main index © Jeff Matthews
2002-2012
Naples Miscellany 17 (late Oct., 2008)
- The Patron Saint
of Naples, as you may know, is San Gennaro. (If you don't,
click on that link.) It is not unheard of to treat
the subject of saints and miracles with humor, and
no one takes offense at it. A good example is the
late Massimo Troise, the
Neapolitan comic whose classic skit of himself
pleading with a statue of the saint for a winning
lottery number made everyone laugh, presumably even
San Gennaro, himself. Commercial exploitation,
however, is another matter. Local Catholic
organizations are upset at a recent poster that
appeared in the Vomero section of town just before
the feast day of the saint (September 19). San
Gennaro was depicted holding up a CD. The music was
a miracle! Buy this CD! The posters were posted
where you shouldn't post, so the city had a good
excuse to take them down, which it did.
- After all the
Discovery Channel-like programs about Mt.
Vesuvius recently, with their splendid special
effects showing killer pyroclastic flows and
incinerated Romans (typical voiceover: "Forget
trying to outrun it. You're dead. Live with it."),
it comes as a relief to read a recent report in the
prestigious science journal, Nature, to the
effect that the feared
subterranean magma chamber that will make the whole
thing go ka-blooey one day is smaller than they
thought and not as close to the surface as they
thought. (Also see "Recent
Eruptions of Mt. Vesuvius".)
Further
entries
on the metropolitana:
 Your
body is a temple, so maybe this is not so
weird. There is a long history of churches and monasteries in Naples
being converted to secular use; the city hall used
to be a monastery, as did the Department of
Architecture of the university and even a number of
police stations and barracks. Small churches, as
well, have wound up doing other things. This photo
is of the inside of what used to be the church of Santa Maria a Cappella
Vecchia, once part of a much larger complex,
all of which has now been converted to secular use.
It is near Piazza dei Martiri
and is, I think, the only old church in Naples that
has been turned into a gym.
- You tend to walk
by these two statues (See expanded entry: "The Russian Horses".)
even though they are not, strictly speaking, out of
the way or difficult to notice. They flank the
never-open entrance to the gardens of the Royal Palace at the east
end, right across from the Maschio
Angioino castle. If at all, you might note
that "they don't look very Italian." Indeed, they
are not. These are the Horse Tamers by Russian sculptor Peter Clodt von
Jürgensburg (1805-67) and are replicas
of two statues on the Anichkov bridge over the
Fontanka river in St. Petersburg. They were a gift
from czar Nicolas I to Ferdinand
II in 1846 on the occasion of a state visit by
the czar to the Kingdom
of the Two Sicilies. Neapolitans refer to the
statues, simply, as "the bronze horses."
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