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There was a time when the term “Vomero section of Naples” was a misnomer. Vomero was near Naples, yes, but not part of it; there are, as a matter of fact, still people in Naples who remember when Vomero was a spacious and airy community on a hill where you could actually spend your summer holidays high above the always too busy city of Naples. Roberto Murolo's
authoritative anthology of Neapolitan
Song has as the very first example a song entitled
Song of the
Washerwomen of Vomero, dating the song to the
1100s. Thus, the name "Vomero," itself, is at least that
old. Before that, the Vomero hill went by other names
depending on the times: the Romans called it Paturcium, probably
from Putultius,
a religious epithet (meaning "gatekeeper") of
Janus, the Roman deity to whom the hill was dedicated.
(There are still traces of Roman roads on the hill,
built so the Romans could by-pass the coast and get out
to Pozzuoli more easily.) The current name "Vomero"
stems from the Latin vomer,
meaning plowshare, the blade on the plow that cuts the
furrow. (Irrelevant but interesting!—English and Italian
medical terminology have vomer and vomere, respectively, for the
triangular bone in the nose, so named because it looks
like that farming tool!) "Vomero" apparently was used to
designate one particular large casale (a fortified farm, really—see this link) and was
then later extended to apply to the entire hill. Thus,
the name has very rural origins; indeed, some sources
trace it to a farmers' game of competing to plow the
straightest furrow. At other times, Vomero has also been
referred to simply as the Hill of Broccoli. All of this
is now quaintly academic since Vomero-Broccoli Hill has
been hideously overbuilt since the end of WWII—the focus
of what follows. A map from 1630 shows the entire hill
and hillside (i.e., all of number 5 on the map, above)
to the west of Castel Sant’Elmo
to be empty and wooded. (The castle is located at the
extreme SE corner of number 5). There is an extant
census from the mid-1500s that estimates the population
of "number 5" (including the even higher hill area of Camaldoli) at barely 1200
persons, meaning 200-300 families. There are no
settlements, at least none worth noticing from a royal
cartographers point-of-view. (Besides the washerwomen,
as you moved further north up the Vomero hill towards
Camaldoli, you perhaps found such things as Giambattista della Porta’s
secret bat-cave, the Academia
Secretorum Naturae from the late 1500s.) From
the Neapolitan point-of-view, however, there was really
nothing up there except the fortress of Sant’Elmo,
itself, and the adjacent San Martino monastery; thus,
there was a single road up from Naples (today called via Salvator Rosa).
There were, of course, numerous paths and stairways;
they still exist today but with some exceptions are
little used and in some cases overgrown and unusable.
The first attempt to encroach on the
hill itself from the city was not a frontal assault by
building roads directly up the hill from Naples (such as
the existing and very steep via Salvator Rosa that ran up (and
still runs up) from the National Museum; it was rather a
stepped, or terraced, approach—the road today named Corso Vittorio Emanuele
(V.E.) (originally named Corso Maria Teresa)
built in the 1850s. It is often called the “first tangenziale —that
is, the first “ring road” or “by-pass.” It started at Mergellina and swung away
from the coast and up onto the southern slope of the
Vomero hill to about the halfway point and then turned
east for a couple of miles and ran along the side of the
hill until it ran into via Salvator Rosa. Not only could you
then by-pass the coast to get into the city from
Mergellina, you could actually by-pass the whole city,
itself, by turning down via Salvator Rosa and then north or
continuing west once you got back down to the museum.
And most important for the future development of the
Vomero, the Corso V.E. set up a great wave of building
along the slope. Large buildings started going up along
the Corso V.E. before WWI, and that naturally entailed
the building of numerous smaller access roads up from
the seaside Chiaia section of town (the right-hand
portion of number 1 on the above map) and a few larger
roads such as via Tasso and
Via Aniello Falcone that would then “snake” up the rest
of the hill to the top—Vomero, itself.
The
newly
renovated bottom station of the
The Cardarelli hospital, from
the 1920s
sources:
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The
1700s then saw the construction of numerous large
private estates and a fair number of churches, big and
small. An estimate from 1743 puts the number of families
at about 600 in the combined Vomero section (the area
immediately around Piazza Vanvitelli ) and the adjacent
section to the north, Arenella (around today’s Piazza
Medaglia d’Oro). Slightly later, towards the turn of
that century and especially again after the restoration
of the Bourbon dynasty in 1816, many large pieces of
property, such as what is today called the 
After the unification of Italy, the grand
urban renewal project of the 1880s called the 
By
the early 1900s and especially after WWI, city planners
had to deal with the automobile. Also, during the 1920s,
Vomero became more closely connected to Naples when the
city decided to open the new “hospital district” of
Naples just above the Arenella section of Vomero. For
all those cars and hospitals, new streets would be
needed. New roads from the 1920s connecting down to the
city included the important via Gerolamo Santacroce that
ran down from the Vomero to the east to connect to via
Salvator Rosa and down into the city; also, via Aniello
Falcone, a Vomero road, was extended down to run west
and parallel to the earlier (and lower) Corso V.E. to
connect to via Tasso, an earlier road that came up from
the Corso V.E. and ran to the extreme western end of
Vomero.
Post WWII construction in the
Vomero section is universally viewed (except by land
speculators) as a disaster due to overbuilding. That is
incremental, of course. It started small with a single
bridge at the beginning of via Cilea (photo, right) in
the late 1940s. The bridge is inconspicuous now, but it
overcame a considerable difference in elevation between
the central part of the Vomero and the relatively
undeveloped area to the west (to the right in the photo)
that led to the Posillipo section of Naples. That bridge
joined the two areas and allowed the laying of a broad
straight east-west boulevard, via Cilea, on either side
of which since the 1950s has arisen—quite different from
the fashionable Liberty buildings from 1900 to the east
in the original Vomero—an astonishing array of
tightly-packed and too tall apartment buildings. And
since the Vomero access ramps to the 
It is
hopeless to pick out the most outlandish example of
overbuilding, but many sources cite—just because of its
size—a building popularly called the Great Wall of China
on via Ugo Ricci (photo, right). The general principle
seems to be, “Build as high as you can and as close to
the edge as you can; if you don’t, someone else will
build higher and closer and block your view of the bay.”
That, of course, has happened in other places in Naples,
as well (