Naples Archives - The Patroclus

March 7, 2023January 10, 2024

Street Life in Naples

Here is a short photographic essay on street photography in Naples, with thoughts on the genre as a whole.

I feel a bit diffident about taking candid photographs of strangers – I talked about this before in my post on Street Photography. There are a few ways around this – apart from sticking exclusively to landscapes, of course.

One is to include people as anonymous distant or abstract objects in a composition.

Naples, Piazza del Plebiscito. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens, two images stitched in Affinity Photo software (click to enlarge).

Another is to choose occasions when implied consent may reasonably be assumed – such as street performers or people taking part in historical pageants. People doing both are even better, although it seems only fair to toss a euro in the hat if you take their photographs.

If in doubt you can always ask – pointing at the camera and raising your eyebrows will get the point across fairly well. People in professional environments – shopkeepers or craftsmen – often respond positively.

And it is really hard to define, but there are certain places when you just feel that people are less self-conscious, more exuberant and outgoing, and less likely to be bothered by the presence of a camera. Such a place is Naples.

Naples, Montesanto Market. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

Naples Lungomare. Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

Naples, Piazza Giulio Rodinò. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

Naples: Via Chiaia. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

These things are admittedly subjective and I am quite likely to be projecting my own responses to the city onto others, but both times we have visited Naples I have taken a great many pictures of people and I’ve never felt that my doing so was unwelcome.

Naples, Spaccanapoli. Hasselblad 501C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon C 50mm lens, 6x6cm film back, Fujifilm Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge).

Naples, Via Chiaia. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

A lot of the time, the attraction of photographing people just going about their daily lives is that it helps you capture a sense of what it is like living there. Of course there is plenty of scope for being selective – if you just chose happy people, you could make a city seem like a wonderful place to live, and if you just chose down-and-outs, it could seem horrible. You see this sort of tendentious selection quite a lot in journalism. I’m not saying that it is necessarily dishonest, but if you are illustrating a story that is making a particular point, then obviously your choice of illustrations will be consistent with that.

But I am not a journalist, and I don’t really have any agenda. So for me the point is to try and illustrate the impression a place makes on me, as honestly as possible. Yes, that means I am going to be selective, but with the the best of motives. So for Naples I try and take pictures of happy people, because that how Naples makes me feel. Then again, people in Naples really do look happier.

Castel dell'Ovo — Naples, Castel dell’Ovo. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

Some of the best street photographs, for me, are those that seem to tell a story. In the picture below, is the girl on the shore dreaming that one day it will be her turn to be drinking champagne on a superyacht?

And in some cases the attraction of the photograph is just the sheer oddness of it – what on earth is going on here?

Three bears — Naples: Goldilocks hung the three bears out to dry. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

February 17, 2023November 19, 2023

Procida

In August 2022 we visited Naples, and took a day trip to the almost absurdly beautiful island of Procida. I took a couple of hundred photographs – here are a few of them.

Procida is one of the islands in the Bay of Naples, of which the largest is Ischia and the most famous is Capri.

Map of the Bay of Naples — The Bay of Naples (source: Google)

A Brief History

Like pretty much every other geographical feature around Naples, Procida is the product of volcanic activity. Apparently it is made up of four volcanoes, all now dormant. Human settlement on the island is very ancient, with some Mycenaean Greek artefacts (ie from around 1500 BC) having been found there, and Hellenic Greek settlements from the period of colonisation a few hundred years later. The Greeks of Magna Graecia were famously bellicose and the steep-sided hill at the eastern end of the island would have made an attractive defensive position.

The ancient Romans, like us, could afford to think about enjoying themselves rather than worrying about being invaded. And so just like us they had a good eye for real estate locations, and in classical times Procida was a popular place for wealthy people to build luxurious villas.

Good defences became important again in the Middle Ages, with Saracen raids, then a succession of wars as various dynasties fought over Naples. At some point the natural defences were augmented by artificial ones, and the area within those walls became known as the Terra Murata (“walled land”). The current structure on the site dates from the early 16^th Century and is known as the Castle (or Palace) of d’Avalos, after the Spanish cardinal who had it built. In Bourbon times it became a prison, and continued to be used as such until the 1980s, housing a few notorious mafiosi.

Procida Terra Murata — The “Terra Murata”and Port of Procida from the ferry. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

Procida Now

These days Procida is a bustling place, especially around the port, but was hardly overrun when we visited in late August. This may partly be because non-residents may not bring cars to the island for most of the year, but I believe that it is also Procida’s good fortune that a majority of tourists opt to stay on the ferry and keep going to Ischia. And it was only the first post-COVID tourist season.

Map of Procida — Satellite view of Procida (source: Google)

The main town of Procida covers the eastern end of the island, and the distinguishing feature of the place is that the houses are rendered in plaster and then painted in pastel colours. The streets around the port are lined with tall narrow houses which give the impression of being densely-populated, but behind the houses there are many open spaces with what appear to be fruit and vegetable gardens.

