A Companion to Early Modern Naples (original) (raw)

The Science of Naples: Making Knowledge in Italy's Pre-eminent City, 1500-1800

The Science of Naples: Making Knowledge in Italy's Pre-eminent City, 1500-1800, 2024

Open Access PDF Available free from www.uclpress.co.uk/ScienceofNaples Long neglected in the history of Renaissance and early modern Europe, in recent years scholars have revised received understanding of the political and economic significance of the city of Naples and its rich artistic, musical and political culture. Its importance in the history of science, however, has remained relatively unknown. The Science of Naples provides the first dedicated study of Neapolitan scientific culture in the English language. Drawing on contributions from leading experts in the field, this volume presents a series of studies that demonstrate Neapolitans’ manifold contributions to European scientific culture in the early modern period and considers the importance of the city, its institutions and surrounding territories for the production of new knowledge. Individual chapters demonstrate the extent to which Neapolitan scholars and academies contributed to debates within the Republic of Letters that continued until deep into the nineteenth century. They also show how studies of Neapolitan natural disasters yielded unique insights that contributed to the development of fields such as medicine and volcanology. Taken together, these studies resituate the city of Naples as an integral part of an increasingly globalised scientific culture, and present a rich and engaging portrait of the individuals who lived, worked and made scientific knowledge there.

From the Street to Stereotype: Urban Space, Travel and the Picturesque in Late Eighteenth-Century Naples

Italian Studies, 2007

The growing historiography on the construction of the stereotype of the South in the history of modern Italy has exposed its persistence in the character of the lazzaroni of Naples and its elaboration in Grand Tour accounts of Naples in the late eighteenth century. This article demonstrates that, despite this ethnographic interest in the popular culture of the streets of the city, travellers were unable to escape existing stereotypes of the Neapolitan in their descriptions and, in fact, strengthened them by creating an urban stereotype of the picturesque which survives into the modern period.

The Risks of Intellectual Life: Three Papers on the Sciences, Humanities and Society in Eighteenth- to Twentieth-century Naples

European Review, 2011

The project of the 21st Annual Conference of the Academia Europaea in Naples on 'Risks, Environment and Sustainable Development' included a session in homage to the international cultural tradition of the host city, which sought to exemplify the three basic aspects of the title in connection with the humanities. As chair of this session, I devised a programme of 'case-studies', bringing together a variety of leading figures active in Naples, who faced 'risks' that were the risks of intellectual life within a dangerous social, historical and political 'environment'. Although situated against various backdrops-history of ideas, musicology, philosophy of science, and related to different ages (Pre-Enlightenment; Neapolitan Revolution and Restoration; Italian Fascism)-the three papers were interconnected by the issue of the 'sustainable development' of forms of knowledge and sensibility and their legacies. In different ways and with diminishing consequences for the lives of the protagonists, the series of papers reconstructed, respectively, the delegitimation and persecution to death, the misfortune and exile, the oblivion and marginalization of intellectuals who struggled to establish the political values, aesthetic taste and scientific methodology that have shaped our modern European cultural consciousness. The first paper presented here considers the trials of history in the age of Giannone (1676-1748), who died in prison. In Pietro Giannone's innovative work, which opposed papal interference in Naples, Brendan Dooley celebrates

Representation and Self-Perception: Plans and Views of Naples in Early Modern Period

A Companion to Early Modern Naples, Brill, 2013

lntroduction Naples rarely represents itself. This simple observation emerges clearly when one studies the iconography of the city in the early modern peri od. Images of the city produced throughout the Renaissance rarely offered any self-celebration of the city or of the powers ruling there; these images were by and large produced by artists from distant areas and cultures who did not participate in the city's Iife. The first Naples perspective pian, an interesting hyhrid of large-scale mapping and vedutlsmo entirely planned, designed, and engraved in Naples, did not appear until16z7, and the first topographic map ofthe city was not produced until1750.1 These dates mark an apparent inability of the Naples elites to represent thernselves. The first great, farnous image of the city, the late Is th-centmy Tavola Strozzi ( , was most Iikely painted in Florence, by an artist who may never have even seen Naples and gave it a northern atmosphere, characterized by steeples and steep roofs, unfit to the Mediterranean reality of Nap les's round domes and terraces.

Magical, ambiguous and salacious: Naples in the British memories of travel in the first half of the nineteenth century

After the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and the end of the continental blockade, a swarm of English, in the wake of the Grand Tour, moves towards an Italy that still represents a country of art and ancient, but whose axis moves finally to the South, in the Mediterranean area as disadvantaged in comparison to the fortunes of the north-central. In a scenario in which foreigners seeking the order first and then the classic beauty and picturesque, where Rome is no longer the extreme limit, but this expands to Naples 'noble' for its superb processions and parties, for the equipments and the opulence of the court, for the sacred relics, villas, music and antiquities of Vesuvius, the image of the South moves between myth and reality. Naples, in the British travel account, appears as the overly frantic and riotous capital than the ancient Roman ruins, works of art, capital of scholarly training. It is the city of a thousand lights and a thousand voices, populated by a swarming crowd, is that 'feudal monster' that, over time, assumes the proportions of the 'metropolitan monster', the “city of eternal metamorphosis in which nothing seems to disappear forever”. It is the place where it seems possible to implement what is not achievable elsewhere.