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San Gennaro dei Poveri Hospital
The hospital, itself, is interesting, historically, but totally neglected compared to the medieval and Baroque points of interest in the main part of the city. It is very much off the beaten track and not at all in a part of the city that you and I would choose to stroll around—the Sanità area of the city just beneath the Capodimonte hill. Though it is now merely a hospital for the poor or indigent, historically it was the first Hospice for Poor. It was founded in 1667 and intended to be a great "poor house", a place for at least some of the city's 10,000 mendicant poor (that comes out to about six or seven percent of the entire population of the city of the late 1600s). It was a forerunner of the much more ambitious project along the same lines, the gigantic Royal Hospice for the Poor (Alergo dei Poveri) started by the Bourbons in the 1750s. The reasons behind the desire to build the poor
house, properly called Ospizio dei Santi Pietro e
Gennaro, shed some light on the world view of
people in that day and age, at least in this part of
the world. The plague of 1656 had devastated the city,
and a large segment of the population had died; those
who could actually afford to do so simply moved out of
the city; jobs went undone and the economy—not doing
too well, anyway, in these late stages of the Spanish
empire of which Naples was a part—was a disaster. The
plague was generally viewed as divine retribution for
the sins of the city, and one way to regain divine
favor was to engage in votive building (such as the
two large spires at Piazza del Gesù Nuovo
and Piazza San Domenico Maggiore— both from
the late 1600s) and the construction of charitable
institutions such as the Hospice of San Gennaro. Many
remembered the dying words of Orsola Benincasa
(1547-1618), a Neapolitan nun, who predicted a severe
punishment from God unless the city did something to
help the poor. [For more on that period, see Naples in the 1600s.] The hospice was never intended to accommodate the thousands of poor roaming the streets, but it did manage to handle about 800 at any given time. The plan was not just to build a gigantic soup-kitchen and flop-house; it was set up to provide shelter, food and education, including practical trade instruction, generally literacy and even music. Much of that philosophy was incorporated into workings of the larger Bourbon hospice in the 18th century. The plan, too, was to help clear the streets of the most obvious walking reminders of endemic poverty in the Naples of that period by making a distinction between the home-grown poor (that you could take care of in such an institution) and the wandering beggars from elsewhere (whom you could then keep—or try to keep—out of the city). The San Gennaro hospice did not fail, but it was
obviously not up to the task. That is the main reason
behind the later Bourbon hospice. Yet, the San Gennaro
hospice was a useful social institution through the
entire 18th and even much of the 19th century. Times
change and such things as "poor houses" are not part
of modern Western society's way of handling social
ills. The hospice became, officially, simply a
hospital in 1939. But it still does a job.
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A few doctors and
other staff of the San Gennaro dei Poveri
hospital in Naples (