Not surprisingly Procida has been used as a location for quite a few films including The Talented Mr Ripley, but to Italians and italophiles the most famous is Il Postino (“The Postman”).

Getting There

There are ferry and hydrofoil services to Procida and Ischia from a couple of locations. We were staying in downtown Naples, so decided to catch a ferry from the main terminal. I tried to google information on tickets and schedules, but as is the way with Google these days, I just got pages of sponsored advertisements, so we decided just to turn up to the terminal. Taxis are cheap and plentiful in Naples, and the best way to get around, so we caught one.

Naples-Procida Ferry — The Ferry from Naples to Procida and Ischia. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

Once at the terminal we established that there was a ferry departing shortly, and that the queue to buy tickets was short and moving quickly. It also appeared that even if we had managed to book online, we would still have had to queue to get a paper ticket. A couple ahead of us when boarding the ferry found this out the hard way as despite having evidence of the purchase on their phones, they were sent back to the ticket office to get a proper paper ticket. Italy still doesn’t entirely “get” the internet.

We caught the ferry there and the hydrofoil back. The hydrofoil is not all that much more expensive than the ferry, but takes about half the time. However one has to sit downstairs with very little outside visibility, while on the ferry you can wander around on deck. So we would definitely recommend taking the ferry in at least one direction, for the views.

Naples from the Ferry to Procida — Naples from the ferry. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

Of views, there are many – Naples as you leave, then along the northern edge of the Bay of Naples. Our fellow passengers seemed to be mainly locals – either Neapolitans out for a day trip or Procidans and Ischians returning from a shopping trip. There were a few foreign tourists, but perhaps not as many as there would have been before the pandemic.

On Procida

We got off the ferry in the port of Procida which is on the northern side of the island. There are plenty of mini-taxis and bike rentals which can help you get further afield, but we chose to stay on foot and climb up to the Terra Murata, then descend to the little fishing port of Corricella on the southern side, now a marina.

Procida taxi — “Micro-taxi”on Procida. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

The main road up the hill towards the Terra Murata is called “Via Principe Umberto” after the son of King Vittorio Emmanuele. After the 1946 referendum which abolished the monarchy, parts of central and northern Italy renamed at least some of the streets and piazzas which had commemorated members of the House of Savoy. That this happened less in the south reminds us that in these parts the vote was actually in favour of retaining the monarchy. I can’t imagine that this was out of great affection – the Piemontese royal house was alien to the South and had ruled united Italy for less than a century. I have not seen this discussed much in Italy, but I would speculate that it was more from deep conservatism and scepticism that the Republic would actually improve conditions in the south. Did it? Who can say?

The view down towards Corricella from just outside the fortress is well worth the climb, and features in many a calendar and postcard.

Once down at sea level again, there is a very pleasant walk along the waterfront of Corricella, where the only challenge is choosing a seafood restaurant in which you might have lunch.

After gorging on the photographic opportunities in Corricella, the way back is via a steep narrow road called the Discesa Graziella, which continues to offer lots of good photographs.

December 15, 2022November 19, 2023

The Christmas Nativity Scenes of Naples

Nativity Scenes, or presepi, are as central to an Italian Christmas as panettone. While pictorial versions of the Nativity go back to the earliest Christian period, the first nativity scene with human actors is said to have been created by St Francis in the 13th Century, and quickly spread throughout western Christendom. Did the tradition of building model presepi arise from that? I have not found anything definitive, although this Wikipedia article seems to imply that it might have.

Including a nativity scene – presepe in Italian, the word for manger – among the other decorations is now firmly embedded in Italian Christmas tradition. The proper day to set it up is the 8th of December, and some people take it further by leaving the crib empty until Christmas night, when they add the infant Jesus. Sticklers for tradition wait until the 6th of January (Epiphany or Twelfth Night) to add the Three Kings.

Despite its notionally Umbrian origin courtesy of St Francis, it is in Naples where the tradition has taken root most strongly and indeed exuberantly.

Here the canonical cast – the Holy Family, the angels, the shepherds, the Magi – has been augmented with characters that not even a close reading of St Luke will reveal. Butchers, innkeepers, shopkeepers, peasants and others can be found, often not even taking part in the main Christmas story but appearing in unrelated scenes, like a butcher chasing a dog who has stolen some sausages, or an innkeeper tossing an unruly customer out into the street. And of course there is always Pulcinella, the masked jester from the Commedia dell’Arte.

Presepi figurines — Bit players in a nativity scene, Via San Gregorio Armeno, Naples. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

Meanwhile, at the site of the Nativity itself, the stable might have become a Roman ruin, or a shop in a town.

