Review of Remembering Parthenope: The Reception of Classical Naples from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Jessica Hughes and Claudio Buongiovanni (Classical Presences) (original) (raw)

2016, International Journal of the Classical Tradition

Famously, the historiography of Naples has provided much grist to the scholarly mill. How should historians explain the city's ostensible failure? Should they blame institutions like the Church or, more recently, the Camorra? Did the city's early modern Spanish monarchs lay the seeds of decline, exploiting a unwilling populace? Or are the people themselves the problem, lazy, chaotic and devious? (As Annalisa Marzano reminds us here, Goethe pointed out to his Northern European readers that it was not the case that Neapolitans did not work; instead, he noted, 'they are intent on enjoying themselves even while at work' [p. 273].) Naples's 'failure', of course, is relative; but the fierce debates, the destruction of many archival records in the Second World War and the city's feudal-monarchical past, anomalous in comparison with the northern Italian communal norm, have all tended to encourage historians who are less interested in this teleological question to turn their attentions elsewhere. As a by-product of this neglect, there are relatively few studies of Naples's classical heritage. Typically, the city has been overshadowed by studies of Rome-with the consequent assumption that developments in Naples should resemble those of its northern neighbour-and by accounts of the discovery and influence of Pompeii and Herculaneum. The wider historiographical situation is changing. For historians of the Renaissance, for example, Naples is now seen not as a failed Italian commune, but as a powerful Mediterranean and European city, and as a central node in Spanish