The University of Naples Department of Veterinary
Medicine
I first
became aware of the existence of the University of
Naples Department of Veterinary Medicine when little
Mickey, the mutt pet of my friends Charley and
Jeanne (yes, the very same pooch that locked me out of the house!)
was attacked and almost devoured by a very nasty
Boxer (who, I hope, is by now vainly woofing after
uncatchable hub-caps of fire in hell). We got Mickey
into the hospital in Naples where he was x-rayed,
treated and handled gently and wonderfully by a
cadre largely composed of young women studying
veterinary medicine and who coddled and soothed the
little guy such that I was almost looking forward to
being run over, myself, and coming back as a dog.
The x-rays showed his little bones to be broken like
a chicken's in various places, but he made it.
The idea of a school for
Veterinary Medicine in Naples goes back to the late
1700s under Ferdinand IV.
The first site was near the Maddalena bridge (in
back of where the central train station is now
located). The school started taking students in
1798. Their primary mission was to take care
of the horses in the royal cavalry. The school had
its up and downs during the two periods of Bourbon
exile (in 1799 and 1806-15), but was
relocated under the latter period to the premises of
the expropriated
monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli alle Croci
(photo, right), adjacent to the Botanical Gardens, one block
north of via Foria. It started thriving in the 1830s
under the direction of Ferdinando De Nanzio, a
respected scientist throughout Europe, whose mission
was to start caring for all animals useful to man
and not just the royal horses. The school was put
under the auspices of the Ministry of Agriculture in
1848 and incorporated into the general university
system of united Italy in 1861.
Currently there are about 600 students following the
five-year curriculum that leads to a degree in
veterinary medicine. Their daily routine outside of
the classroom, predictably, has much to with pet
dogs and cats with an occasional bunny, hamster and
exotic bird thrown in. Yet, there is a department
for "large animals," including farm animals, horses
from the large race track and many stables in
Naples, and even a panther from the zoo. If Jumbo is
ill, this is the place to bring him (although for an
elephant, the vet will certainly make a house-call).
The
adjacent church Santa Maria degli
Angeli alle Croci (photo, left)
has remained open all these years and is a very
historic church in a city full of historic churches.
It was built in 1581 as a Franciscan monastery and a
significant amount of the design is the work of Cosimo Fanzago (1591-1678),
the unchallenged king of 17th-century Neapolitan
architecture, a tiny sampling of whose work in
Naples, alone, can be seen in the churches of S.Maria la Nova; Saints
Severino and Sossio, S. Maria di Costantinopoli, San
Pietro a Maiella (now the music
conservatory) and San
Domenico Maggiore.
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