See Naples and Live – 10: Market Forces

Sometimes it's impossible to see a place that you really want to see... because it just isn't there any more.

Many things drew me back to Naples... but one in particular was the chance to visit the Piazza Mercato, the historic Market Square that I previously wrote about and featured paintings of in this blog (An Odyssey in the Second Year of the Plague – Street Fight in Naples – 19 January 2021).

I was prepared for disappointment (I knew that it was now all but abandoned) but not on the level that I was to experience it.

The piazza had once been the almost-theatrical centre stage of life – and death – in Naples.

The 17th-century Masaniello revolt had taken place here, going through every possible stage from euphoric celebration to the darkest violence.

It was a place of public torture and execution... and it was also a place of commerce and the joys of life... all played out beneath the backdrop of Vesuvius, the volcano that could erupt and wreak havoc at any moment.

Domenico Gargiulo made the most remarkable depiction of its heyday (see below). But when I finally walked out across that desolate space, I couldn't even manage to get a decent photograph to convey the terrible emptiness of it.

My picture at the top of this post is a mess... a picture of the hodge-podge at just one corner of the square. That obelisk fountain was one of two built in the 18th century – which added little to the place. The only common feature in my picture and Gargiulo's is the tower of the Carmine church.

The past is definitely another piazza...

Piazza Mercato by Domenico Gargiulo

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...