|
A Place in the Sun  "Un posto al sole"—A
Place in the Sun—is the name of a wildly popular Italian
soap opera. In the last episode...hold on...it occurs to
me that I have never watched it and am not about to
start; thus, I know nothing about the last episode. I do
know, however, that it promises "love and betrayal in
the beautiful bay of Naples" and is filmed on location
on the premises of the Villa
Volpicelli at water's edge at the little harbor
of Riva Fiorita
on the Posillipo coast
(photo, left—Villa Volpicelli is the "castle"-looking
building on the far left in the photo.)When seen from a distance across the bay, this little harbor and the other buildings evoke—as do many points in Naples and on the islands in the bay—the infamous "You Can't Get There from Here" reflex. You stare at them for a while and wonder just how people manage to get to these places. On Capri, for example, the answer lies in narrow footpaths. Elsewhere, such as here on the Posillipo coast, many homes are accessible only by private driveways running down from the coast road, via Posillipo. That road starts down at the Mergellina harbor and angles in as it runs up the coast, such that by the time you get a mile up, there is a considerable wedge of land between you and the coast, land that holds many homes and even open, cultivated plots. The watchman at the entrance to a nearby building is the one who told me of the "Un posto al sole" connection. (The villa also serves as a location for another TV series, "La Squadra,"—The Squad—a police/adventure series.) A woman standing nearby and eavesdropping on my questions spoke up and assured me that the villa was originally a Bourbon fortress—which I doubted even as I thanked her. A young woman in a local cafe said that the villa was from the 16th century. That would put it in the period of the Spanish vice-royalty in Naples. I thought that to be unlikely, as well. It turns out that both versions (and a few others) have partial truths hidden in them. The view from your Place
in the Sun every morning.
 The
whole Posillipo coast was actively—even lavishly—
inhabited by the Greeks and Romans; bits of ancient
columns have recently been dredged up from the waters
just off the point where the villa Volpicelli sits at
water's edge. The changing coastline and simple ravages
of 2,000 years have concealed much of all that. (Some of
the ravages are not so simple—earthquakes and
bradiseisms, for example.) Major ruins in the area
include the villa of Vedius
Pollio). After the fall of the Roman empire,
coastal areas in this part of Italy were often abandoned
in the face of dangers posed by invading marauders of
one kind or another. Posillipo was such an area and did
not come into a period of rejuvenation and growth until
the Angevins moved the capital of the Kingdom of Sicily
up to Naples. Then, with the coming of the Spanish in
1500, the area started a period of intense regrowth as
the Spanish fortified the city and moved to the west
towards Mergellina. At that point (the late 1500s), new
villas started to pop up along the Posillipo coast.The current villa Volpicelli sits on the site of—and incorporates parts of—the Candia e Santacroce villa, a structure that is mentioned in 1629 By A. Baratta in Veduta di Napoli. Villa and harbor are also found on the 1653 Stopendael map of Naples. The property then changed hands a number of times. By the mid-1700s and the reign of the Bourbons in Naples, the harbor was the site of the villa as well as adjacent military facilities, including a small barracks and gunpowder and munitions storehouse. Later, in the early 1800s (during the reign of Murat), after the new hillside road, via Posillipo, had been built, a road was then put in to branch off from it and run down to the harbor. (In the really old days, of course, that top road did not exist; if you were fortunate enough to be a Greek or Roman with your own little place in the sun on the coast, the most convenient way in and out was by boat.) Whatever military significance the harbor might have had was rendered moot by the unification of Italy in 1861. At least one of the old buildings (center) at the harbor has been restored to resemble the villa Volpicelli, itself.  The villa
was sold off in 1884 to one Raffaele Volpicelli for whom
it is still named. He set about trying to restore the
villa to its original 17th-century splendor; thus, what
you see today is a faux
chateau. ("Phony castle" sounds so much better
in French! Maybe there is a school of architecture named
that, in which case the villa Volpicelli can join the
bizarre battlements of Lamont
Young's Victorian "castles" in Naples.) The
parapet and towers look a little too "castle-y" to have
ever been real. They look like something conjured up in
the early 1900s when waning Romanticism might have
prompted you to notch a few more fine retro crenels
along the top from behind which you could shoot your
crossbow at the invading minions of modernism—maybe pick
off a horseless carriage or two. Indeed, the villa was
opened by Volpicelli in 1907. The current work on
the towers (photo, above right) will restore the villa
to that "original" state of splendid anachronism.The kind young woman in the cafe also told me that the villa now belongs to someone named Solimene. I have dutifully checked the phone book and find that name at the appropriate address on via F. Russo (the number was right next to the sign that said "Private Property. This means YOU, pal!") Maybe I'll call and see why I have been getting no call-backs on my recent dynamite auditions for the role of a top-notch lover and/or betrayer. I have a feeling I may never get to see the inside of the villa. Maybe I can get arrested in the other TV series. A good book on the entire area is Posillipo by Renato De Fusco (pub. 1988. Electa. Naples). It contains spectacular photography by Mimmo Iodice. A good item on the villa, itself, is "Storia di una villa sul mare: villa Volpicelli al Capo di Posillipo" by Dora Musto in volume 2 of Per la storia del Mezzogiorno medievale e moderno; Studi in onore di Jole Mazzoleni (pub. Rome, 1998). to main index to urban portal |
