Naples Great Lady

A photographic project to discover the spirit of Naples

This photographic project of mine represents not only a tribute to the beauty of my city, but also a deep exploration of its spirit, it is a visual journey through a city suspended in time , represented without the human presence, only through its architecture, its spaces and the play of light that crosses it.

I was born in Naples , where I lived until a few years ago. Moving away made me discover the great secret of this city that, with its inhabitants, represents an extraordinary unicum. It is the clash of the FIRE of Vesuvius with the WATER of the Gulf that governs the vital functions of the entire Neapolitan universe. This is how creative stimuli and great passions are born.

And here comes out a hundred, a thousand Naples . The Naples of daily magical works linked to emotions, anguish, and fears of a childish tone. The Naples of mystery that has the effect of giving each event, however familiar and recognizable, a character of the never seen before and of cultivating, in this disorientation, the most profound and singular of seductions.

As an old and dear friend of mine says, with a hint of bitter irony mixed with pride: ” Naples is an impregnable and sycophantic creature, always in a trance and always awake, eternally divided between street vendors and street-walkers, in a sort of frenetic cellular disorder, consuming its illnesses in full view of everyone and so noisily as to border on absolute silence .”

Naples is an enigma that inevitably offers itself to the oneiric key . A surreal city par excellence, with a saint who, in the surreal, burns a particular dedication to that alchemical people of which he is the protector. The miracle of San Gennaro is not just any miracle, it is a unique event in the world, a prodigy that is repeated every year so that the most peremptory and imaginative invocations of a mass of believers who dialogue in their own way with the transcendent do not go in vain.

Unlike other cities, each founding element is separated from the urban context and is framed by the large and luminous gulf . The gulf and Vesuvius, in short, form the placental backdrop to the Maschio Angioino, the Castel dell’Ovo, the Castel Sant’Elmo , the Royal Palace. The particular light and the particular blue of the sky, contaminated only by small and clear Magritte-like clouds, make the atmosphere absolutely surreal and the inhabitants themselves with their icastic language (a faccia toia è calamita e paccher – your face is a magnet for slaps; a panza toia è fodero e curtiello – your belly is a knife sheath) remind me of the representations of two 16th-century artists who I consider the precursors of surrealism: Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Hieronimus Bosh .

Truth and fiction, reality and imagination, always everything exaggerated, excessive, contradictory , but, beneath the Naples of contrast, of the beautiful postcard and the dark and gloomy alley, it is the city with a great past that enchants me.

When I am in Naples I like to walk at 6 in the morning along Via dei Tribunali . In this very narrow street there is an ancient building with a tall black portico under which, after closing my eyes, aided by a particular smell present only in the alleys of Naples, I travel back in time. It is a wonderful sensation to see again imagining those places populated by characters with long white wigs, lace and cloaks, “hearing” the hooves of horses and the wheels of carts on the uneven pavement.

This is how I get in tune with the soul of the city. The Naples that was an obligatory stop for men of culture from all over Europe. The Naples that inspired and influenced artists of every kind and that is still present around me…the Great Lady of Naples .