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I mean, really lost.
Strange—that name. “Poggioreale”
means “royal hill”—clearly, a fine hill at the foot of
which one might build a residence fit for a king. The
only well-known such seats of royalty in Naples are the
above-mentioned Angevin fortress from 1300 and the
various Bourbon royal palaces from the 1700s, notably
the Royal Palace in the heart
of the city and the building that is now a major art museum on the
Capodimonte hill. The name “Poggioreale” now means other
things to modern Neapolitans; it the site of the largest
cemetery in the city and the site of the largest prison
in southern Italy; the main train station is there; it
is, broadly speaking, the grimy and degraded industrial
section of Naples (thoroughly
bombed in WW2); optimistically, however, it is
also the location of the gleaming new Centro Direzionale, the new
Civic Center, an island of glass and steel skyscrapers
(perhaps as close to Regained as this former paradise
will ever get). Was there, then, ever a true royal
residence in that area? Indeed, there was. The Angevins were driven from
Naples in the early 1400s by the Aragonese, who took over the
kingdom and started an expansion of the city to the
east, through the city walls at the Nolana Gate and
along the slopes of what is now called the Capodimonte hill. It was a
bucolic area and perfect for a royal residence. Such a
residence, the Villa Poggioreale, was begun in 1487 for
the ruler of Naples, Ferrante, who ruled from 1459 to
1494. Sources from that period speak of the villa with
its main structures and adjacent gardens as a splendid
example of the kind usually associated with Florentine
architecture of the same period.(1) Indeed, one of the great
Renaissance architects of
the day, Lorenzo de’ Medici’s favorite, Giuliano da
Sangallo (1443-1516), was present in Naples during part
of the construction. There is some evidence of his
participation in the final design of the villa, and
there is direct evidence of his enthusiasm for such
building in Naples in the form of a design he made for a
spectacular new royal palace to be built later for the
Aragonese rulers of Naples. (2) The Aragonese dynasty in Naples,
however, was short-lived. Events in Spain fused the
royal houses of Aragon and Castille into modern Spain in
1492; shortly thereafter, the new Spanish Empire moved
into Naples and incorporated it as a vicerealm.
Subsequent Spanish plans for the city did not correspond
to those of the earlier rulers. The massive
city-building undertaken in the early 1500s by Spanish viceroy Don Pedro de Toledo
was concentrated almost totally in the west. The eastern
approaches to the city were refortified, yes, but
Ferrante’s Villa Poggioreale now stood isolated well
outside the city walls. Yet, a map from 1670, almost at
the end of Spanish tenure, shows it to be not only still
there, but still thriving, set amidst the still pastoral
setting at the foot of the Capodimonte slope. (3) The economic doldrums of the late 1600s and the turbulent change of dynasty in 1700 did not encourage expansion—or even maintenance—of the city and its environs. That condition did not change noticeably until the arrival of the Bourbons in the 1730s. Their priorities, like those of the Spanish, did not involve keeping up the Villa Poggioreale; they chose, instead, to build to the east, yes, but along the coast, where there arose a string of spectacular homes for the noble classes, residences that are now historically known as the “Vesuvian villas.” Farther inland, the area at the foot of that “royal hill” —the site of the Villa Poggioreale—was left to its own devices. (It was no longer a royal residence since the Spanish and then the Bourbons had built their own such estates either inside the city—or outside, but in other directions (for example, the Bourbon Palazzo Reale at Portici on the coast, in the shadow of Vesuvius). The “decline” of the area (though not
viewed as such at the time), started with the decision
in 1762 to locate the new Santa Maria del Pianto
cemetery in the area. For
its time, it was a very forward-looking, new and
hygienic approach to cemetery management in Europe, one
that forbade burial within city limits, moving that
activity out of the city to one large single location.
That site was greatly expanded in the 1830s with the
addition of the adjacent Cimitero Monumentale. It is all
now known simply as the Poggioreale Cemetery and is the
largest cemetery complex in southern Italy. As modern as
all that was, such a move obviously discouraged further
residential building in the area, or even maintenance of
those properties that were now in a setting swiftly
becoming less and less idyllic. Subsequent location of
early industry in the east did not help, either. Maps of
the mid-1800s do show the name “Poggioreale,” but show
little more than tracings of where the by-then
400-year-old villa had stood. To finish off any pastoral illusions,
the train station was then placed in the area when
railroads came of age, and subsequent grander stations
and necessary rail yards grew as the railroad industry
expanded. Then, the large prison of Poggioreale was
located in the area in the early 1900s, and, finally,
the area was heavily bombed in WW2. So much for Italian
Renaissance architecture in that area. There is now no
trace of the villa at all. What was presumably the main
entrance of the Villa is now directly across the street
from the entrance to the cemetery. To my own disappointment,
I have not been able to determine exactly what
happened to the place—that is, physically. Who were
the landed gentry in the late 1700s who lived there
and decided to leave because the king had decided to
open a cemetery across the street? What was the
process by which bits and pieces of the structure and
gardens started to vanish, leading to the ultimate
disappearance of the whole villa? As they say, more
research is needed. Stay tuned.
(1) See J.
Leostello da Volterra, Effemeridi delle cose fatte
per il Duca di Calabria (1484-91) cited in. G.
Filangieri di Satriano, Documenti per la storia,
le arti, le industrie delle pronvincie napoletane,
Napoli, 1883-91, vol. 5, pp. 230 and 315, vol. 6,
p.45. (2) See Libro di Giuliano da Sangallo, Vatican Library, Vatican, Rome. The design for the new royal palace is preserved in the collection of the Uffizzi in Florence as architectural design n. 282. (return to text) (3) The map in question is from 1670 by Alessandro Baratta, ed. Giovanni Orlandi, in the Bowinkel collection in Naples. It is reprinted piecemeal and extensively cited in Cartografia della Citta’ di Napoli , by Cesare de’ Seta, edizioni scientifiche italiane, Naples, 1969. The illustration in this article is from that map, reprinted in Le citta’ nella storia d’Italia, Napoli, by Cesare de’ Seta. (1981) Rome-Bari: Laterza ed. (return to text) ---
additional reading on the Villa Poggioreale--- Ackerman, J.S. (1963). “Sources of the Renaissance Villa,” in Studies in Western Art. Acts of the XXth International Congress of History of Art. Princeton. Blunt, Anthony (1975) Neapolitan Baroque & Rococo Architecture. London. Hersey, George L.H. (1969) Alfonso II and the
Artistic renewal of Naples 1485-95. New Haven and London:
Yale University Press. to main index to history portal to portal for urban planning |
It is perfectly reasonable to expect any
large European city to change over the course of
four-hundred years. Yet, in the case of Naples, many of
the physical features of the city from 1600—and even
well before that date—are still easily discernible in
the layout of the modern city: the