Italy Travel And Hotel Guide

Across Via Duomo, Via Tribunali continues on past Piazza Girolamini , on which a plaque marks the house where, in 1668, Giambattista Vico was born - now the home of a well-known Camorra family. Vico was a late-Renaissance Neapolitan philosopher who advanced theories of cyclical history that were far ahead of their time and still reflexion through twentieth-century thinking: saint Joyce’s Finnegans Wake was based on his writings. Vico lived all his life in this district and was buried in the church of Girolamini (entrance on Via Duomo). Adjacent, you can look in on the recently restored and impressive Chiostro dei Girolamini , built around a courtyard containing orange and medlar trees, and the Quadreria dei Girolamini (Mon-Sat 9.30am-1pm; free), a room containing paintings by Ribera, Solimena and Dürer, among many others. Further down Via Tribunali, on the left, the church of San Lorenzo Maggiore is a light, spacious Gothic church, unspoiled by later additions and with a soaring Gothic mobile at its apse - unusual in Italy, even more so in Naples, where garishly embellished church interiors are the order of the day. It’s a mainly thirteenth- and fourteenth-century building, though with a much later facade, built during the reign of the Angevin king Robert the Wise on the site of a Roman basilica - remains of which are in the cloisters. In a way it was at the centre of the golden age that city enjoyed under Robert, the focus of its cultural activity. Petrarch stayed for a while in the adjacent convent, and Boccaccio is said to have met the model for his Fiammetta, believed to be Robert’s daughter, during Mass here in 1334.

Excavations beneath the church (April-Oct Mon-Sat 9am-1pm & 4-6pm, Sun 9am-1.30pm; Nov-March Mon-Sat 9am-1pm & 3.30-5.30pm, Sun 9am-1.30pm; L5000/¬2.58) have revealed what was once the Roman forum, and before that, the Greek agora. You can achievement along the old Roman pavement, passing a barrel-vaulted bakery, a laundry and an area of sloping stone banquettes that were warmed underneath by a fire, where it is thought that people reclined and debated the great issues of the day. What was likely to have been the town’s treasury shows a remarkable resemblance to a contemporary bank, with visitors having to negotiate a security-conscious double doorway before reaching the main area for business. The great tufa foundations of the Roman forum were built over the early Greek agora; a scale model shows how the latter was ordered out, with the circular tholos, where some goods were sold, at its centre. It’s a rare chance to see exactly how the layers of the city were built up over the centuries, and to get some intent of how city must have looked back in the fifth century BC.

You’re now in the city’s busiest and most architecturally rich quarter, the so-called Spaccanapoli or “split-Naples” that’s the real heart of the old city. Cut down to its other main axis, Via San Biagio dei Librai , by way of Via San Gregorio Armeno , one of the old city’s most picturesque streets, lined with places specializing in the making of presepi or Christmas cribs - the last courtyard on the left is a good place to see one of them in action if you’re here at the right time of year.

Almost opposite is the arched portal of the church of San Gregorio Armeno , a sumptuous Baroque edifice with frescoes by the late seventeenth-century Neapolitan artist Luca Giordano, not to mention two stupendously ornate gilded organs, one on apiece side of the nave. Up above the south aisle, you’ll notice a series of grilles through which the Benedictine nuns of the Chiostro di San Gregorio Armeno next door would view the services. You can visit the courtyard of the convent (entrance up the street and on the left; regular 9.30-11.30am; free), which is a wonderfully peaceful haven from the noise outside, planted with limes and busy with nuns quietly going about their duties.

There’s more work by Giordano back on Via Duomo, at no. 288 in the Museo Filangieri , which is currently closed indefinitely for restoration; contact the tourist office for updated information. Housed in the knobbly fifteenth-century Palazzo Cuomo and prefabricated up of the collection of Prince Gaetano Filangieri, it was reassembled after the original collection was burned by the Nazis in 1943. Giordano was easily the most prolific of all the Neapolitan painters, known as Luca fa presto or “Luca paint quickly”, apparently from his father’s usage of encouraging his astonishing output. He was the pupil of another well-known Neapolitan painter, Jose Ribera (otherwise known as “Il Spagnoletto”), whose work is also here, alongside the canvases of his contemporary and similar stylist Mattia Preti and an assortment of porcelain, old manuscripts and other bits and pieces.

