In Naples the historic center was invented a few years ago. It existed before but no one went there. In the film «Journey to Italy» by Roberto Rossellini (1953), Ingrid Bergman would remain watching the sea from the room of the Excelsior. Over a century ago, a twenty-year-old art historian, Roberto Longhi, ventured into Santa Maria dell’Aiuto, behind Santa Maria La Nova, when not even local scholars could enter those churches. And Longhi was very Piedmontese.
As for the Sansevero Chapel, today one of the obligatory stops on a visit to Naples, the first (and only) important monograph on the monument was published at the end of the 1950s by a young Marina Causa. No offense to the Freemason prince and other alchemies, it would have remained an address for a few.
Longhi was struck by the book because he knew about our intellectual laziness. In 1957, at the inauguration of the Pinacoteca in the palace of Capodimonte (which the writers of the Naples novel were careful not to mention), he warned: a great European museum is being born, but no one will go there because Naples is not very curious about its things . We visit museums, dear Longhi, in Paris. Therefore it sounds paradoxical to complain, as has been done for weeks, that a Capodimonte anthology had ended up in the Louvre (and not in the cellars near the brooms and the elf, but in the golden mile from the “Nike of Samothrace to the “Mona Lisa”) . Our historic centers? Florence, Venice, Ferragni in front of Botticelli, the Palio, the Forum and the gladiators at the Colosseum with selfies in order and the Grand Canal. Theme parks with the obligations of managing tourist flows, beleaguered residents who rent, B&Bs, the vegan universe, slices of pizza and the kebab solution (“a dancing tribe” sang Lorenzo Cherubini aka Jovanotti in 1991? No, a tribe that eats!). In a Naples which in the last twenty years has sold like no other product, the race for themes to sell calls for combinations that are little less than traumatic: the Veiled Christ of Sanmartino, derivative and not very effective, plays with the alleys told in the early 17th century by Caravaggio (who was Lombard); the very sad mural of an Argentine footballer deserves a toast with lemonades of gynecological repercussions. At the entrance to Forcella, between San Giorgio Maggiore and the Pio Monte di Misericordia, in one of the most delicate palimpsests in the West, the San Gennaro di Jorit, in maxi king size, has two muggings on its face.
And he is the first Indian chief you encounter when coming out of San Biagio dei Librai. Mural graffiti drawings on obelisks, fountains, buildings and facades. Overloaded with history and deprived of memory, as if rotated away from itself, our center is an empty slate, an open-air Biennial. Which from May to October is filled with cockroaches. As for the writings, it is difficult to see them on the facades of the Frari in Venice or in Santa Maria Novella in Florence. Sites as they call them today, for which you need an entrance fee. Is it right to pay to see and protect Masaccio, Titian, Donatello and Brunelleschi? Evidently yes: but not here. Yet we keep Donatello and it is among the best kept treasures of Naples. He is in Sant’Angelo a Nilo, just to the right of the altar. Together with Michelozzo he steals the space from the sixteenth-century San Michele, an ancient modern superhero in action at the head of the altar. On the opposite side, one of the apexes of Florentine Baroque on the move, the very unknown tomb of the Ghetti brothers. Is it worth going in, praying and seeing this relay of three centuries? Yes and possibly without first signing at the entrance. Those who, like Benedetto Croce, dominated the historic center in every sense objected that taste is not formed but educated. “There is no taste in Italy in being intelligent” will be echoed, from Bologna, one hundred years later by that great genius Roberto Freak Antoni.
The meticulous inlay of paints and sprays on the lower portion of Sant’Angelo a Nilo, just below the statues in the niches, resembles the cover of a 1968 Rolling Stones album. “Beggar’s banquet”. Except that, on vinyl, the writings decorate the chipped wall of a broken-down toilet, not the facade of a church. The beggars’ banquet. With all due respect to Croce, the stretch of road from Santa Chiara to the statue of the Nile could be renamed this way. For a historic center worthy of urination.
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