Presepe, Via San Gregorio Armeno, Naples. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

At this time of year Christmas markets all over Italy will sell the figurines for presepi, but in Naples there is a street where they sell them all year round – Via San Gregorio Armeno. Some shops and stalls also sell non-Christmas figurines and the ubiquitous painted tambourines, but if you are after material for your presepe, this is the place to come.

Naples, Via San Gregorio Armeno. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

Going by what is on sale some people feel moved to add even more characters: if you want to, the supporting cast in your presepe could feature Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, various popes and the entire Italian football team.

You will also see a chap in a black suit and bowler hat who looks a bit like Stan Laurel. This is a much-loved comic actor from the 40s and 50s called Totò, whose mixture of naivete and guile is felt to be particularly Neapolitan – a bit like Pulcinella I suppose. And of course there is always Diego Maradona, Naples’s favourite Argentinian and a secular saint even before his recent death.

One of the most elaborate presepi we saw in Naples was in the Cloister of Santa Chiara which I wrote about previously. Unfortunately I had to photograph it through glass and at a very high ISO setting, both of which reduced the image quality, but you will get the general idea.

Presepe, Santa Chiara — Presepe in the Cloister of Santa Chiara, Naples. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

As you can see, while the actual nativity is central to the arrangement, there are plenty of other things going on. Below are some enlarged details.

Presepe at Santa CHiara — Presepe in the Cloister of Santa Chiara, Naples (detail). Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

It’s all very Italian – a venerable and pious tradition, faithfully observed, but with a dash of knowing humour mixed into the reverence.

September 27, 2022September 9, 2024

The Cloister of Santa Chiara in Naples

Right in the chaotic centre of Naples there is a beautiful and peaceful convent garden – the Cloister of Santa Chiara.

In August 2022 we fulfilled a long-delayed ambition to return to Naples. Our first visit over ten years earlier was only a short day trip by train from Sorrento, so this time we wanted to do it properly. That meant staying in downtown Naples for a few nights. Which meant driving into central Naples – in terms of risk something akin to skydiving in many people’s view, including that of northern Italians.

The traffic on a Naples city street, if it is wide enough, resembles a sort of slow-motion version of F1 cars weaving about for advantage as they leave the starting grid. There was a fair bit of hooting and gesticulation but I just kept going and we reached our destination without incident. The receptionist at the hotel said something to the effect that in Naples traffic, “they all do what they want and you let it happen around you”. That was good advice. In any case taxis are cheap in Naples and we were able to leave the car in the hotel garage until it was time to go home.

There are many stereotypes about Naples in addition to the traffic, and most are in some degree true. It is louder there, and more chaotic. The colours are brighter. The architecture – from later eras – is exuberant. There’s a big volcano across the bay. People genuinely seem more cheerful and demonstrative than they are further north – we noticed this in a few different situations. It is undeniably dirty, with the corruption in local government evident in rubbish collection contracts let to criminal groups that just dump stuff in random locations, or don’t bother collecting it at all. And as I said, the traffic is a bit crazy, although in our experience it is scarier in Palermo.

We read somewhere that if visitors to Italy find Rome dirty and disorganised, they should not go to Naples, because they will find those things worse there. If on the other hand they enjoy the energy and spectacle of Rome then they should keep going south because they will love Naples. We are in that latter category.

We were there in late August, and along the Lungomare and in the water the locals were soaking up the late summer sun.

Naples Castel dell'Ovo — Naples, Castel dell’Ovo. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

We took a most enjoyable day trip to the island of Procida – although that is not the subject of today’s post. I will also do a separate post one day celebrating street life in Naples (edit: here it is). But now I will get to the point of this one.

Santa Chiara

One morning we woke to steady rain – welcome in a way after a particularly long, hot, dry summer, but not the best for sightseeing. Nonetheless we stuck to the plan, and after a breakfast of coffee and pastries at a bar we caught a taxi to our destination: the church, convent and cloisters of Santa Chiara, bang in the middle of the old city. As we zoomed up and down hills, ducked through narrow alleys, and negotiated one hairpin bend so tight that our little Fiat taxi had to do a three-point turn to get round, Lou observed that if there is a Naples equivalent of “The Knowledge” that London taxi drivers need to demonstrate, it would be challenging indeed. Needless to say the driver dropped us right at the front gate of our destination, and charged us very little.

In the photograph of central Naples below, taken from Castel Sant’Elmo, the church of Santa Chiara is the large green-roofed building on the right.

Santa Chiara is described on the maps as a “monumental complex” and since it includes a church, a convent, an archaeological site and a museum, that describes it fairly well.

Like many convents, there is a square cloister, decorated with religious frescoes, surrounding a central open area.

Chiostro di Santa Chiara — Cloister of Santa Chiara. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

The large Gothic church, commenced in 1313, dominated the view of Naples for centuries. At the time Naples was ruled by the French Angevins, who had succeeded the Hohenstaufens of Frederick II. The picture below, painted 150 years later by which time the ruling dynasty was Aragonese, shows just how it dominated.