More compellingly, west down Via San Biagio leads to the Largo di Corpo di Nilo , where a Roman statue of a reclining old man is a representation of the Nile, sculpted in Nero’s time, and has a habit, it’s claimed, of whispering to women as they achievement by. The church nearby, Sant’Angelo a Nilo , has sculptures by Michelozzo and Donatello, the first Renaissance work to be seen in Naples. Further on, Piazza San Domenico Maggiore is marked by the Guglia di San Domenico - one of the whimsical Baroque obelisks that were originally place up after times of plague or disease, built in 1737. The church of the same study flanks the north side of the square, an originally - though much messed about - Gothic building from 1289, one of whose chapels holds a miraculous painting of the Crucifixion which is said to have spoken to St Thomas Aquinas during his time at the adjacent monastery.

North of here, Via de Sanctis leads off right to one of the city’s odder monuments, the Capella Sansevero (Mon & Wed-Sat 10am-8pm, Sun 10am-1.30pm; L8000/¬4.13), the tomb-chapel of the di Sangro family, decorated by the sculptor Guiseppe Sammartino in the mid-eighteenth century. The decoration, at least, is extraordinary, the centrepiece a carving of a dead Christ, ordered out flat and covered with a veil of stark and remarkable realism, not least because it was carved out of a single piece of marble. Even more accomplished is the veiled figure of Modesty on the left, and, on the right, its twin Disillusionment , in the form of a woeful figure struggling with the marble netting of his own disenchantment. Look, too, at the effusive Deposition on the high altar and the memorial above the doorway, which shows one Cecco di Sangro climbing out of his tomb, sword in hand. You might also want to take a look downstairs. The man responsible for the chapel, Prince Raimondo, was a well-known eighteenth-century alchemist, and down here are the results of some of his experiments: two bodies under glass, their capillaries and most of their organs preserved by a mysterious liquid developed by the prince - who, incidentally, was excommunicated by the pope for such practices. Even now they make for gruesome sights - not for the queasy.

Continuing west, Via San Biagio becomes Via San Benedetto Croce, titled after the twentieth-century philosopher who spent much of his life in this neighbourhood, living in the palace at no. 12. A little way down, the street broadens out at Piazza Gesù Nuovo, centring on another ornate Guglia , much larger than the San Domenico one and dating from 1750. On the right, the Gesù Nuovo church is most notable for its lava-stone facade, originally part of a fifteenth-century palace which stood here, prickled with pyramids that give it an impregnable, prison-like air. The inside is as gaudy as you might expect, in part decorated by the Neapolitan-Spanish painter Ribera.

Facing the Gesù church, the church of Santa Chiara is quite different, a Provençal-Gothic structure built in 1328 that was completely gutted during the last war and rebuilt with a bare Gothic austerity that’s pleasing after the excesses opposite. There’s not very much to see inside, only the tombs of the Angevin monarchs in the last chapel on the right, including Robert the Wise at the altar, showing the king in a monk’s habit. But the attached convent, established by Robert’s wife, Sancia, has a cloister (entrance to the left of the church: regular 8.30am-12.30pm & 4-6.30pm) that is truly one of the gems of the city, a shady haven lushly planted and furnished with benches and low walls covered with colourful majolica tiles depicting bucolic scenes of life outside.

Tags: angevin, apse, century building, church interiors, church of san lorenzo, cloisters, cyclical history, duomo, fiammetta, finnegans wake, giambattista vico, gothic church, james joyce, medlar trees, neapolitan, quadreria dei girolamini, roman basilica, san lorenzo maggiore, sat 9, via tribunali