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The ex-English Cemetery
The term "English cemetery" might
suggest that perhaps this land had something to do
with WWII and the presence of a number of military
cemeteries in southern Italy. Not so. Nor has it to do
even with the much earlier wars of Italian unification
and Giuseppe Garibaldi, who gave other land in Naples
in 1861 to the British community for the construction
of Christ Church, the
house of worship over on the other side of the city in
the Chiaia section. In 1826, the British Consul, Sir
Henry Lushington bought land within the gardens of the
church of Santa Maria della Fede for
a Protestant cemetery. In those days, the old wall of
the city—though not exactly intact—still formed the
eastern boundary of the city, and the church was
outside that wall. There was, of course, not yet a
train station, and the waves of building, rebuilding
and overbuilding that would engulf the eastern part of
Naples were still many decades in the future. The
cemetery became the final resting place for a number
of people in the foreign community in the Naples of
the mid-1800s, such as Dutch painter Anton Smink
Pitloo (founder of the so-called "Posillipo School" of
landscape painting), Scottish science writer, Mary
Somerville, German botanist, Friedrich Dehnhardt, and
Lady Elizabeth Craven.
In 1980 the land was given by the
British consulate to the city of Naples. The grounds
were restored as a park between 1990-93, a project
that entailed the removal of most of the graves to the
main municipal cemetery of Poggioreale. Left intact
and very visible remain nine funerary monuments from
the second half of the 19th century that are
artistically interesting, including the Mary
Somerville tomb by prominent Calabrian sculptor,
Francesco Jerace. His many other works include the
statue of Beethoven in the courtyard of the Naples music conservatory,
the statue of Victor Emanuel II on the façade
of the Royal Palace in
Naples, the bas-relief on the facade
of the University of Naples,
and the group figure of L'Azione
(Action), part of the Vittoriano, the
great national monument to Victor Emanuel II in Rome. In 1993, Electa publishers in Naples issued a photographic catalogue of the restored premises of the gardens of Santa Maria della Fede, entitled The English Cemetery, edited by Giancarlo Alisio.
BUT
(!) see this unfortunate update from August 2011. to main index to urban portal |
The
recently restored "ex-English cemetery"—as it is
called in Naples—has become a small but welcome green
oasis, a public park, in the midst of a densely
populated part of the city. The park/cemetery is
contained within the high walls adjacent to the church
of Santa Maria della Fede about
halfway between Piazza Garibaldi and Piazza Carlo III,
just off the main north-south street, Corso Garibaldi,
that connects those two squares.
The entire grounds comprise church,
monastery and garden. The church, itself, is on the
site of an earlier, smaller one and was expanded in
the mid-1600s. In its long history, the complex has
been a monastery for