Romantic Naples. Literary Images from Italian and European Travellers in the Early Nineteenth Century

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available online at
http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the
Library of Congress.

ISSN 2194-0371

ISBN 978-3-631-81794-0 (Print)

E-ISBN 978-3-631-81935-7 (E-PDF)

E-ISBN 978-3-631-81936-4 (EPUB)

E-ISBN 978-3-631-81937-1 (MOBI)

DOI 10.3726/b17227

© Peter Lang GmbH

Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften

Berlin 2020

All rights reserved.

Peter Lang – Berlin ∙ Bern ∙ Bruxelles ∙ New York ∙ Oxford ∙ Warszawa ∙ Wien

All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any
utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without
the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to
prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions,
translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in
electronic retrieval systems.

This publication has been peer reviewed.

www.peterlang.com

About the author

The Author
Paola Villani is a Full Professor of Modern Italian Literature at the University of Suor Orsola Benincasa in Naples Italy where she also directs the Department of Humanities.
Professor Villani referees numerous literary journals of high scientific prestige, and belongs to many scientific committees amongst which that of the ‘Premio Napoli’ for literature. She teaches Travel Literature and her research interests concern 19th and 20th century Italian literature with a focus on the journeys of European travellers, and the image of Southern Italy in Europe. Her recent studies have concentrated on the investigation of journals written by European travellers visiting Pompei and the Campania region.

About the book

Paola Villani

Romantic Naples. Literary Images from Italian
and European Travellers in the Early Nineteenth Century

As an urban space that becomes ideal and symbolic, Naples is a stronghold of imagination. Mount Vesuvius, the Gulf and also Pompeii, Herculaneum, Portici: the City gets lost in its own stories. Neapolis as a true mermaid, an irresistible and fatal temptation; on one side, the craddle of a very high and wise humanity, on the other, a landscape of decadence and the homeland of demons. More than a “paradise inhabited by devils”, it is a “ruined paradise”, as consecrated by Percy B. Shelley in his famous Ode to Naples, which offers one of the most fortunate ‘images’ of the city during the Romantic age.
This book is not a story of the journey to Naples in the Early Nineteenth Century, nor an anthology of works on Naples, and not even a history of the literature produced in Naples. Rather by drawing on all these fields of investigation, it presents itself as an introduction to the Romantic imagery of the Neapolitan Province, Naples as the ideal place, invented and articulated in the land of writing in a dense multiplicity of forms. By narrowing down the field of investigation to the decades between the 1799 revolution and 1860, this study endeavours to introduce the incoherent gallery of loci, clichés, and stereotypes that have been constituted from text to text, between odeporic literature and fiction, and that too often have been simplified and ‘systemised’, with the final outcome of polymorphic and incoherent stereotypical crystallisations. A short journey through the pages of Italian and European literature.

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

Introduction

Chapter I Mindscape: Invisible South

The Journey to Italy before Italy

A Country “Getting Effeminate by Idleness”

South, Mindscape

South for Everyone

Chapter II Corinne, or the South

Beyond the Grand Tour

Corinne’s “Meridionism”

The City of the Sun

“Ruines sur ruines”

Chapter III Between Preservation and Renewal

The Golden Lie

The Revolution Myth

The Murattian Period

The City of Restoration

Pictorial Journey

Chapter IV The End of a Kingdom

The Capital’s Last Decades

Southern Romanticism?

Giacomo Leopardi and Naples

Beyond the Pictoresque

Chapter V Grand Tour Sites

The Salons

The Streets of the “Lazzaroni”

“Sterminator Vesevo”: The Ascent to the Mountain

The City of the Dead: Pompeii

Indice dei nomi

Introduction

[…] the myth of Paris as the absolute city, summary of the universe […] was born at the same time as an omen of destruction, and behind the multiform richness of the urban spectacle one can glimpse a desert landscape with ruins¹.

Like Paris, perhaps also the myth of Naples was born and lives intertwined with an invincible “omen of destruction”. No longer ‘a place of memory’ but the ‘memory of a place’, its history ends up dissolving in its stories and bearing the meanings and the ultimate directions of a ‘ruin’. It dematerialises and disappears, buried in narratives and crystallised into common places, even for those of us who were born here and who live here today; this city is a unique enigma. It is a siren of immense fascination that is one of a kind, whose overbearing and treacherous beauty escapes any attempt to know or classify it. It is a city of a thousand faces and a thousand portraits for travellers of yesterday and today, but also for its citizens, who keep moving around in its spaces like guests. They are amazed by an unexplainable sense of extraneousness, pushing them away from this city with a power that is at least equal to the force that urges them to stay here, or to ‘nostalgia’ (in the proper sense of its Greek etymology) when the city itself forces them to leave.

As an urban space that becomes ideal and symbolic, Naples is a stronghold of imagination. Mount Vesuvius, Largo di Castello, Villa Reale, Pozzuoli, the Gulf and also Pompeii, Herculaneum, Portici: in an inextricable intertwining of Nature and History, the territory becomes a ‘landscape’, a stratification of visual and imaginative perceptions, which also bears a necessary project aspect in itself.

Naples, therefore, gets lost in its own stories. Physical places are not only geographical coordinates, but themes offered by a city suspended out of time, projected into the chaotic vitality of the great contemporary metropolis while simultaneously being made unique by its millennial age. This is basically the ‘diabolic’ and fascinating duplicity of the Parthenope Siren, a founding myth and an icon of identity. Antagonistic and opposing thrusts push towards a liquid, plural, ←11 | 12→and dynamic modernity, and at the same time they hark back to the static time of a glorious past which affects the present and future of the city.