The
city of Naples Tourist Board has always attended, in its
institutional activity, the increase in value of the
Ancient Centre of Naples and the visit to the marvels of
the extraordinary succession of ages and styles that a
historical city can have, in a variety that has not
equal in the world. The stratified map of the ancient
centre, published in 2001, offers to the visitor the
instrument to understand and pass through the works of
art, making easier the visit across four itineraries,
each one corresponding to a style: Romanesque-Medieval,
Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo.
From
the examination of the works emerges the aspect of a
stratification of 2500 years whose elements live together in a
perfect symbiosis. In the town planning distribution of Rome
the Imperial forums are placed to remarkable distance from the
baroque town. Paris of Notre-Dame doesn't exist any more.
London of Elizabeth was destroyed by a fire. Of Vienna
of the old Hapsburg empire exist rare testimonies which don’t
live together with the new capital, of 1684, Madrid, was born yesterday. Among the big European cities,
Naples is the only one which shows to the tourist an agreeable
stratification without dissonance as if all had been always
prearranged in this way.
Of
the Greek and Roman Naples ( VII century B. C. – IV century
A. C.) remain living examples in the current seventeenth
century of S. Gaetano square, between the baroque church
of S. Paolo Maggiore , with its Corinthian columns and the “opus reticulatum”
wall in the temple of “dioscuri”, and the subsoil of
the fourteenth-century church
of S. Lorenzo Maggiore where has been discovered the floor of the Palaeo-Christian
basilica and, to a below level, the Remains of Roman
curia, the street and the Greek shops, all visible.
Here
there was the forum with the centre of the town life and from it
spread three decumans which today corresponding to arterial roads of
the city: the major Decumanus which now is called via Tribunali (which
goes across S. Gaetano square), the superior Decumanus which goes
from via Sapienza to piazzetta SS. Apostoli, the inferior Decumanus
goes from S. Domenico Maggiore square to the Greek walls in via
Forcella. This streets were connected among them by the
“Cardines” ( the present lanes) which formed the "insulae",
that is to say the limits of the isolated or gathered houses
enclosed by high walls. In these perimeters rose the Byzantine
Naples, the Medieval one, the Renaissance one, and the Baroque
until today, with the elimination of part of “cardines”, all
gardens and vegetable gardens which gladdened the old houses.
A
millenarian stratification which has respected even the old
customs: here there was the Forum with the shops, today there
are the popular markets under the medieval porches with the
spectacular shows of vegetables, of fishes, and other of
baroque taste. Further on there is the church of the
Purgatorio ad Arco dedicated to the cult of the dead, which
derives more from the hell of Greek memory than Catholicism.
In via S. Gregorio Armeno you can find a basement where
appears the abraded figure of Ceres, the goddess of the
fertility; of its temple there is a gash of wall incorporated
in the neighbouring church of S. Gregorio Armeno where is
venerates S. Patrizia, the virgin martyr to whom the
young brides ask for the grace of a beneficent prolificness!
The
stratifications continued in the following centuries: the
religious and civil orders, press for the change of taste,
noticed the continuum necessity of transformation and
superfetations of their works. So the structures of Angevin
and Catalan churches with the advent of Aragons were hidden under a blanket of pictorial and marble decoration
created by the artists of the fifteenth, sixteenth and
seventeenth century. This is the reason that makes us
insert in itineraries far away in the time the same church or
monument.
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