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Piazza
Mercato & Piazza
Mercato (photo by Maurizio Rea)
That
site
is
what
is
today called, simply, Piazza Mercato—Market
Square. It is
still bounded on the east by the very
prominent church of the Carmine (the above
photo was taken from the belfry of that
church) and, at the time (the mid-1200s), was
almost directly on the sea. It became a
thriving market place with easy access to
shipping and became the site of many historic
episodes in the history of the city. The first
of these was the execution by beheading of the
young "Corradino" (technically, Conrad V of
the Holy Roman Empire), the last Hohenstaufen
pretender and the last potential threat to
Angevin rule on the southern Italian mainland;
that happened in 1268. Much later, it was also
the site of the outbreak of Masaniello’s Revolt
(1647). In short, Piazza Mercato was a
bustling market place of a large medieval
city—busy, loud, colorful and grimly violent
at times, a place where you could buy fish and
then maybe watch a hanging or two. It remained
the commercial center of Naples for centuries
and did not start to fade until the great
urban renewal known as the Risanamento came along
in the late 1800s and cut the square off from
the rest of the city. It really faded in WWII
since it was adjacent to the military port and
near enough to the train station to sustain
heavy damage from Allied air raids.
In site of recent building in the area, Piazza
Mercato is still a seedy place and not at all
a tourist attraction.
The
original
church
was
called
the
church of Santa
Croce and was much smaller and in the center(!)
of the square. It was erected in the mid-1300s
on the spot where the execution of Corradino
had taken place in the previous century and
where a marble column had been placed to mark
the event. In 1656,
the plague swept through the city and
the square was used as a mass grave for 47,000
victims. In 1774, a second small adjacent
church was erected, also near the center—the
church of Purgatorio
al Mercato—on the site of a cross
that marked that mass burial site. A fire in
1781 destroyed both churches and many other
ramshackle structures in the square, and a
consolidated church was then built, still in
the center of the square. That rebuilding plus
the redesign of the entire square was done by
architect Francesco Sicuro (1746-1826) whose
other works in Naples include the Palazzo
Salerno (on the southern side of Piazza Plebiscito)
and the Teatro
Fondo (now called Teatro Mercadante).
In 1875, the church was moved from the center
of the square to the location shown in the
photo. In
spite
of
some
recent
attention
given to restoring the church, the results are
less than satisfactory. The church was already
showing structural problems before the 1980
earthquake, which caused its closure. Recent
visits to the premises reveal the effects of
decades of neglect and even vandalism. (It is
one thing for the indigent to seek shelter in
a closed, abandoned Christian church; that
strikes me as a totally Christian use of the
premises. It is quite another thing for idiots
to spray-paint the interior and desecrate
tombs by ripping them open and scattering the
remains. That, too, has happened in the
church.) In any event, the premises still
contain historic artifacts such as the column
that marked the execution spot of Corradino
and even the executioner's blood-stained
chopping block. (Or at least that's what
locals used to tell you;
kill-joy skeptics see a grimey old key-stone
left over from when the church was moved to
its current location. Me? I don't know.
I
also have no opinion on the lore that claims
that a pool of clear, pure water formed and
persisted at the base of the Corradino column
in the center of the square or that it
persists even
today(!) at the location of the
column within the church.) Significant art
(including at least one work by Luca Giordano)
within the church was removed after the
closure to other premises for safe-keeping. |
For
many centuries, Naples remained within the
walls of the ancient city, referred to today
as the “historic center” (more or less the
area defined by 
I don’t
know if there is much hope for a total
cleaning up of the entire square, but if there
is one church in Naples that should be
restored and reopened, either as a place of
worship or even a museum (given the intense
history of the area), it is the church of