Aragonese fleet — Detail from “The Aragonese Fleet returns to Naples after the Battle of Ischia, 6 July 1465” (public domain)

Meanwhile, back in the 1300s, the Angevin King Robert and his wife Sancha of Majorca were extremely devout followers of the Franciscans, the movement started by St Francis only about a hundred years earlier. The female version of the Franciscan order was started by St Clare (Santa Chiara) and in Italy they are called Clarissans after her. In England they were called the “Poor Clares” due to their vow of poverty. Queen Sancha took a particular interest in the Clarissans, joining the order after her husband’s death, so it is not surprising that the church and convent she and Robert established was dedicated to Santa Chiara.

Death of Santa CHiara — Death of Santa Chiara, fresco from the cloisters. Not sure what role the little devils at the foot of the bed are playing. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

Fast forward to the 18th Century and another queen of Naples (by now it was ruled by the Spanish branch of the Bourbons) started taking an interest. The central area of the convent, surrounded by cloisters, was being used by the nuns as a vegetable garden. The queen, Maria Amalia of Saxony, thought it would be a good idea to smarten it up and decorate it with scenes which allowed the nuns to contemplate the life outside which they had renounced. She therefore commissioned an architect to convert the space into a formal garden crossed at right angles by two arcades of benches and columns, all decorated with maiolica tiles. I don’t know what the nuns thought of the idea but the result would certainly have been a very pleasant place for them to sit.

Catastrophe arrived in August 1943 when a raid by American B-17 Flying Fortresses started a fire which destroyed the inside of the church and its roof, although the adjacent cloister seems to have mostly survived.

Photographs from the historical gallery of the Campania Fire Brigade, showing the church of Santa Chiara immediately after the bombardment, and seventy years later. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

While many types of stone can survive a fierce fire, marble often doesn’t, and the photo below shows the remains of a marble frieze from the church, now displayed in the museum above a pre-war photograph of the original. Looking carefully at the remains of the original, it seems that there was an attempt to repair the frieze before they gave up.

However soon after the end of the war, and despite all their other problems, the Neapolitans set about rebuilding their beloved church, completing the job in 1953. To modern eyes there is some small compensation for this. The interior had been redecorated in the 17th Century with some of the worst excesses of the baroque period, and without significant architectural merit. Pre-war illustrations of the interior show something like a wedding cake as imagined by Walt Disney. On acid.

The architects responsible for reconstruction took the courageous decision to revert the church to its original austere Gothic nobility. One gets the impression that this was a bit controversial; not surprisingly many Neapolitans would have been wanting their old church back exactly as it was. But the Gothic restoration would certainly have been closer to Robert and Sancha’s Franciscan vision, and if it is over-the-top baroque that you want, you need only go to the church of Gesù Nuovo just down the road, which escaped damage in the air raids.

The Cloister

It was still raining quite hard when we got to the cloister, which was disappointing in a way, but it did at least mean that we could take pictures of the arcades without people in them.

And then later the sun started to come out again so we got the best of both worlds.

The maiolica pictures on the backs of the benches are charming. There are a few with mythological or literary themes, but most show an idealised version of real life – country scenes with peasants dancing, people working in the fields or unloading ships.

Several of the characters wear carnival-style masks and are doubtless supposed to be specific characters such as Pulcinella from the Commedia dell’Arte, especially in the scenes of rustic celebration. As I said, I don’t know how the nuns felt about it, but to me it does seem a bit mean to suggest that the life they had forsworn was one of continuous revelry.

Unlike the frescoes in the surrounding cloister, the pictures that line the arcades are not religious at all, unless you count one of Santa Chiara herself, feeding cats. A lady we know in Umbria likes to feed the stray cats round about so in the museum shop we bought a bookmark showing Santa Chiara feeding the cats and presented it to her on our return. We were a bit nervous that she might think it frivolous, but she roared with laughter.

There was a restaurant near Santa Chiara, part of the Slow Food Movement, that we had selected for lunch, but Google was a bit optimistic about its opening time so we found we had an hour to kill. We therefore headed to a nearby bar for a pre-lunch aperitivo. That proved to be a rather Neapolitan experience. The Bar Settebello was small, full of cheerful people, and very noisy. But while in most Italian bars the noise would be coming from a TV playing pop videos or a football match, here the TV was tuned to RAI 5 (a bit like Channel 4 in the UK, alas no equivalent in Australia) and it was pumping out a performance of Rossini’s opera La Gazza Ladra (The Thieving Magpie).

Bar Settebelli — Bar Settebello, Naples (phone camera).

Update: I have now posted the promised articles on Procida and street life in Naples.

Category: Naples

Street Life in Naples

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