested the people and their dealings below with vastness and meaning," says Robb.

                                      Piazza Mercato – around 1654 

But a far grimmer picture of the same place captures the scene seven years earlier during what became known as Masaniello's Revolt – a violent popular uprising against oppressive taxation under Spanish rule. Again there is a Where's Wally? element; but this time if you look closely, you will see not the amusing antics of people and and animals on market day, but severed heads, a naked corpse hanging from a pole, and all kinds of chaos.

Masaniello's Revolt in 1647 (painted some time between then and 1652)

And what became of Piazza Mercato? Bombed in the 1940s and redeveloped unsympathetically in the 1950s, it has lost its glory. "Today it is a crowded desolation," says Robb. "Today the area does a desultory business in building and decorating materials, paint and cleaners, children's toys and fireworks."

Lightness, darkness... and madness.This is Naples...