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Of the 30 or so gates that have
allowed passage into the city of Naples over the
centuries, a couple still exist in a cosmetic sense;
that is, they have been left in place (or moved and
rebuilt to save the history), but you don’t really go
from one place to another by passing through the gate.
Only one gate still retains the feel of a city gate;
that is, you walk from the outside through it into the
old city, and you truly have the feeling that you are
passing through a portal from somewhere else into
something else. That is Porta San Gennaro, named for the patron saint of Naples. The
“from somewhere else” is Piazza Cavour, the area of the
National Archaeological Museum
and the main street called via Foria north of the old
wall; the “something else” is the oldest and
crooked-&-narrowest part of the historic center of Naples,
untouched by the urban renewal
of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. If you turn
left after you pass through Porta San Gennaro, you’ll be
back out in the Naples of today in a block or so—via Duomo; but if you go straight or
turn right, you will get lost and never be heard from
again. I have done that. Porta
San Gennaro is the oldest of all the gates of
Naples, built by the Greeks as they put up the new city—Neapolis in about 450 BC. It
was the opening in the north wall below the northwestern
height of the city upon which stood the acropolis of the new city. It
opened onto an area today known as the Vergini, an uneven volcanic area
sculpted by eons of lava flows and rain water, terrain
that has dictated even the layout of modern streets in
the area. That area was essential to the Greeks, the
Romans and the inhabitants of subsequent civilizations
in Naples in that it provided a passage to burial sites.
The area is honeycombed beneath the surface with ancient
crypts and catacombs including the well-known San Gennaro catacombs. In the
days before gates had names (except for “north”), this
north gate was simply called the Tufa Gate and the road
leading out to the burial sites was the Tufa Road, for
the porous volcanic stone that has for millennia been
the mainstay of Neapolitan masonry.
The gate is not actually in its
original location. Under viceroy Toledo
in the 1500s, the Spanish did a lot of wall-and-gate
moving, expanding the city walls wherever possible and
moving gates into places along those walls; thus, in
1537, Porta San Gennaro was moved out about 50 yards
from where it had stood. In 1656, as an ex voto during the infamous plague of that year, Mattia Preti painted a fresco (image, above) above the entrance showing San Gennaro, Santa Rosalia and St. Francis Xavier beseeching an end to the plague. The fresco has recently been restored. back to main index to portal index for architecture and urban planning |
I
don’t know the last time that walls, gates and
drawbridges actually protected the city of Naples—maybe
the early 1700s. Actually, the only drawbridge I know of
in Naples is at the 
Historically, Porta San Gennaro is said to
have been the gate through which Belisarius passed to
take the city for Justinian in the